The legendary Eddie Van Halen solo he forgot how to play as soon as he recorded it
Eddie Van Halen was never anything close to what some might regard as a conventional guitar player. After all, he always approached the subject with a level of humbleness, focussing more on the art of intuition than learned practicalities. And while some might find it difficult to believe that someone so reputable would ever charge forth without a plan, Van Halen thrived on it.
Throughout history, legendary guitars seem to always fit one of two categories—the technically proficient traditional players and the ones who make it up as they go. As someone who was always firmly in the latter, Van Halen adopted a certain nonchalance about his own playing and reputation, seeming somewhat reserved when anyone floated the idea of him being a true “guitar hero”.
However, this detached demeanour only drew others to him more, leaving many wondering how someone so laidback about his craft could shun such titles. At the core of this was how effortless he seemed—a term that’s often overused when describing guitar greats, but in Van Halen’s case, it seemed to be the only fitting description for his destined relationship with the instrument.
But what some might revert to as mere flippancy was instead Van Halen’s complicated relationship with his own hype, leading to a love-hate relationship with his approach, especially considering how every revolutionary “trick” he pulled out the bag was less that and more a means to an end. In his view, playing the guitar was a gateway to great music, not a sole practice in itself.
Perhaps that’s why, when he was enlisted to work alongside Michael Jackson by Quincy Jones on ‘Beat It’, he didn’t exactly take to it the way any other guitarist would. Equipped with the task of creating the song’s guitar solo, Van Halen played around with a few different riffs in under 30 minutes, leaving a stunned Jackson unsure of how someone so relaxed could make a good song sound incredible.
A song so monolithic didn’t just surge ahead without any credit to Van Halen, it did so because of its guitar solo, becoming one of the biggest songs that forever changed the landscape of rock, mostly thanks to the guitarist’s organic ability to tamper with several ideas before landing on magic. Even better was the fact that, as soon as they had established what the solo would sound like, Van Halen seemed to let it go from his mind entirely.
In fact, Van Halen struggled to remember it at all years later when he was asked by Jackson’s guitarist Jennifer Batten to play it for her during a chance encounter in the late 1980s. “Eddie’s tech came over and asked if I would come and meet him,” she told GuitarWorld. “And as soon as I walked in the room, he put his guitar on me and wanted me to play the [‘Beat It’] solo. So, of course, I did.”
However, when Van Halen then put on his guitar, he asked Batten to go over the solo again so he could re-learn how to play it. “Because it’s not something he had played with Van Halen – it was a one-off in the studio and then he went on his way,” she said, adding: “But I’d say he picked it up again mighty quickly!”
