“I couldn’t tell you”: The song Eddie Van Halen never thought would be a hit
Most musicians need an internal sixth sense to figure out what works and what doesn’t on any particular song. It’s easy to get too attached to that one great lick, but if something is shoehorned into a tune, it can lead to everything sounding flabby once they start incorporating it into a full record of tunes. And since many of the greatest pop songs of all time are airtight from back to front, Eddie Van Halen felt lost in the woods when deciding what to give to the radio.
Because when listening to every Van Halen record, they always worked best as a whole rather than in parts. They could put together the occasional great rock and roll pop song like ‘You Really Got Me’, but looking at their real classics like Women and Children First or 5150 with Sammy Hagar, every one of them doesn’t bother wasting a note from track one to the end of the record.
But looking at some of their best moments, not all of them are cut out to be singles. Take a record like Fair Warning. ‘Unchained’ might be a good frontrunner for a first taste of the record, but whereas most people would get into tracks like ‘Mean Street’ when it was played live, it was going to be difficult to convince anyone that something like ‘Sinner’s Swing’ or ‘One Foot Out the Door’ belonged on the radio next to the likes of Elvis Costello.
Then again, that’s why Eddie never thought that way. He only considered himself a musician and not a song doctor, so when he came up with a tune like ‘Jump’, he was simply having fun with his synthesiser rather than trying to write a timeless pop song. But you would think he had an idea of what a pop song would sound like when working with one of the greatest pop artists of all time.
When Eddie got the call to work with Michael Jackson on ‘Beat It’, the session musicians already had to cut the thing twice. Steve Lukather of Toto had already talked about how the studio needed it to be a little less aggressive than it was, but by having everyone else hang back, it gave Eddie a lot more room to shine when he penned his solo, which took him one afternoon to play through.
It might have been a lot of fun to get out of his comfort zone, but Eddie admitted to not having the best foresight for what ‘Beat It’ would be, saying, “I’m not into, let’s say, pop tune hit singles. I’m not into the Archies or whatever you call it, that kind of bubblegum. I couldn’t tell you if ‘Drop Dead Legs’ is more of a hit than ‘Jump’ because I like both. I could never have predicted ‘Beat It’ being a hit. I don’t think.”
But the real regret might have been not choosing to take any credits on one of ‘The King of Pop’s greatest tunes. An afternoon of work might not have been enough for Eddie to think he deserved writing credit, but had he decided to take a certain percentage of credit for his time, he could have been swimming in money after it became one of the best-selling albums in recorded history.
Then again, maybe playing music amongst a bunch of buddies was enough for him. He was more than happy to be able to make a living out of the music that he loved, so when people started arguing over percentages rather than the music itself, that was normally when Eddie checked out.
