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Eddie Van Halen

Scott_M

By Scott_M,
in GF - General Forum

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Mook Grand Master

Mook

Posted
Posted

I'm not a fan but not many people come along & have their own unique sound that changes the instrument so respect to him for that. 

 

65 is no age either although I'm guessing he had a decent kick at the ball while he was here.

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cochyn Mentor

cochyn

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Posted

The single reason I bought a guitar was so I could play 'Eruption' and pull 'chicks'. I failed at both, but nevertheless. EVH was a formative influence on me and my fledgling guitar 'style'. Who am I kidding, he was a genius who bought great musicality to his out there style, and I was an enthusiastic noodler. RIP, man.

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the chimp Veteran

the chimp

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Posted
3 hours ago, niallers said:

Didn't he perform the guitar solo for whacko Jackos Beat It? Fucking brilliant riff 

How Eddie Van Halen transformed Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’

By HILLEL ITALIE
 
 
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NEW YORK (AP) — Before Eddie Van Halen agreed to add a guitar break to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” one of the most famous cameos in rock history, he had to be sure the phone call from producer Quincy Jones wasn’t a practical joke.

“I went off on him. I went, ‘What do you want, you f-ing so-and-so!,’” Van Halen told CNN in 2012, 30 years after he worked on the song. “And he goes, ‘Is this Eddie?’ I said, ‘Yeah, what the hell do you want?’ ‘This is Quincy.’ I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t know anyone named Quincy.’ He goes, ‘Quincy Jones, man.’ I went, ‘Ohhh, sorry!’”

Van Halen, who died Tuesday at age 65, needed less than an hour in the studio and 20 scorching seconds on record to join white heavy metal to Black pop at a time when they seemed in entirely different worlds, when the young MTV channel rarely aired videos by Black artists. “Beat It” became one of the signature tracks on Jackson’s mega-selling “Thriller” album, won Grammys in 1984 for record of the year and male rock vocal performance and helped open up MTV’s programming.

Van Halen himself would admit he was initially skeptical of contributing to Jackson’s album, wondering how much he had in common with a singer he remembered for chanting “A-B-C, easy as 1-2-3.” But Jackson had written “Beat It” as a rock song, anchored by a hard and funky ruff by guitarist Steve Lukather. When Van Halen arrived at the studio in Los Angeles, Jones told him he could improvise. Van Halen listened to “Beat It,” asked if he could rearrange the song and added a pair of solos during which, engineers would long swear, a speaker caught on fire.

As he was finishing, Jackson walked in.

“I didn’t know how he would react to what I was doing. So I warned him before he listened. I said, ‘Look, I changed the middle section of your song,’” Van Halen told CNN. “Now in my mind, he’s either going to have his bodyguards kick me out for butchering his song, or he’s going to like it. And so he gave it a listen, and he turned to me and went, ‘Wow, thank you so much for having the passion to not just come in and blaze a solo, but to actually care about the song, and make it better.’”

Van Halen worked for free, was not credited on the album and didn’t appear in the video. But his touch was undisguisable. After the record’s release, Van Halen would remember shopping in a Tower Records while “Beat It” was playing on the sound system.

“The solo comes on, and I hear these kids in front of me going, ‘Listen to this guy trying to sound like Eddie Van Halen,’” he said. “I tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘That IS me!’ That was hilarious.”

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