Battles of the Bands: Alex and Edward Van Halen (excerpt from a substack article)
Before managing the David Lee Roth-era Van Halen, Noel Monk’s rock and roll bona fides included wrangling the Sex Pistols through the original lineup’s benighted—and only—U.S. tour in 1978. Which is to say, Monk had seen a few things. But nothing prepared him for the spectacle of Edward and brother Alex Van Halen’s out-of-left-field fisticuffs when he was still getting to know the band while road managing their first U.S. tour in 1978, opening for Journey.
As Monk recounted in his delicious memoir Runnin’ with the Devil: A Backstage Pass to the Wild Times, Loud Rock, and the Down and Dirty Truth Behind the Making of Van Halen:
snip
That first occasion, we had all been sitting in the hotel room, drinking and talking. Suddenly Edward and Alex veered off into their own little discussion, the subject of which was completely foreign to me. And when I say foreign, I mean that I did not understand a word, as they began screaming at each other in what I later learned was Dutch—the tongue of their motherland. It was one of the strangest things I had ever seen—these two ordinarily placid Southern California rockers, who usually spoke in a sort of pothead surf patois, suddenly nose to nose, spitting and snarling, and growling at each other in a foreign language, as if they had become possessed. I started to leave the room as their voices got louder—it was all just a little too crazy and pathetic, even for rock ’n’ roll. But before I could exit, they were on each other, slamming their fists into each other’s faces, grabbing great fistfuls of hair, and rolling around on the floor like drunken idiots. As we separated them, all I could think was, Holy shit . . . I’ve got a couple madmen on my hands.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-190558668