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With only the maddest respect to/for Ariel Levy for stitching BROTHERS into something that’s mostly readable, Alex Van Halen’s memoir about his guitar genius little bro Edward leaves a lot on the table and even more to be desired. In its final pages, AVH claims drafting the book took him a full year, and he didn’t begin until Ed had been gone for at least three years. It’s clear from the very first page until the very last that AVH is and always will be in mourning, and his collaboration with Levy feels sincere on that front; it’s impossible to read this book and not feel the incredible silence Ed commands now, having passed away in 2020 and leaving the music world to deal with the loss. Arriving almost 5 full years after Ed’s passing, BROTHERS is AVH’s opportunity to do the same.
Spoiler Alert (?): Levy did what she could, but the book is almost unreadable because of the way it’s written. This isn’t at all to say the book is written poorly, because it is not. For the most part, AVH’s wry humor and bluntspeak comes right through Levy’s prose totally unimpeded. In this, BROTHERS reads a lot like other memoirs published by rock star authors, and in AVH, there’s a legitimate rock star on the dustcover and in the author photo. But unlike other rock star memoirs, this one is heavily textual in places where it feels just downright weird for it to be so; AVH + Levy structure most sections in almost formulaic way, wherein AVH tells a personal story with personal details and then Levy underscores the points AVH makes by resorting to published quotations in major publications; the simple majority of the time, these quotes are things Ed or David Lee Roth said to a print journalist, almost as if AVH is just thumbing through old articles written about his namesake, family band, reminiscing for the sake of doing so.
To/in his defense, AVH does not owe the world a book about anything. And it is clear he is still in tremendous grief over the death of his younger brother. It’s an impossible task he’s made for himself, to write and publish something like this, given the clear weight and depth of that grief. It is a brave undertaking, and probably an important one for AVH, but the way the textual displaces the deeply personal makes me wonder why AVH himself felt compelled to work on this in the first place. There’s so much reticence in BROTHERS, it’s unclear whether or not it actually helped AVH in any other way than to keep the fire burning.
Look, if you’re any bit of a Van Halen fan like we are here, you absolutely should read this book; ALEX VAN HALEN WROTE IT for crying out loud. Without AVH, there wouldn’t have been an EVH, and Alex’s stories about the family’s childhood years in The Netherlands are worth reading. But there’s also some weird omissions, particularly regarding the band’s “Van Hagar” period, when it arguably reached the pinnacle of its commercial success. Sammy Hagar, who famously replaced Roth as the band’s lead singer, is never mentioned by name even one time in the book, and Michael Anthony, the band’s original bass player, also seems to fall into the deeper recessed of AVH’s memory/give-a-shit. The book’s final pages is the typical list of “thank-yous” we are used to seeing as liner notes on an album sleeve, and notably absent are not only Hagar and Anthony, but Valerie Bertinelli as well (Gary Cherone, the band’s third singer, also isn’t thanked, and the one album the band released with him is pretty harshly panned by its own drummer). Whatever beefs broke up Van Hagar apparently still continue, which I found as unsurprising as I did sad; even in the death of EVH, the beefs apparently go on, and that might be the saddest thing of all.
SBG GIVES THIS BOOK 3 of 5 STARS + IMPLORES AVH TO BURY THE HATCHET WITH HAGAR + CO.
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