“He’s going to kick me out”: The song Eddie Van Halen thought he butchered
It’s hard to think that anyone who plays at the level of Eddie Van Halen ever struggles with imposter syndrome. Although there may be some technical foul-ups every now and again that need to be kept in check, nearly everything that Eddie played during his lifetime was perfectly tasteful, always serving the song yet still sounding completely off the rails when the time called for it. That didn’t mean he didn’t have his own issues, though, and there were times when he thought his guitar playing actively took away from the tracks he was playing on.
At the same time, every musician goes through those moments where they feel like they aren’t pulling their weight properly in a band. Even though the rest of the group is sweating their asses off trying to get the perfect take, having something come to an artist naturally might make them think that they aren’t putting in their best effort or need to tone things down for the sake of the rest of the band.
In the case of Eddie, though, there wasn’t a soul on Earth that would argue with him being the centre of attention on every single Van Halen track. Even when he was playing the piano before switching over to guitar on a track like ‘Jump’, he always wanted to leave a lasting impression, and despite David Lee Roth’s magnetic presence in front of the microphone, Eddie had that uncanny ability to make every one of his greatest moments seem so easy.
When someone reaches that level of genius, though, there are always going to be people who want a piece of it as well. Despite Eddie not being an errand boy for certain artists, there were a lot of musicians he respected in the industry, and for someone who had the number of hits he did in the 1980s, there’s still a good chance that getting a call from Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson was enough to leave him shellshocked.
Because looking back, Jackson’s style of music seemed completely alien to rock and roll. They both had a great sense of groove, but Jacko knew there was a way for him to make something a bit heavier than normal, and if he had someone like Eddie to cosign a song like ‘Beat It’ with a guitar solo, that would send everything into the stratosphere.
All of the puzzle pieces were in place for Eddie to create the right guitar line, but as soon as he played everything, he was hesitant about changing pieces of the arrangement, recalling, “I warned him before he listened. I said, ‘Look, I changed the middle section of your song.’ Now in my mind, he’s either going to have his bodyguards kick me out for butchering his song, or he’s going to like it. And so he gave it a listen, and he turned to me and went, ‘Wow, thank you so much for having the passion to not just come in and blaze a solo but to actually care about the song and make it better.’”
To say that he made the song better would be an understatement, though. While Jackson had some heavy moments on the rest of the record, the fact that this song worked so well gave him a pass to flirt with even heavier stuff on the horizon, whether that was collaborating with Slash in the early 1990s or making his own hair metal songs from the ground up on ‘Dirty Diana.’
For all of the ways that this kind of collaboration could have gone south, though, the fact that Eddie refused to be paid for his time speaks volumes about how he saw his contribution. Any of these sessions could have become bogged down by egos, but this is one of those moments when people connect solely for the purpose of making great art.
