Alex Van Halen Recalls Having His First Drink at Age 6: ‘Alcohol Was Definitely a Problem in Our Family’

Van Halen drummer Alex Van Halen was introduced to the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle at a very young age.

The rocker, sober from alcohol since the 1980s, opens up about his experiences with drinking in his new memoir Brothers (out now), and the ways in which his father’s attitude toward alcohol influenced both him and his later brother Eddie Van Halen.

Alex, 71, reveals in his book that he had his first drink at just 6 years old, given to him by his father, Jan.

“He didn’t give me a pacifier; to placate me he gave me a tobacco pipe,” he writes. “I was young when I first realized that alcohol had that effect on me — that it lifted my spirits like nothing else. For people whose bodies react to alcohol the way mine does, it’s like you’ve gone back to the womb. Everything is warm and fuzzy, no matter where you happen to be.”

The rocker says alcohol “was definitely a problem in our family,” and shares an incident in which he once smashed his father over the head with a bottle because his mother told him to, and another where a 12-year-old Eddie was bitten by a dog, and given a cigarette and a shot of vodka by Jan.

In a 2021 interview with Modern Drummer, Alex said he ultimately quit drinking after the 1986 death of his father. In his book, he reveals that his wife Stine helped him get clean from an addiction to benzodiazepines in the 1990s.

Eddie, meanwhile, struggled with a dependence on alcohol for many years, and in 2015, told Billboard he’d been sober since 2008.

“I was an alcoholic, and I needed alcohol to function,” he said. “I started drinking and smoking when I was 12. I got drunk before I’d show up to high school… I’m not blaming my father at all, but he was an alcoholic, too. So in our household, it was normal.”

Eddie died of cancer in 2020 at age 65, and Brothers is a heartfelt love letter from Alex to his late sibling.

The book, described by its publishers as “nothing like any rock-and-roll memoir you’ve ever read,” shares stories from throughout their lives, including their family’s experience immigrating to the United States to their rise to fame with Van Halen.