Four years after Eddie Van Halen’s death his brother, and Van Halen co-founder, Alex Van Halen is opening up about the late rock icon’s substance abuse issues. In a new interview with Rolling Stone — his first since Eddie died in 2020 — 71-year-old Alex confessed that the loss of his brother is still “more than fresh” than it was four years ago, and shared details about Eddie’s reported prescribed steroid pill addiction that made him “feel like Superman.”
“I didn’t see the bottle, but the bottle had, like, a thousand pills in it,” Alex said of the medication that Eddie was prescribed to help relieve swelling after surgery to remove a brain tumor. “If two’s good, 20’s better. That was our mantra.”
Videos by PopCulture.com
“You know, he fought until the end,” Alex went on to say of his brother’s health issues. “Anybody who thought he was anything less than that can suck my you-know-what. … If you knew what he had to go through to beat the cancer — he wouldn’t do traditional treatment. Some of the off-the-wall s— caused such a toxic mix in his body. And, yeah, you shouldn’t drink with it, Ed!”
Alex went on to share that Eddie continued working on music “up to the very end” while undergoing experimental cancer treatments in Switzerland, even though the music “wasn’t very good,” Alex said, adding, “But that wasn’t the point. That’s what he did.”
Finally, Alex shared that losing his brother caused him “oceanic grief” and led him to “shut down” emotionally after lashing out in sorrow. “I was yelling and screaming. I was beside myself,” he said. “I just miss him. I miss the arguments. I live with it every day. And I can’t bring him back. I can’t make things right.”
Eddie Van Halen died in October 2020 — at the age of 65 — after a long battle with cancer. He’d first been diagnosed with tongue cancer as far back as 2000. Not long after his death, his ex-wife Valerie Bertinelli mentioned that cancer eventually spread to his lungs.
