Edward Van Halen: A Definitive Biography Read Free Page A

random arrests, rampant executions. Worse yet, those of Eurasian descent were specifically targeted and interned.
    The end of the war in 1945 had an immediate and profoundly direct impact upon Jan van Halen and Eugenia van Beers. They were each caught directly in the heart of the two locales in the world’s most brutal war.
    Post-WWII Love Affair
    Upon his release from musical captivity, Jan clearly felt a need to leave the scene and find somewhere far away to recover from the madness of the past five-plus years. When a musical opportunity presented itself in the Dutch East Indies, Jan jumped at the chance to test the waters in this strange and different land with clearly little in common with northwest Europe.
    Now free and no longer under the command of the Nazis—and trying to erase the memories of the god-awful music he’d been forced to play—Jan was feeling loose and dandy enough to take an interest in Eugenia van Beers. Things moved fast and the two were soon married. Clearly, Eugenia wanted to get out of what would be known by 1949 as Indonesia and start over in a new and different land herself. The newly married couple resettled in the Netherlands. An interracial couple in Dutch territory would have been absolutely unthinkable during Nazi occupation.
    Back in Jan’s home country, he continued to perform at every opportunity that presented itself. The couple’s first son, Alexander Arthur van Halen was born in May of 1953. Edward Lodewijk van Halen followed on January 26, 1955 (his music-obsessed father naming the future prodigy after Ludwig van Beethoven). Jan banked on his boys following in his somewhat bohemian footsteps. Also, like their father, both boys were born in Amsterdam, but the family eventually resettled in Nijmegen. Nijmegen is a city in a province directly on the border with Germany and to this day lays claims as one of the oldest cities in the world at 2,000 years old.
    After failed attempts at instruction by Jan himself, where he discovered he did not have the patience to teach his own boys, Alex and Edward began piano lessons at a very young age. “Basically, that’s where I got my ear developed, learned my theory, and got my fingers moving.” It most certainly did get his fingers moving, and Alex and Edward excelled and soon mastered works by Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky.
    Whenever Jan’s performances were broadcast over the radio, they all gathered around and listened as a family. Jan was always practicing and noodling around the house, often along with records at home. Jan even showed the boys some of the music he performed with pride during his military service: marching songs from the Dutch Air Force prior to the Nazi invasion. As very small toddlers, the kids followed Jan around with pots and pans while he played his proud marches.
    As the boys got older, Jan brought them along to his performances around Holland and into Germany. As a result, the boys—neither yet even ten—were exposed to the nuts and bolts, the glamorous and the perverse aspects of the music business and the entertainment industry. Following one of his father’s shows, Alex admitted to losing his virginity at the simply unrealistic age of nine.
    As the van Halen marriage progressed, for reasons possibly becoming more and more obvious, Eugenia simply turned sour on the idea of the boys becoming professional musicians like their father. Indeed, it was apparent that, personality-wise, Eugenia and Jan were opposites. According to Edward, “My dad is the person who would cut school and smoke cigarettes, and my mom would be the cheerleader. Complete opposites—the conservative and the screw-up. If you sat there and talked to my dad, he’d make you roll over and laugh.” (The quote featured no secondary comment about his mother.) Alex recalled that he once as a child told his mother he didn’t feel like practicing. Eugenia instructed Alex to place his hands on the table and proceeded to hit them with a wooden