Everybody Wants Some
The Van Halen saga
Chapter One
THE IMMIGRANT SONG
Like the stories of other great Americans from Henry Ford to Walt
Disney to Fievel the Mouse, the saga of Van Halen begins in an
ancient land, far from the United States and its constant supply of hot
water and electricity. As a narrator would say in the old movies: Among
the windmills, tulips, and wooden shoes of lovely Amsterdam, Holland,
there once lived a kindly musician named Jan van Halen.
Born in 1920, van Halen played saxophone and clarinet everywhere,
from political events to radio orchestras to circus tents. During
World War II, he was reportedly captured while fighting the Nazis, and
forced to tour Germany as a prisoner playing propaganda music for the
hated Third Reich. When he was released after the war, he traveled to
Indonesia, where he met and fell in love with an Indonesian beauty,
Eugenia van Beers. She was older, born in 1914, but they married and
returned to Amsterdam, to Michelangelostraat, where a baby boy,
Alexander Arthur van Halen, was born on May 8, 1953.
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