Alex Van Halen is shedding light on his brother Eddie Van Halen’s addiction to prescription pills.
In his first interview since Eddie’s death, Alex, 71, explained that his late brother, the Van Halen guitarist, became addicted to prescribed steroid pills after undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumor in the years before his death. (Eddie died in 2020 of complications from cancer. He was 65.)
“You know, he fought until the end,” Alex told Rolling Stone in an interview published on Tuesday, October 15. “Anybody who thought he was anything less than that can suck my you-know-what. … If you knew what he had to go through to beat the cancer — he wouldn’t do traditional treatment. Some of the off-the-wall s— caused such a toxic mix in his body. And, yeah, you shouldn’t drink with it, Ed!”
Alex added that the pills made his brother “feel like Superman,” and one day he saw Eddie take every pill in the bottle. The intent wasn’t to harm himself but to chase that feeling.
“I didn’t see the bottle, but the bottle had, like, a thousand pills in it,” he said. “If two’s good, 20’s better. That was our mantra.”
Alex, who was also Van Halen’s drummer, laughed when he said it, though he accepts that the pills likely contributed to his brother’s death.
In the time leading up to Eddie’s death, he kept creating music as he sought experimental cancer treatments. Alex concedes the music wasn’t very good, but that’s not the point — the point was that he was able to do it at all.
When Eddie died, the family was unable to have a proper funeral with the world still in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Alex called it “unceremonious,” adding that Eddie was cremated and his son, Wolfgang, has his ashes.
“I gotta say that Wolf did a phenomenal job in handling all that s—,” he said. “It was way more than any young man should have ever been in charge of.”
Alex, meanwhile, had to deal with his own “oceanic grief.”
“I was yelling and screaming. I was beside myself,” he said. “I just miss him. I miss the arguments. I live with it every day. And I can’t bring him back. I can’t make things right.”
Sometimes, he can still feel Eddie’s presence, telling Rolling Stone, “Ed’s been around a couple times.”
“He’s fine,” Alex concluded. “Wherever he is, he’s fine.”
