The 1982 song Eddie Van Halen thought was stolen from him: “I never wanted to do it”
While Van Halen, especially their guitarist and de facto leader, Eddie Van Halen, are frequently considered to be among the most original and inventive rock bands of their generation, they recorded an awful lot of covers for a group of people with a seemingly endless stream of ideas flowing through them.
Even from their landmark debut album, they were delivering covers such as a riotous rendition of The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ and an equally brutal interpretation of John Brim’s ‘Ice Cream Man’, and while not every album in their discography is laced with a few reworks of classic songs, their 1982 album, Diver Down, sees the band try their hand at five different covers, with varying degrees of competency and faithfulness.
However, perhaps the most intriguing cover that the band opted to record for this album was one that very few people could reasonably have predicted a group of Van Halen’s ilk would ever attempt to turn into a comfortable fit for them. While it’s by no means terrible, it wasn’t exactly Eddie Van Halen’s idea of a good time despite the overwhelmingly positive nature of the source material.
It may be a song that has been covered to death by other rock acts, but Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Dancing In The Street’ has still been on the receiving end of some fascinating reinterpretations, with Van Halen’s being among them. However, rather than going for their usual all-out, ballsy rock approach, the track is instead underpinned by an undulating synthesiser, something that was beginning to become a more regular feature of the band’s work by this point in their career.
As a result, Van Halen’s estimation of ‘Dancing in the Street’ is considerably far removed from the original, with only the lyrics and basic vocal melody remaining intact from how original songwriter Marvin Gaye had penned it.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with reinterpreting a song to the point where it becomes considerably less recognisable, but given how much Eddie Van Halen had tweaked with the original, essentially creating a brand new riff as the basis of the song, he felt somewhat aggrieved by the fact that he never received so much of an additional songwriting credit for having been the mastermind behind this new incarnation of the song.
As far as he saw things, the keyboard riff that he’d come up with should never have been used for the cover in the first place, and it was only because of the behind-the-scenes meddling of producer Ted Templeman and frontman David Lee Roth that this part ended up being “stolen” and tacked onto a cover he was less than enthusiastic about recording.
“I fucking hated that song,” the guitarist later claimed. “I never wanted to do it. Ted and Roth thought I was out of control on Fair Warning, and the label wanted a hit single, and they dug up these cover tunes to try and get a hit.”
Evidently miffed by the idea that he had had some of his creative freedom taken away after delivering an album that failed to have any commercial success, Van Halen felt trapped by the demands of Templeman and Roth and simply had to go along with their idea to use his composition as part of the unwanted cover. But hey, at least it isn’t as bad as what David Bowie and Mick Jagger did to the same soul classic three years later…
