The Van Halen song that ripped off The Doobie Brothers: “We got sued”
There isn’t much in the Van Halen catalogue that wasn’t spawned from the mind of Eddie Van Halen. Even though he may have been able to play a mile a minute every time he sat down to write, his penchant for massive fretboard runs was only matched by his ability to craft beautiful melodic hooks for every song, even weaving together unique pieces for his solo showcase, ‘Eruption’. Although many of the band’s best songs benefited from having Eddie at the helm, one of their biggest hits came secondhand.
Of course, Van Halen prided themselves on being a brilliant covers band during their tenure. Looking through the David Lee Roth era of the band, many songs tended to cater to fans of classic rock, covering songs like ‘Dancing in the Street’ and turning their version of The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ into a massive hit on the charts.
By the time they had reached their third album, the band no longer needed to fill out their album with cover material. Bringing in a healthy dose of muscle, albums like Women and Children First and Fair Warning marked a turning point in the band’s career, catering more towards heavy metal than anything hard rock.
As the times changed, though, Eddie started to become more enamoured with the keyboard. After giving the instrument its debut on ‘And The Cradle Will Rock’, Eddie would become infatuated with the sounds coming out of dance music around the same time, which he would emulate on 1984 with hits like ‘Jump’. While Roth often begrudgingly sat through the various shenanigans that Eddie was known for playing, one of the perfect marriages of hard rock and keyboards came with the song ‘I’ll Wait’.
Featuring the same bluesy swagger that Roth was always known for, the song remained one of the lower lights from the record, never equalling the central singles but still receiving a fair bit of radio airplay during the album’s promotional cycle. Although Eddie and Roth may have found an ideal balance in this song, it came from the help of one of The Doobie Brothers.
According to Eddie, the band’s frontman, Michael McDonald, came down to the studio at the insistence of their producer, Ted Templeman. It seemed like just a normal moment for a rock band on the rise, as producers would often fly in friends to take part in the sessions, or simply just to view them.
As the band played, though, the producer was slowly taking pieces of McDonald’s ad-libs, telling Brad Tolinski, “Ted played that track for Michael McDonald in his office to see what he would come up with. Little did we know that Ted was using a microcassette recorder he held under his desk to record what Michael was improvising”.
Once the royalty cheques started coming in, though, Eddie said the lawyers began showing up, explaining, “After the album came out, we got sued. Michael McDonald said that he came up with that chorus. I don’t know if Dave knew that it was Michael McDonald, but I knew that Ted played it for him. If Ted had been more on the up and up about it, we would have given Michael credit”.
Whether it was on purpose or simply an accident didn’t stop McDonald getting what was owed to him. McDonald told Uncut: “Van Halen had cut the track – the chord progression and the arrangement was already recorded and they needed some lyrics and a melody to go over that. Ted asked me to help out, so I sat down with David Lee Roth in Ted’s office at Warner Brothers and wrote out a lyric.”
It was a seriously lucrative moment, “Just to show you the difference between that band and our band as far as record sales, I probably made more money as a one-fifth writer on that song than I did on the entire Doobie Brothers album the subsequent year.”
Despite the accidental plagiarism, the band could turn McDonald’s riffs into their own, sounding exactly like the kind of song Eddie could have written in his sleep. There might be certain melodies that come and go throughout hard rock, but when they get into Eddie’s hands, it isn’t going to sound like anyone else.
