{"id":54997,"date":"2024-12-25T06:00:11","date_gmt":"2024-12-25T12:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/?p=54997"},"modified":"2024-12-17T11:50:31","modified_gmt":"2024-12-17T17:50:31","slug":"brothers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/brothers\/","title":{"rendered":"Brothers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Entertain the Nazis, join them, or die.\u00a0 Those were the options presented to professional clarinet and saxophone player Jan Van Halen during the German occupation of Holland. If he hadn\u2019t opted for oom pa pa, his genetics tragically wouldn\u2019t have propagated.\u00a0 Post war, the Dutchman moved to colonial Indonesia for greener musical pastures.\u00a0 His nascent family began with Eugenia before the two trekked to California with a shred of English and two grade school boys in tow.<\/p>\n

America was not the touted land of plenty for Alex and little Edward. The patriarch perpetually struggled to make ends meet outside of the occasional gig. Decades before becoming gazillionaires, the family subsisted on his dishwashing and janitor shifts.\u00a0 Eddie was initially the drummer of the duo while Alex opted for guitar in their hardscrabble Pasadena upbringing. The two found their musical grounding in the form of an exacting four-foot-tall piano instructor called \u201cmom.\u201d Listen to their biggest hit, \u201cJump\u201d and you\u2019ll see it paid off. The immigrants couldn\u2019t afford cool effects pedals, so Eddie had to engineer sounds the old fashioned way\u2026with his fingers and thousands of hours of practice. A few short months into budget guitars, Dave was already sanding down six-strings \u2013 mixing and matching components on the way to his first Frankenstrat.<\/p>\n

So which version of the band is your poison? Dave or Sammy? Both? Does it even matter? Van Halen’s meteoric rise to stardom was strapped on the back of Eddie\u2019s blinding speed and virtuoso innovation. Sorry, Dave.\u00a0 This trajectory was accompanied by the usual occupational hazards – alcoholism, addiction, relapses, divorces, and death. Alex walks us through all 65 years’ worth.\u00a0 Brothers<\/em><\/a><\/strong> had the proper amount of tawdry rock and roll tell-all without cheapening the work. The title says it all. The only lasting component of the forty-plus year musical ensemble was the nucleus of namesake Dutch-Indonesian immigrant boys, 6 and 8.\u00a0 Alex and Ed were thick as thieves, around the world, from the cradle to the grave.\u00a0 Or, as Ed said, they \u201cfight more than anyone I know, but also get along better than anyone I know.\u201d\u00a0 Even their former lead singers would agree we\u2019re better for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Entertain the Nazis, join them, or die.\u00a0 Those were the options presented to professional clarinet and saxophone player Jan Van Halen during the German occupation of Holland. If he hadn\u2019t opted for oom pa pa, his genetics tragically wouldn\u2019t have propagated.\u00a0 Post war, the Dutchman moved to colonial Indonesia for[Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,8],"tags":[9580,88,155,3253,676],"class_list":["post-54997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-staff-picks","tag-alex-van-halen","tag-brothers","tag-family","tag-music","tag-nonfiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sd0CXx-brothers","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54997"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55000,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54997\/revisions\/55000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}