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Alex Van Halen doesn’t ‘sugar coat’ complex relationship he had with Eddie in new book ‘Brothers.

If rock music history has taught musicians anything, it is this: Don’t start a band with your sibling. Just ask Oasis co-founders Liam and Noel Gallagher, whose well-documented mutual enmity makes their upcoming reunion tour as much a source of morbid curiosity as of excitement.

However, Van Halen was something different. The powerhouse hard rock band co-founded by Alex and his brother, Eddie, sold over 70 million albums during their nearly four-decade run. It was Alex and Eddie who started the band as teenagers in their Pasadena basement, who recruited locals David Lee Roth and Michael Anthony to join the lineup, and who guided Van Halen into the highest rung of rock stardom . When Eddie, a pathbreaking prodigy who changed the way the electric guitar was played, died of cancer at 65 in 2020, it was not only the end of the band, but also a tight bond that had lifted Van Halen up from playing suburban house parties to football stadiums.

With his book “Brothers,” Alex has written an elegy to Eddie, and their complex dynamic that was tested by drug abuse, power trips and all the other common traps that befall megastars who once shared the same bedroom. “This is a happy-sad moment for me,” says Alex about his book, which was written with writer Ariel Levy. “I’ve tried to take an objective view of things, and bring it all to light. But I didn’t want to be self-serving. I tried not to sugar coat the story.”