Eddie Van Halen might be renowned for his exciting and innovative guitar style, but there was a lot more to him than just rock music.
It’s true that when Eddie Van Halen initially burst onto the music scene lovers of rock music and guitar enthusiasts everywhere were left with their jaws well and truly on the floor as they tried to come to terms with the majesty that was his exciting style of playing. Van Halen presented a new form of rock music that was unlike anything that people were previously used to, but this wasn’t a sound they stuck beside wholeheartedly.
As the band carried on, so too did the kind of music they were knocking out. For example, even though Van Halen had plenty of success with frontman David Lee Roth – and fans were well into the records they put out with him – when Sammy Hagar stepped in, he flat-out refused to sing any of Lee Roth’s numbers. Instead, they cracked on with fresh material, and Hagar pushed the band forward, shaping a new sound that ended up delivering some of Van Halen’s biggest albums.
“What I brought to Van Halen was just who and what I am,” he said when talking about joining the band, “It was Sammy Hagar, who and what I was at that moment, but very inspired by Eddie Van Halen’s musicianship… He inspired me to write songs… Goosebump songs.”
Eddie Van Halen was skilled and equipped enough that he was willing to start writing new music and put something exciting together. His skill in this regard didn’t just stop with his work with the band, either, as he went on to help write one of the most famous pop songs in the entire world. When Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson were working on the record Thriller, they were halfway finished with the song ‘Beat It’, but felt as though they were missing something. In a bid to discover what that missing something was, Jones decided to call Eddie.
“It was about 20 minutes out of my life, Quincy had called me up and asked me if I wanted to do it,” he recalled, “Honest to God truth, the band’s policy was, you know, ‘We don’t do things outside of the band’, at the time. But everybody was out of town so I had no one to ask. I swear to God, I figured, ‘Who’s gunna know if I play on this black kids record?’”
When he started working on the track, it became clear to Eddie what was missing. They didn’t just need a solo and a snazzy guitar riff, but the entire arrangement of the song was wrong. Eddie made the necessary changes; it was just down to Michael Jackson to approve them.
“The funniest thing of all was I actually rearranged the song, the section they wanted me to solo over, there was no chord change underneath it, so I had to rearrange the song,” Eddie explained, “Michael came in and I said ‘I hope you don’t mind I changed your song’, and he listens and he goes, ‘No, I really like that high fast stuff you do’.”
