“Eddie Van Halen handed me a guitar and said, ‘I had to learn that damn riff for Wolfie. Show me how you played it!’” Power Rangers composer Ron Wasserman discusses how he “fooled the master” in his performance of the iconic theme

Theme tune composer and musician Ron Wasserman has recalled the time he “fooled” Eddie Van Halen, after the electric guitar icon asked him for pointers on how to play his Power Rangers theme.

Wasserman was recently interviewed on YouTube channel Monsters, Madness and Magic about a career spent penning themes for ’90s kids classics like the X-Men series, when host Justin Young asked about the specifics of his most famous theme.

“Power Rangers, from ‘we need a theme’ to completion took two and a half hours,” says Wasserman. 

“It was just  a great night: I just bang the thing out. Then when they said, ‘Fox loves it!’ I asked, ‘Who are we going to get to sing it?’ It was the first thing I ever sang on like that and they said, ‘No, it's you!’ And that took off a whole new career for me of doing of screaming incorrectly into a microphone.”

In the same interview [credit to Killer Guitar Rigs for the spot], Wasserman then corrects a common misconception about the guitars on the track – revealing that it’s mostly done on keys. What’s more, he says, if he had you tricked, well, you were in good company… 

“All that stuff you heard, except for some of the lead guitar later on, all of it’s done on a keyboard,” says Wasserman. 

“It fooled everybody. My highest compliment on that is [that] I had a band called Fisher with my ex-wife. And Eddie Van Halen, his wife Valerie Bertinelli was a big fan of the band, so she put one of the songs in a movie she was doing. She said, ‘Come on up to the house.’ 

“So we came up to the house – the estate, the compound! I was talking to Eddie for a bit and he handed me a guitar and he said, ‘I had to learn that damn riff for Wolfie. Show me how you played it!’ 

“And I went over to the grand piano and said, ‘Don't kill me!’ And he said, ‘Alright, good job…’ So I fooled the master. I can't imagine how it fooled him but it fooled him, so I'm fine with it.”

For another excellent impersonation – this time of EVH himself – check out the recent clip of Norman’s Rare Guitars’ demo whiz Michael Lemmo playing the #69 Peavey Wolfgang that was gifted to Jason Becker by Eddie Van Halen.