Remembering Eddie Van Halen

Before they co-founded one of the most successful rock bands in history, Alex and Eddie Van Halen were two kid brothers with a love of music. In an emotional, and musically rich interview, Alex talks about Eddie’s life and death and the communication he feels he still has with him. Alex also plays some of the unreleased music they were working on before his brother’s death in 2020. Visit the All There Is online grief community at cnn.com/allthereisonline and watch the video version on YouTube. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Anderson Cooper?

  Wherever you are in the world and in grief, welcome to All There Is. I'm Anderson Cooper.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  Look, here's a big one. Whoa.

• 0:39Anderson Cooper?

  I took a week off and was with my kids on vacation.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Wyatt, you're doing so well.

• 0:44Anderson Cooper?

  Wyatt is four and Sebastian almost three.

• 0:49Anderson Cooper?

  It was amazing to swim with them in the ocean, play with Wyatt in the pool for hours. Good job.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  You're like a minnow. You're like a minnow.

• 0:59Anderson Cooper?

  And listen to Sebastian squealing with delight when I tickle him.

• 1:04Anderson Cooper?

  I was reminded of something my dad, Wyatt Cooper, wrote about my brother and me as kids. "I must see that they do not lose their gift of laughter," he wrote. "There's more music in the laughter of one child than in all the poems of all the poets who ever lived, more sunshine than in a century of summers." He died two years after he wrote that, and with him gone, I did lose that gift of laughter. I buried it along with my sadness and fear and anger. I've realized lately how much I've used work to avoid all those emotions, to avoid grief. While I was away one night, when my kids were asleep, I listened to the most recent podcast episode with Francis Weller, and I want to play you something he said that really struck me.

• 1:48Speaker 03

  We don't have much knowledge in grief, as Rilke would say. And so consequently, we push back against it, and we don't know how to engage it, to write, to dance, to talk, to share, to bring it to ritual. We are so passive around grief, so that when it comes... We are basically caught off guard and unawares of how to respond. So it's how do I get out of this as fast as possible? And we have so many ways to do that. All the distractions, the busyness, the alcohol, the drugs, and anything you need is available to get us away from the depths of those places.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  I think what happens as we begin to become less avoidant and resistant to it is it'll begin to develop a companionship with it. A companionship with grief? Yes, this is what I call the apprenticeship with sorrow. We begin to stop fighting it and begin to see that it's actually the way in which my deepest self comes fully present.

• 2:57Anderson Cooper?

  I've definitely used work to distract myself from the depths of those places, as Francis said, and I know some of you listening have as well. But what does it all amount to? All this work and striving and stress. I'm grateful for the career I've had. It's been and continues to be remarkable and interesting to me. It's given me stability and a sense of accomplishment and purpose. I'm grateful. But in the end, does any of that matter? I think about the last week of my mom's life, spending time with her, just talking, holding her hand, being with her.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  Are you scared? No. I'm not either.

• 3:40Anderson Cooper?

  Oh, God, Fred. She lived an epic life, but all those famous people she knew, all the things she achieved, in the end, what mattered to her was the people sitting around her bed, holding her hand, telling her, "I love you."

• 3:54Speaker 04

  I love you very much. I know you do, darling, and I love you very much. You know that, don't you?

• 4:00Anderson Cooper?

  Always and forever. Me too. I know when I'm old and sick and dying, it won't matter to me what I did. What will matter is what my kids think of me and what kind of person I was in their eyes. Is all this striving just a distraction from that? Am I brave enough to focus instead on building that companionship with grief that Francis talks about and a greater companionship with my kids? All of this brings me to my guest today, Alex Van Halen. Alex and his younger brother Eddie were founding members of Van Halen, one of the most successful rock bands in history.

• 4:43Anderson Cooper?

  Alex was on drums, Eddie on guitar, David Lee Roth became the first lead singer, and Michael Anthony was the bassist. Eddie, or Ed as Alex called him, died in 2020 after a long battle with cancer. He was 65 years old and is considered to be one of the best guitarists to ever play. Alex is now 71, and he's just written a book called Brothers about his life with Ed. How has grief been for you?

• 5:11Speaker 05

  I always thought of myself as kind of a stoic kind of guy, you know, tough. I was the elder in the family, so I had a certain role to play.

• 5:20Anderson Cooper?

  You were the protector.

• 5:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:22Anderson Cooper?

  Do you feel like you are grieving?

• 5:24Speaker 05

  I'm grieving all the time. I'm not trying to put it aside. I'm not saying I'm running from it because that doesn't solve the problem.

• 5:31Anderson Cooper?

  It's there, you feel it.

• 5:32Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It's just, it's, times can be overwhelming, and the more I dwell on it, the more complicated it becomes. When I'm alone and I put on a piece of music and I hear him play, I just break, I break down, that's it, you know, uncontrollably. But knowing what I know about the human body, you just let it happen, otherwise it will happen in the line at the grocery store, and I wouldn't, that wouldn't look so good. None of us thought he was gonna die. He'd always bounced back. He had the most incredible DNA that I've ever seen anybody. He could do more drugs than anybody and still wake up the next day and perform. I don't think anybody really thought he was gonna die. So when he passed, it was really a shock.

• 6:16Anderson Cooper?

  Did, did he know?

• 6:17Speaker 05

  I don't think he knew. Being human, you think you're gonna go on, one more day, one more day. You keep going forward and, but then one day, you don't. So up to the very end, we were still making music and we talked about what are we gonna do next year, but it was clear that he was going downhill.

• 6:37Anderson Cooper?

  There's a song that you guys were working on.

• 6:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, we usually recorded almost everything in the studio while they're playing.

• 6:44Anderson Cooper?

  I just want to play a little bit of the song.

• 6:57Speaker 05

  So there are a lot of fragments of pieces. This is ones that I really, I really liked because having just added me in the studio was always the way to let things breathe. You have four people in there, everybody starts throwing in ideas, nothing gets to become, you have to wait till it grows into fruition, you know, give it time, give it space, let it breathe a little bit.

• 7:22Anderson Cooper?

  It's how you communicated with each other.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah, exactly.

• 7:25Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 05

  Music was the way he spoke to the world.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  I think his soul is in the music.

• 7:36Anderson Cooper?

  He died during COVID.

• 7:38Speaker 05

  Yes, it was difficult because his immune system was down, so the last thing he needed was to get infected by anything. So there was always a distance between us at his house. We had to watch him from outside in the driveway from the window.

• 7:53Anderson Cooper?

  You couldn't sit by his bedside, you couldn't hold him?

• 7:55Speaker 05

  No, no, no. The last time we did that was when I took him to Switzerland to have some, some treatment by some unbelievable doctors, but he was in a lot of pain most of the time. Most people have no idea what kind of pain he was in, physical, emotional, mental, you name it. Then he started to lose the function of his extremities. It just, it all compounded and every day it was something, some other part that's not functioning anymore.

• 8:23Anderson Cooper?

  It was cancer? That went to his brain?

• 8:25Speaker 05

  Yes, and they did something called a gamma knife operation, but they cut the cancer out, which was successful, but in the process, it caused a swelling in his brain. So they put him on steroids and, you know, typical, I'm only laughing about it because even in a life and death situation, the decision was, well, two's good, 20 must be better. So he took handfuls of steroids and it made him Superman temporarily. But we got him off to Switzerland to get him off that stuff, so.

• 8:58Anderson Cooper?

  You were able to be with your brother at the end? He had a stroke?

• 9:02Speaker 05

  Yes, he had a massive stroke. We were in the room with him when he actually took his last breath. We just sat there, everybody was in their own headspace. All I know is that when he stopped breathing, I didn't hear anything, I didn't see anything, there were no bells, there were no angels, it was just, it stopped. And then the room was empty. That was it. And then they pulled the plug because he was on a ventilator. And because of COVID and the restrictions and the rules, they immediately carved the body off and that was it. Then we didn't see him anymore. A very uneventful ending to an eventful life. But you know what? He fought until the very end. That's, I want to think of his life in terms of that he never gave up.

• 9:47Anderson Cooper?

  You wrote in the book, "I watched you take your last breath. In that moment, all the stuff that you did or made in this world, you can't take it with you."

• 9:55Speaker 05

  We travel through time, or we travel through existence, and you come and then you go. It's part of the natural order of things. I think the real problem is that when it happens out of what is the norm, which is a full 75 or 80 year life, and to have it be shorter than that, it doesn't make sense. Am I angry at him? Yeah, there were times when I would yell and scream, "Ed, what the fuck is wrong with you? What are you doing? Ed, if you stop doing all them damn drugs," you know, you can't do this to your body and expect to live a full life.

• 10:30Anderson Cooper?

  So it's anger at him?

• 10:32Speaker 05

  Had he stopped, he might have, he might still be here. The emotional part of me just says, Ed, you're not done yet. That'd be nice to have you hanging around. My, my kids don't have an uncle anymore. Your son doesn't have a father. I don't have a brother. Ed's whole life was searching for something. I don't know what it was. Because musically, we could play anything, Ed. Come on. Maybe you could have been here a little longer. But then you realize, I have no control over that. Maybe it's not my place to tell him to be here longer. Maybe he knows intuitively that this is it. I'm done. I'm leaving. He was, he was never satisfied. There was always that itch to do something else. So I don't know.

• 11:14Speaker 05

  I'm, I'm still grappling with some of those things because to me, it doesn't make any sense. Can I mention Billy Bob Thornton had this little clip? It just popped on, on my computer. And it really was very articulate and succinct. And it was just completely all right on the spot.

• 11:30Anderson Cooper?

  Well, let me actually, I'm gonna play what Billy Bob Thornton said.

• 11:34Speaker 06

  My brother Jimmy, you know, he was a young guy. In 1988, he died suddenly of a heart problem that they didn't know he had. I've never been the same since my brother died. There's a melancholy in me that never goes away. I'm 50% happy and 50% sad at any given moment. And the only advice I can give people for when you lose someone like that is you won't ever get over it. And the more you know that and embrace it, the better off you are. I don't want to forget my brother. And I don't want to forget what it felt like when he died because he deserves it. That's how important he was to me. So if I have to suffer and if I have to be sad for the rest of my life

• 12:18Speaker 06

  and if I have to be lonely without him, without his particular thing, his sense of humor and what he brought to life, then that's the way I honor him. You know? I'll be sad and melancholy about that forever and I know it. And I accept it and I live with it.

• 12:37Speaker 05

  I think Billy Bob Thornton's answer was probably the most articulate and accurate in, in the sense of you're gonna have to live with it for the rest of your life. And I'm more than happy to do that. If that's how I pay my respects to you, Ed, that's, that's how I shall do it.

• 12:54Anderson Cooper?

  We're gonna take a short break. When we come back, more of my conversation with Alex Van Halen.

• 13:07Anderson Cooper?

  More now with Alex Van Halen. The bond that you and your brother had and have was particularly close because it wasn't just the first 18 years of your lives and then you guys went your separate ways, which is how it is with many siblings. You were in the band together your entire lives.

• 13:28Speaker 05

  65 years together.

• 13:30Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah.

• 13:31Speaker 05

  Almost every day, if not physically, at least mentally and spiritually, if you will. And we had conflict every moment of the day. That's how I was taught to make art, is that you don't want to all agree on the same thing. You gotta have some friction, so to speak.

• 13:46Anderson Cooper?

  Ed talked about when you guys would play, in the earphones that you had on, he could hear others, but he had to hear you. It was the connection between you two that was essential to making the music. Ed said, "All I had in my monitors when we played live was Al's drums, a little bit of Dave's vocals, a little bit of mine, a little bit of Mike's vocals, but all I hear is myself and my brother." It seemed to me like such a metaphor of your relationship that even in success with all the stuff swirling around you and all the personalities and the record executives and David Lee Roth, in the end, when push came to shove, it was you and him.

• 14:27Speaker 05

  Yeah. You know, it started off as a two-piece. Ed and I were the original, the guys who put the band together. But at the end of the day, when there's a disagreement in the band, I'm taking his side and vice versa, because we protect each other. That was the most important thing that we were taught, stick together.

• 14:45Anderson Cooper?

  There was a day when you guys were teenagers, you heard your brother playing "Going Home" by...

• 14:51Speaker 05

  Alvin Lee.

• 14:52Anderson Cooper?

  Alvin Lee. I just want to play a little bit of that and then ask you about the importance of it.

• 15:14Speaker 05

  When Ed played that, it just blew me away.

• 15:16Anderson Cooper?

  And he was playing it just from listening to it?

• 15:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:19Anderson Cooper?

  That was the moment you realized he was a virtuoso on the guitar?

• 15:23Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. There was no doubt about it.

• 15:26Anderson Cooper?

  Your dad was a musician?

• 15:27Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 15:28Anderson Cooper?

  Your mom was from Indonesia. Your dad had met her in Indonesia, lived there for several years, and then ultimately you guys came to the States. Even at the height of your success, your mom was still disappointed.

• 15:41Speaker 05

  That's a mild way of putting it. You know, we never quite measured up to what she wanted.

• 15:46Anderson Cooper?

  That's incredible.

• 15:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:48Anderson Cooper?

  For your brother, you think that weighed more heavily on him, her attitude?

• 15:52Speaker 05

  Ed was really very sensitive in that sense.

• 15:57Anderson Cooper?

  Your dad had a heart attack in 1986 and died several months after.

• 16:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:04Anderson Cooper?

  He was only 66, is that right?

• 16:06Speaker 05

  66, yeah.

• 16:07Anderson Cooper?

  You described yourself as being devastated.

• 16:10Speaker 05

  Beyond. It was just like, I can't even put it into words. Whether it's because we're all conditioned to believe a certain how it's supposed to end, and that this particular instance, it contradicted everything I was aware of, or the fact that he's no longer here. We related to him, not just musically, but in his sense of humor and his expert... I mean, you can go anywhere in the world with him, and he could find his way. And that confidence, gives you a confidence. I have a piece of footage of us leaving Holland, this, we get on the boat, and the four of us look like a duck, with four ducks walking in a row, and we're waving. We have no idea where we're going, what we're walking into, but as long as the boss is leading, we're good.

• 16:54Speaker 05

  That's the confidence he inspired.

• 16:57Anderson Cooper?

  Your dad struggled with alcohol?

• 16:59Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, he didn't struggle with it. He loved it.

• 17:04Anderson Cooper?

  Okay, all right.

• 17:09Speaker 05

  But my grandfather died from it. My dad's brothers died from it. My dad died from it. I came very close.

• 17:19Speaker 05

  And Ed, he battled it his whole life. And people don't respect or appreciate what kind of battle you're going through when you're trying to slay that dragon, if you will. I mean, it's an ugly, ugly monster.

• 17:32Anderson Cooper?

  You gave it up finally.

• 17:34Speaker 05

  I wouldn't call it giving it up. I had to quit because I thought I was going to die. And so I went to rehab and it was a painful process.

• 17:44Anderson Cooper?

  Was that after your dad died or before?

• 17:46Speaker 05

  Two or three months after he died.

• 17:47Anderson Cooper?

  So that was a really motivating factor for you to give up?

• 17:50Speaker 05

  Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. I thought that maybe by not dying from alcohol, it would absolve his sins, so to speak. So I thought I owed it to him.

• 17:59Anderson Cooper?

  Before he died, he actually played on one of your albums. You brought him into a recording studio.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, this actually was Dave's idea.

• 18:08Anderson Cooper?

  It was David Roth's idea?

• 18:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I got to say thanks to Dave because that was really a cool thing for him to do. I'd never seen my dad get so nervous because he knew that his capabilities had really diminished. But the moment we started playing, it took like three or four takes and that was it. We're done. Let's go and have a couple beers.

• 18:24Anderson Cooper?

  Is it okay if I play a little bit of your dad playing?

• 18:27Speaker 05

  Absolutely. He would love it.

• 18:30Anderson Cooper?

  This is Jan Van Halen on the clarinet and the song is "Big Bad Bill is Sweet William Now."

• 18:43Speaker 05

  Afterwards, I think he had a great time with it, you know.

• 18:46Anderson Cooper?

  When your dad died, your reaction was that you and your brother went into the studio and you just played music?

• 18:53Speaker 05

  We just played for hours. It's the only way we could deal with the overwhelming. We didn't even know what to call it. You know, it wasn't referred to as grief back then. We were tough guys, you know. Have a couple of beers and let's go on with it.

• 19:06Anderson Cooper?

  So did you talk with him about your dad or was it just?

• 19:09Speaker 05

  No.

• 19:09Anderson Cooper?

  Let's go play?

• 19:11Speaker 05

  Let's go play. Yeah, we just played whatever it was. It didn't matter.

• 19:16Anderson Cooper?

  I just want to read several paragraphs from the book because you said, you're talking to Ed, you said, "You never stopped. The real problem isn't that you drank alcohol, it's that you drank the Kool-Aid. People telling you you're a genius, that you're the greatest guitar player who ever lived. All true, but you ate it up and then you were overwhelmed by the burden of it. Our dad told us from the beginning, 'Don't believe your own bullshit, just play, and if you're playing a wedding, wear a tux. Give everything you've got. Fulfill your obligations. You're the head of the family, do your job.' But love stays, that's the truth. We still communicate. You're still with me, Ed. Because we live in a Western society, people want to dismiss that as projection. But ask any physicist, energy can be neither created nor destroyed. When a cloud dissipates, what happens to

• 20:01Anderson Cooper?

  the water? It isn't gone, it's just changed form. The same thing goes for you, Ed, or any other human being on this planet. So I'll never say goodbye."

• 20:11Speaker 05

  Now I'm getting a lump in my throat.

• 20:13Anderson Cooper?

  But you feel that, you believe that?

• 20:15Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah.

• 20:17Anderson Cooper?

  Can you talk about that?

• 20:18Speaker 05

  In a lot of different cultures, death is not really, it's not the end. And I prefer to believe that. This is going to sound a little out to left field, so to speak, but he communicates in different ways with me. And I can't really go into that because the moment you mention it, it breaks that bond. It's kind of a really a thin thread of signs.

• 20:42Anderson Cooper?

  There's a lot of people who feel signs and see signs, and it gives great comfort. And it's only recently that I've begun to, excuse me if I voice cracks, it's uncontrollable.

• 20:59Anderson Cooper?

  I've recently begun to actually feel my brother and my dad, who died long ago. But I've actually started to sort of... Feel them inside me in a way that I never have before. And it's it's an extraordinary feeling.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  The first real direct communication, if you will, was more of a smell. His unique fragrance was everywhere. And I couldn't figure out rationally, where is this coming from? Is it the closet? Is it the clothes? Is it the stuff that he washed with? Or maybe it's just my mind wants to smell that? I don't know. But it was there. And lately, it's been fading a little bit.

• 21:43Anderson Cooper?

  But the feeling it leaves you with is positive.

• 21:46Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, yeah. There are other dimensions of existence. My dad explained that it's all about frequencies. If you had a receiver and an amplifier and you modulate it between the different frequencies, you can go from KLOS to KMTs or whatever radio stations there are. It's all there. It's all there in the airwaves, but you have to be in tune with it. Then you'll you understand what it is. He's around here somewhere. I think he thought he was done here, and that's why he left. That's my mental way of dealing with it.

• 22:20Anderson Cooper?

  One of the things you write about is your rise and the early club days. You know, you were didn't have a record deal, you know, just trying to make it. And you say, what we didn't know at that time was that there's a way in which the club days were the pinnacle of our experience on planet Earth. That's when we got the highest highs because the potential of being great was still out there. That's when the dream of Van Halen was the most magical because it was still a dream.

• 22:45Speaker 05

  Because that's when you're alive, you know? It's just human nature. I think that when you've reached a certain goal, the air leaves the room, so to speak.

• 22:54Anderson Cooper?

  But I'm wondering if in your secret heart, when you think of your brother, is it those days you think of?

• 23:02Speaker 05

  Now that you mention it, yeah, it's the most it's the most prominent in my memory because being in the basement with the leaking pipes and the there was no heat down there and it didn't smell great. We didn't care. Load up a couple more, let's play.

• 23:19Speaker 05

  But you have a common goal and you have something because you're hungry. I still have the piano that we came over here with. It's in the hallway. And the cigarette burns for one jump was written, it's still on there.

• 23:32Speaker 05

  Those little things bring back the memories and it brings back the smells, the feeling, the touch.

• 23:40Anderson Cooper?

  Is there a song that when you think of your brother, this is the song you think of?

• 23:44Speaker 05

  I could think of several different ones, but we all used to bring pieces of music into the basement. And I remember when Ed brought in "Running with the Devil."

• 23:59Speaker 05

  That chord structure and that whole deal, the moment I heard that, I said, "Okay, Ed, you're writing all the songs from now on because we can't compete with that."

• 24:10Speaker 05

  And it had nothing to do with speed, it had nothing to do with articulation, it had nothing to do with anything other. It was just absolutely brilliant. It went to my ear. It was amazing.

• 24:36Anderson Cooper?

  That's what we'll end the podcast with then, "Running with the Devil." It was really lovely talking to you.

• 24:40Speaker 05

  Anderson, thank you, Ed.

• 24:45Anderson Cooper?

  And that's All There Is. You can watch a video version of this interview on YouTube or at our online grief community at CNN.com/AllThereIsOnline. You can also listen to voicemails there from other podcast listeners about their experiences with grief, leave comments of your own, and listen to all the seasons of the podcast as well. I'll be back with another edition of All There Is next week. I hope you find something in these podcasts that help you in your grief, and I hope they make you feel a little less alone. Thanks for listening. I'd love to hear your comments at CNN.com/AllThereIsOnline.

• 25:26Anderson Cooper?

  All There Is is a production of CNN Audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan DeZula is our technical director and Steve Ligtai is our executive producer. Support from Nick Gottsel, Ben Evans, Chuck Hadad, Charlie Moore, Kerry Rubin, Kerry Pritchard, Shimri Chitrit, Ronald Bettis, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Deonora, Laney Steinhardt, Jameis Andrest, Nicole Peseru, and Lisa Namro. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage.