‘Kiss On My List’: The song Van Halen ripped off from Hall and Oates
When Van Halen first arrived on the music scene, no one had heard anything like them. In a landscape still dominated by soft rock and progressive rock dominating the charts, Eddie Van Halen’s guitar tone combined with David Lee Roth’s energetic stage presence made the genre feel exciting yet again, leading to some of the most celebrated songs to ever come out of California. Although Eddie could have made a legacy out of almost anything that he played, he admitted that one of his pieces was taken note-for-note from the sounds of soft rock.
If you look at the music that Eddie was used to listening to, it was far from the sounds of soppy ballads in his youth. When talking about the first songs that he fell in love with, Eddie would talk about how much influence Eric Clapton’s guitar tone had on him when he was with Cream while also extolling the virtues of Tony Iommi’s work in Black Sabbath.
Even though Eddie gravitated towards heavy music, he also had a soft side. Along with playing various swing songs during his youth with his father, Eddie did open up to softer tracks as he got older, with his son Wolfgang remembering that he would cry listening to works like ‘Don’t Give Up’ by Peter Gabriel.
Although the guitar gave Eddie a great outlet, his musical vision was too great to be limited to one instrument. On Women and Children First, Eddie would get behind the keyboard for the first time, creating the sounds of distorted madness on tracks like ‘And The Cradle Will Rock’, leading many to believe that he was playing an affected guitar.
As Eddie became more interested in playing piano, the band started to take their sound in a pop-friendly direction, which didn’t always sit well with Roth. Against the frontman’s wishes, 1984 would become one of their most successful albums to date, scoring massive hits beginning with ‘Jump’.
Instead of being greeted with a Van Halen guitar lick, the opening sounds on the track were blaring synthesisers, with Eddie creating most of the song on the keyboard. Even though Eddie may have birthed an entire track tickling the ivories, he later admitted to listening to Hall and Oates when making the record.
Since the duo had become one of the biggest acts in pop music then, Eddie admitted to taking the crux of the riff from ‘Kiss On My List’. It’s easy to see the similarities once you listen to both of them back to back since both songs are in the same key and have the same syncopated rhythms going back and forth between both hands.
Despite the similarities, Darryl Hall had no ill will towards the Van Halen camp, recalling later, “It’s something we all do. Eddie Van Halen told me that he copied the synth part from ‘Kiss on My List’ and used it in ‘Jump’. I don’t have a problem with that at all.” Although there could have been some legal trouble, the influence from the soul duo gave the world a soft rock romp and a hair metal banger out of the same lick.
