Alex Van Halen is now being accused of stealing some parts of his memoir ‘Brothers’ from another Van Halen book, ‘Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen.’
“I just finished Alex Van Halen’s ‘Brothers.’ I found much of it very engaging… if not a little familiar,” the author Brad Tolinski wrote in a Facebook post. “My co-author Chris Gill and I, counted close to forty quotes taken directly from our book ‘Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen’ —most them unattributed. Okay, technically all them unattributed, since he never directly mentions our book. I guess it’s a back-handed compliment—it means our reporting was accurate. However, I would add, if you’ve read Brothers and enjoyed it, it’s only half of the story. Read our book and get Ed’s perspective.”
A user responded to the author’s comments, saying that Alex did add Gregg Renoff’s work at the beginning of the book under the ‘author’s note,’ and shared the picture of the mentioned quote.
“I relied on my memories to write this book, and I’m glad that some of the other people who were there when all of this was going on wrote down their own,” Alex wrote in the book. “‘Runnin’ with the Devil’ by the late Noel Monk and ‘A Platinum Producer’s Life in Music’ by Ted Templeman were both interesting reads, and then, of course, there was ‘Crazy from the Heat’ by David Lee Roth, which reminded me of incidents and conversations I hadn’t thought about in years.”
“I disagree with my former collaborators on all sorts of things, but I was still interested to hear their various sides of the story. I have mixed feelings about the books by all the Van Halen-ologists because they weren’t actually there, but I read them all just to remind myself of everything Ed and I said over the years- sometimes when we were angry, sometimes when we’d had a few, and sometimes when we managed to put into words what we were always better at saying through our music,” the drummer added.
“Yeah, saw that, but dismisses us ‘because we weren’t there.’ Hmm, I believe Ed was, which is where we got our info. But, you know, enough sour grapes. I did enjoy the book,” Tolinski responded to the user.
Alex Van Halen has been working on a book about his brother for a long time in the hope of capturing his spirit and moving past his grief. However, he admitted “I’m not done dealing with this yet. In fact, I’ll probably be dealing with it until my dying day.”
To process his feelings, he sometimes talks to Eddie, as he revealed during an interview with The Guardian. “This is probably a spiritually, psychically wrong thing to say,” he said, “but had Ed listened to our dad, he’d still be here. Instead, he did everything he could to f*ck that up.”
Alex has released the full version of ‘Unfinished,’ the last song he wrote and recorded with Eddie Van Halen.