“Acting stupid”: The Eddie Van Halen solo his brother was never happy with
It’s only natural for band members to have their disagreements after a while. No one can get along with four people perfectly over the course of their career, and there are bound to be a few times when someone throws their hands up and insists on not playing a song they don’t like or storms out of the studio when they don’t get their way. Although the Van Halen brothers were usually a united front for most of their early years, that’s not to say that they didn’t have their moments where things weren’t working out.
In fact, one of their first major fights inadvertently gave us one of the best guitarists of all time. The whole reason why Eddie took up guitar in the first place was because his brother Alex was banging away on his drum kit, so to get back at him, he took up the guitar and started finding new ways of playing that no one had thought possible.
But it’s easier to look at what Eddie does from a drummer’s perspective in many respects. Many people like to focus strictly on the massive tapping leads that go throughout every song, but his rhythm playing is far too neglected in the rock field, like the beginning of ‘Mean Street’ where he manages to create absolute mayhem for a few minutes by hitting the neck of his guitar in the right spots.
Even when they were making some of their most outlandish songs, Eddie always had a vision about where things were going to go. He and Alex usually saw eye-to-eye on everything they did, but that didn’t mean that the guitarist could find ways to stretch that may have upset his older brother in some respects.
After all, the massive rock and roll band that started everything was far away from the keyboards of ‘Jump’, but Alex’s heavy-hitting backbeat was what made the track a lot more aggressive than it actually was. But as soon as Eddie found some downtime to work with Michael Jackson on the solo to ‘Beat It’, David Lee Roth was far from the only one raising a few eyebrows when he came back to work on 1984.
According to Alex, he was absolutely pissed at the idea of Eddie working on anything outside their band, saying, “Why would you lend your talents to Michael Jackson? I just don’t fucking get it. And the funny part was that Ed fibbed his way out of it by saying, ‘Oh, who knows that kid anyway?’ You made the mistake! Fess up. Don’t add insult to injury by acting stupid.” Then again, that might have been what kept everything fresh when he came back to the group.
Roth eventually releasing his solo EP Crazy from the Heat may have been him testing the waters as a solo star, but Eddie saw his collaboration as a way to have some fun. He didn’t spend any more than an afternoon coming up with the solo, but judging by how many people have that album in their house, it’s safe to assume that he should have received some royalties from the whole deal rather than a token guest appearance.
Although it might be water under the bridge now in the light of Eddie’s passing, it’s easy to see ‘Beat It’ as a bit of a dividing line between both eras of the group’s career. Alex didn’t want to see his brother enjoying solo work more than Van Halen, and when Roth was sent packing, their second iteration with Sammy Hagar would look a lot different.
