Alex Van Halen wants folks to know his memoir, Brothers, out Tuesday, isn’t a tell-all.
“It’s not about the dirt,” Alex tells Billboard. “If I start throwing dirt, it’ll never end … I think it divides the audience, and we’re not here to divide.”
Instead, Alex says he wrote Brothers to get the truth out about his brother and Van Halen bandmate Eddie Van Halen, who died in October 2020.
“I really felt like a lot of the stuff that was out there was incorrect, and it didn’t do justice to the more sensitive side of Ed,” he says. “So before I die I would like to at least partially set the record straight.”
The book doesn’t go into Van Halen past the David Lee Roth years, with Alex saying there were “limitations to how big the book could be.”
But talking about their 1985 split with Roth, Alex says, “It was a very sad moment when that whole thing fell apart,” with the mag noting that in the book he calls Roth’s departure “the most disappointing thing I’d experienced in my life, the thing that seemed the most wasteful and unjust. Until I lost my brother.”
As for their other singer, Sammy Hagar, Alex was asked why he didn’t want to join Sammy and bassist Michael Anthony on their recent The Best of All Worlds Tour, during which they played Van Halen hits.
“I’m not interested. They’re not doing the band justice,” he says. “They can do what they want to do. That’s not my business.”
Alex also set the record straight about selling off his drum equipment in June, sharing he was just getting rid of stuff he wasn’t using.
“I’m not quitting. I don’t know where that came from,” he says. “I’ll die with sticks in my hand.”
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