“If two’s good, 20’s better. That was our mantra”: Eddie Van Halen took an entire bottle of steroid pills before his death because they made him “feel like Superman”
Alex Van Halen has opened up on the final period he spent with his brother Eddie before his passing, and the struggles they faced with addiction in their family.
Alex’s memoir Brothers is due to be published this October. It explores his life with Eddie from their childhood to the end of the original Van Halen lineup in 1984. As part of a new interview with Rolling Stone ahead of its release, Alex reveals that Eddie took an entire bottle of steroid pills given to him by his doctor a short while before his passing, not to harm himself, but to chase the superhuman feeling they gave him.
READ MORE: “I can’t do this. This is too hard”: Why Joe Satriani backed out of a planned Van Halen tribute with David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen before later joining Sammy Hagar’s Best Of All Worlds tour
Eddie died following complications from throat cancer at the age 65 in October in 2020. He had struggled with addiction issues throughout his life, and so did Alex. Their father, Jan Van Halen, passed away in 1986, and was also musician and an alcoholic – his death led to Alex going sober, and though Eddie also tried for the first time at this point, he was unsuccessful.
“There is a part of me that’s common sense,” Alex says in the interview. “If this is going to fuck me up, why would I do that?… Common sense was not Ed’s strong point.” Despite his struggles, Eddie had been sober since 2008 at the time of his death. The steroid pills he was given were to combat swelling due to surgery to remove a brain tumour. “If two’s good, twenty’s better. That was our mantra,” Alex shares. “I didn’t see the bottle, but the bottle had, like, a thousand pills in it,” he says.
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Elsewhere in the interview, Alex shared ideas for a posthumous Van Halen release. According to the drummer, he has reached out to OpenAI, the company behind AI chatbot ChatGPT, about analysing “the patterns of how Edward would have played something” in hopes of generating new guitar riffs and solos. He’s even suggested Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant to lead the project.
Alex Van Halen’s memoir Brothers is out on 22 October. You can pre-order it now.
The post “If two’s good, 20’s better. That was our mantra”: Eddie Van Halen took an entire bottle of steroid pills before his death because they made him “feel like Superman” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
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