“You only have so many great solos in you, don’t give one to Michael Jackson!” Eddie Van Halen recorded his Beat It solo in secret – and his brother is still mad about it 42 years later
Alex Van Halen says Eddie’s legendary appearance on the pop smash was a waste of his finite talents – and the perfect excuse for David Lee Roth to leave the band
(Image credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Alex Van Halen has revealed he's still angry over Eddie Van Halen's legendary guest spot on Michael Jackson's BeatIt, which the late electric guitar legend recorded without telling his bandmates.
Talking to UK newspaper TheGuardian to promote his new memoir, Brothers, Alex revealed his brother had tracked his now-iconic solo for the pop hit in secret at a time of great tensions within the band.
As TheGuardian reports, the band were coming apart by 1982, owing to heightened internal creative and personal tensions in the Van Halen camp: vocalist David Lee Roth felt jealous of “Ed’s status as a creative colossus”, while Van Halen himself felt stifled by producer Ted Templeman's discouragement of his solos.
So, when Eddie recorded his Beat It solo without his bandmates knowing, tensions reached breaking point.
“What the fuck are you doing playing on that record?” Alex recalled saying when he found out about Eddie's guest spot (via the Guardian). “Don’t you realize you only have so many great solos in you? Don’t give one to Michael Jackson!’”
The drummer says Roth ultimately used Eddie’s moonlighting as a way out of the band, reportedly eying greater fame in his own right on the silver screen and stage: “He was delusional,” Alex Van Halen retorts. “He’s not an actor.”
In Jackson’s own words, he had wanted to write “the type of song that I would buy if I were to buy a rock song”, and so both Eddie and Steve Lukather were brought onboard. Having recently topped the charts with Toto at the time, Lukather helped flesh out the song’s skeleton – including its masterful riff – before Eddie added the flair-laced icing.
A watershed moment or not, 42 years later, Alex's rage over Eddie's secret fretboard-burning rendezvous is still white hot.
“Why would you lend your talents to Michael Jackson? I just don’t fucking get it,” he also told Rolling Stone during a recent mic-drop-a-minute interview. “And the funny part was that Ed fibbed his way out of it by saying, ‘Oh, who knows that kid anyway?’ You made the mistake! Fess up. Don’t add insult to injury by acting stupid.”
That interview has made plenty of headlines already, with Alex lifting the lid on how an Ozzy-fronted Van Halen album, and a project with Chris Cornell, nearly came to fruition.
The candid conversation also saw him suggest that AI may be used to finish Van Halen demos. Alex says he has reached out to Open AI to analyze “the patterns of how Edward would have played something” to round out unfinished material.
A freelance writer with a penchant for music that gets weird, Phil is a regular contributor to Prog, Guitar World, and Total Guitar magazines and is especially keen on shining a light on unknown artists. Outside of the journalism realm, you can find him writing angular riffs in progressive metal band, Prognosis, in which he slings an 8-string Strandberg Boden Original, churning that low string through a variety of tunings. He's also a published author and is currently penning his debut novel which chucks fantasy, mythology and humanity into a great big melting pot.
