Alex Van Halen recently hailed his wife Stine Schyberg for saving his life after he developed a drug addiction while on tour with Van Halen in the 1990s.
Alex Van Halen opens up on the matter
Alex, the legendary rock band’s drummer, unpacks his relationship with Stine in his new memoir Brothers (out now), written in honor of his late brother and bandmate Eddie Van Halen.
In the memoir, Brothers, Alex talked about leading a promiscuous life, as rock stars are wont to do, which eventually became a “one-dimensional,” tiresome “routine.” However, everything changed when he stumbled upon his “cosmic connection” with Stine, 59.
“I literally owe my life to Stine, my wife of almost 30 years,” writes Alex via PEOPLE, who married the designer and art director in 2000. They share son Malcolm, 25.
In the 1970s, Alex sustained a vertebral injury in a boating accident and by the time Van Halen’s Balance Tour rolled around in 1995, he was dealing with intense neck pain and sleeping troubles. The star wrote that Van Halen’s tour manager gave him two Valiums to help him cope. Before long, he was hooked.
Once the tour ended and Alex returned home, he was “totally addicted” to benzodiazepines, writing that he “walked through life with my head in a fluffy cloud for six months.”
It was quite a familiar situation for Stine. She lost her brother, also a drummer, to a heroin overdose, and had experience getting through to someone suffering from addiction, Alex writes.
“I owe that woman my life. She loved me enough — and was strong enough — to say, ‘I’m out of here,’ when she saw me slipping into addiction,” he writes. “I can still see her walking out the door with our cat in a box.”
Eventually, Stine and their cat Emma moved back home. Though it was “hell for four or five weeks” as he came down from the drugs, Alex eventually got clean.
The star writes that he ultimately found a way to protect himself from the pressures of fame in ways his brother, who also struggled with addiction, never could before his 2020 death.
“Losing Stine was the only price I wasn’t willing to pay for the drug. Once I make my mind up about something, there’s no stopping me,” Alex writes in the book. “With Stine I was able to carve out a home, a zone that had nothing to do with work or fame. Ed was never able to create that.”