“He didn’t get royalties”: The artist Eddie Van Halen thought ripped him off
All’s fair in love and rock and roll most of the time. There are many ways that people can take their favourite artists and twist them into something they can call their own, but the minute that people start getting a bit too close for comfort is when they make something that sounds a bit too close to an original song. While Van Halen was more than willing to credit the bands that they covered, Eddie was none too happy when he started seeing some of his licks out in the wild.
Then again, if Eddie managed to win every lawsuit for guitarists ripping him off, he would have been an extremely wealthy man. He had already trademarked a signature brand of tapping for an entire generation of players, and even if he wasn’t the most celebrated guitar hero at the time, he was soon going to ascend to the same level as Jimi Hendrix in terms of what he could do whenever he got onstage.
But there’s always more to Van Halen than Eddie’s guitar solos. The masses criminally underrate him as a rhythm guitarist. People love to gush over how many times they’ve pored over ‘Eruption’, trying to dissect every note he played, but then there are songs like ‘Hear About It Later’ or the very beginning of ‘Mean Street’, where his sense of percussion is on another level compared to everyone else.
While a deep groove is all someone normally needs in rock and roll, rhythm is equally important in the world of hip-hop. The biggest names in the world of rap in the genre’s early days were all about finding the best tunes to get the beat going, and while disco provided a nice basis for everything on a song like ‘Rapper’s Delight’, it didn’t people long to start sampling the biggest rock songs of all time.
Run-DMC were on the cusp of busting down the door for rap-rock, but there were also Beastie Boys sampling Led Zeppelin and Eminem coming later to flip Aerosmith’s ‘Dream On’ into his own classic, ‘Sing for the Moment.’ When listening to Tone Loc’s ‘Wild Thing,’ though, the sample is much more subtle if someone doesn’t have keen ears for Van Halen tracks. The whole drum break comes from ‘Jamie’s Cryin’ off their debut album, but according to Loc, the band were none too happy.
When running into Eddie in passing, Loc remembered that the guitarist was pissed at him for using ‘Jamie’s Cryin’ on the sample, saying, “I ran into Eddie Van Halen one time. He was uptight and a little tipsy, claiming that I took money from him. I don’t think he really believed that, but maybe he did because he was tipsy and you say what you feel when you’re in that zone. Maybe he didn’t get the proper royalties for it. I don’t know. He’s lucky I didn’t sock him in his jaw.”
Then again, whatever fire Eddie had on the matter eventually cooled later. Since he knew that every other guitarist was knicking his style and passing it off as their own, there was no point in starting a feud with someone who wasn’t even in his genre about sampling a drum groove that he wasn’t even playing.
If anything, Eddie’s frustration was merely a reaction to what everyone else was dealing with when rap was coming in. This was a new art form, and it was up to every listener whether to jump on the hype train or draw a line in the sand for what they considered to be “real music”.
