Alex Van Halen

Alexander Arthur Van Halen (born May 8, 1953) is a Dutch-American musician who is the drummer and co-founder of the hard rock band Van Halen. The band was formed in 1974 by Alex Van Halen; his younger brother, Eddie Van Halen; David Lee Roth; and Michael Anthony. Warner Brothers signed the band in 1977, and its debut album was released in 1978. Alex and Eddie Van Halen are the only members of Van Halen who have been in the band throughout its existence.

Alex Van Halen
Van Halen performing live in 2012
Background information
Birth nameAlexander Arthur van Halen
Born (1953-05-08) May 8, 1953
Amsterdam,[1] Netherlands
OriginPasadena, California, U.S
Genres
InstrumentsDrums
Years active1972–present
LabelsWarner Bros.
Associated actsVan Halen
Websitewww.van-halen.com

Early life

Alexander Arthur Van Halen was born in Amsterdam.[2][3] The family name in Dutch is van Halen, and his name is pronounced in Dutch as: [ɑlɛkˈsɑndər ˈɑrtʏr vɑnˈhaːlə(n)]. His Dutch father, Jan van Halen (1920–1986), was an accomplished jazz saxophonist and clarinet player. His mother, Eugenia van Beers (1914–2005), was an Indo (Eurasian) from Rangkasbitung, Indonesia.[4] Alex spent his early years in Nijmegen in the east of the Netherlands.[5] The family moved to Pasadena, California in 1962.[4] Both Alex and his younger brother, Eddie, are naturalized U.S. citizens.[6]

Both Alex and Eddie Van Halen were trained as classical pianists in their childhood.[7] Although Alex is known as a professional drummer, he began his musical aspirations as a guitarist, with his brother Eddie taking up drums.[4] While Eddie was delivering newspapers to pay for his drum kit, Alex would practice playing on them. After spending time playing Eddie's drum kit, Alex became more skilled at the drums than Eddie was.[8] When Eddie heard Alex's mastery of The Surfaris drum solo in the song "Wipe Out", he decided to learn to play the electric guitar.[5] Alex was influenced by Budgie drummer Ray Phillips.[9]

Alex, Eddie and three other boys formed their first band when they were in the fourth grade, calling themselves The Broken Combs; they performed at lunchtime at Hamilton Elementary School in Pasadena.[10]

In 1971, Van Halen graduated from Pasadena High School in California.[5] He then took classes in music theory, scoring, composition and arranging at Pasadena City College for a short while.[5] While attending Pasadena City College, Alex met Michael Anthony and David Lee Roth. They formed the band Mammoth, and Alex, along with the others, left Pasadena City College.[11]

Musical career

Alex Van Halen had several early bands with Eddie before the formation of Van Halen. Names of these previous bands include The Broken Combs, The Space Brothers, The Trojan Rubber Company, and Mammoth.[5]

In 1972, Alex and Eddie Van Halen formed Mammoth with Mark Stone on bass and Eddie on lead vocals. The band rented David Lee Roth's PA system for their shows. Soon after, Edward became tired of singing lead vocals, and asked Roth to join the band. Later, in 1974, since the name Mammoth was already taken by another band, the name was changed to Van Halen, and Stone was replaced by Michael Anthony.[12] Roth has claimed that it was his idea to rename the band Van Halen, and that he actually named it after Alex. In addition to his musical duties at this time, Alex handled managerial duties, such as booking gigs, etc. for the band. Their 1978 self-titled debut album Van Halen was released to much fanfare, influencing many musicians in hard rock.

Although the term "brown sound" is generally associated with Eddie's guitar, it was actually coined by Alex to refer to the sound of his snare drum.[13]

The only recording Alex has made outside of Van Halen is the instrumental "Respect the Wind" (for which the Van Halen brothers were nominated for a Grammy Award in 1997 for Best Rock Instrumental Performance),[14] featuring Alex on keyboards with Eddie on guitar. The song was written for the 1996 film Twister and plays during the end credits of the movie.

Equipment

Van Halen endorses Ludwig drums, pedals and hardware, Paiste cymbals, Remo drumheads and Regaltip drumsticks. A Paiste endorser since March 1983, Van Halen, in co-operation with Paiste developed a signature ride cymbal—a 2002 24" Big ride—which Paiste introduced at the 2010 Winter NAMM Show. He also had two Ludwig signature snares. Alex has used Rototoms and octobans in the past as well as electronic drums and is renowned for using extravagantly sized drum kits that feature four bass drums, having originally used only two.

Regaltip created the Alex Van Halen signature drumsticks when he became an endorser.

Influences

Van Halen's main influences include Billy Cobham, Ginger Baker, Keith Moon and John Bonham, and he has cited jazz drummer Buddy Rich's work as having an early and lifelong impact.[15]

Personal Life

Alex married Valeri Kendall in June 1983, after a two-year engagement. The marriage ended in divorce two months later. Van Halen's first of two sons, Aric Van Halen, was born October 6, 1989; Aric's mother was Van Halen's ex-wife, Kelly Carter, whom he divorced in August 1996 after 13 years of marriage. Van Halen married his current wife, Stine Schyberg, in 2000. She is the mother of his son Malcolm Van Halen. Van Halen is the uncle of Wolfgang Van Halen.[16]

After the death of his father Jan in December 1986, Van Halen embraced sobriety in April 1987.

Van Halen is an ordained minister. He presided at the wedding of his brother Eddie in 2009.[17]

His son Aric is a passionate runner and competed in the Olympic trials for the steeplechase in 2016. [18]

gollark: The rest of the instruction consists of variable-width (for fun) target specifiers. The first N target specifiers in an operation are used as destinations and the remaining ones as sources. N varies per opcode. They can be of the form `000DDD` (pop/push from/to stack index DDD), `001EEE` (peek stack index EEE if source, if destination then push onto EEE if it is empty), `010FFFFFFFF` (8-bit immediate value FFFFFFFF; writes are discarded), `011GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG` (16-bit immediate value GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG; writes are also discarded), `100[H 31 times]` (31-bit immediate because bee you), `101IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII` (16 bits of memory location relative to the base memory address register of the stack the operation is conditional on), `110JJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ` (16 bit memory location relative to the top value on that stack instead), `1111LLLMMM` (memory address equal to base memory address of stack LLL plus top of stack MMM), or `1110NNN` (base memory address register of stack MMM).Opcodes (numbered from 0 in order): MOV (1 source, as many destinations as can be parsed validly; the value is copied to all of them), ADD (1 destination, multiple sources), JMP (1 source), NOT (same as MOV), WR (write to output port; multiple sources, first is port number), RE (read from input port; one source for port number, multiple destinations), SUB, AND, OR, XOR, SHR, SHL (bitwise operations), MUL, ROR, ROL, NOP, MUL2 (multiplication with two outputs).
gollark: osmarksISA™️-2028 is a VLIW stack machine. Specifically, it executes a 384-bit instruction composed of 8 48-bit operations in parallel. There are 8 stacks, for safety. Each stack also has an associated base memory address register, which is used in some "addressing modes". Each stack holds 64-bit integers; popping/peeking an empty stack simply returns 0, and the stacks can hold at most 32 items. Exceeding a stack's capacity is runtime undefined behaviour. The operation encoding is: `AABBBCCCCCCCCC`:A = 2-bit conditional operation mode - 0 is "run unconditionally", 1 is "run if top value on stack is 0", 2 is "run if not 0", 3 is "run if first bit is ~~negative~~ 1".B = 3-bit index for the stack to use for the conditional.C = 9-bit opcode (for extensibility).
gollark: By "really fast", I mean "in a few decaminutes, probably".
gollark: I suppose I could just specify it really fast.
gollark: I could, but do I really want to?

References
  1. "New Netherland Institute". Newnetherlandinstitute.org. Retrieved August 10, 2018.
  2. "Alexander Arthur (Alex) van Halen". Newnetherlandinstitute.org. Retrieved August 10, 2018.
  3. "Happy Birthday, Alex Van Halen!". Vhnd.com. June 17, 2013. Retrieved August 10, 2018.
  4. "Alexander Arthur (Alex) van Halen". Newnetherlandinstitute.org. Retrieved February 9, 2016.
  5. "Drummerworld: Alex van Halen". Drummerworld.com. Retrieved December 1, 2008.
  6. Christopher, Michael (February 6, 2015). "Rock Music Menu: Eddie Van Halen set for Smithsonian talk". Delaware County Daily Times. Upper Darby Township, PA. Retrieved February 13, 2016.
  7. "Alex Van Halen". Drumsoloartist.com. Retrieved January 13, 2008.
  8. Wurster, Jon (June 2012). "Alex Van Halen: Of Sound and Vision". Modern Drummer. 36 (6): 52–53.
  9. "BLABBERMOUTH.NET - Founding BUDGIE Member RAY PHILLIPS Working On Solo Debut". Roadrunnerrecords.com. Archived from the original on December 6, 2008. Retrieved October 14, 2009.
  10. Van Halen 2012 Interview on YouTube
  11. "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame". Rockhall.com. Retrieved January 18, 2008.
  12. McCully, Jerry. "The Early Years of Van Halen: A Paper Route, a High School Essay, and a Couple of Lucky Breaks". Archived from the original on March 24, 2011.
  13. "Alex Van Halen". ClassicVanHalen.com. Retrieved March 22, 2008.
  14. "Grammy Nominations from Rock on the Net". Rockonthenet.com. Retrieved August 10, 2018.
  15. "Alex Van Halen: Bashing and Crashing In the Here and Now". Moderndrummer.com. Retrieved July 16, 2014.
  16. "Alex Van Halen". IMDb.com. Retrieved August 10, 2018.
  17. Kreps, Daniel (June 29, 2009). "Eddie Van Halen, Janie Liszewski Married in California". Rolling Stone. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. Retrieved July 6, 2014.
  18. "For Aric Van Halen, a Steeplechaser, Jump Takes on a New Meaning". New York Times. Retrieved October 15, 2019.
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