The collaboration Eddie Van Halen called a career standout: “Beyond anything you can imagine”
Van Halen always were a fairly insular group throughout their time in the spotlight. Even though it wasn’t out of the question for Eddie Van Halen to jam with a couple of friends onstage once in a while, who needed collaboration when the band had the hard rock equivalent of Beethoven behind the fretboard? There were a few options for Eddie to work with other acts, and he considered his work on ‘Beat It’ by Michael Jackson to be one of his true career highlights.
Then again, ‘The King of Pop’ didn’t necessarily need Eddie on the track to become one of the biggest names in mainstream music. He was on his way to becoming the pinup star of MTV, and with the launch of videos for ‘Thriller’ and ‘Billie Jean’, he had already carved out his niche as a mixture of R&B, soul, funk and even a dash of rock sprinkled in for taste.
It’s not like he was short on guitarists, either. Throughout the recording of Thriller, most of the guitar duties were handled by Steve Lukather of Toto, but when it came time to deliver the guitar solo for ‘Beat It’, it needed that extra spice to send it over the edge. While Lukather could play any style someone threw at him, Eddie was a no-brainer when he agreed to visit the studio.
Although the solo only took a few minutes to record, it absolutely makes the track. Any other pop star trying their hand at rock would have seemed nothing more than cute, but getting a co-sign from Van Halen and the leftovers from ‘Eruption’ was the most perfect blend of pop and rock that MTV had ever seen since the rise of Prince.
Even looking back, Eddie thought that those few minutes in the studio were a landmark piece of his recording career, telling The Smithsonian, “Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ is a stand out for me. Quincy Jones called me up and asked me to play on it. When I got there, it took me 15 minutes to rearrange the song, and I played two solos and told them they could pick the one they liked best. It’s crazy that something could take such a short amount of time and can grow into something beyond anything you could ever imagine.”
While the solo was a great way for Jacko to get his foot in the door of rock and roll, it did end up having some repercussions for Van Halen. David Lee Roth was far from thrilled when he heard Eddie playing with someone else, and when he walked into the studio with pop-flavoured hits like ‘Jump’, it was only a matter of time before Roth was out the door and Sammy Hagar joined just in time for 5150.
In fact, there’s a bit of a parallel track between Jackson and Eddie that starts with this song. From there, Eddie started using the keyboards more heavily on albums like OU812, while Jackson would get even heavier on tunes like ‘Dirty Diana’ and bringing in another guitar god, Slash, to lay down licks on Dangerous.
‘Beat It’ may have caused a bit more of a shakeup than it really should have, but that doesn’t take away from it being one of the greatest musical moments of the 1980s. If anything, the fact that Van Halen was still able to brush themselves off afterwards meant that this song probably helped their career in a small way. One day, they were every rocker’s favourite act, and now they were a band for the people.
