In 1982, the phone rang at Eddie Van Halen’s house. He was the biggest rock guitarist on the planet at the time, and the voice on the other end said it belonged to Quincy Jones, who was producing an album for Michael Jackson and wanted him to play a guitar solo on it.
Van Halen was completely certain one of his friends was winding him up. So he swore down the phone and hung up. Then he did it again. And again. By his own count, he hung up on Quincy Jones four times.
His memory of that call is one of the great rock-and-roll anecdotes. He told CNN in 2012 that he answered with something along the lines of What do you want, and the voice said, “is this Eddie?” and he said Yeah, what the hell do you want. Then came “this is Quincy.” And Eddie thought to himself that he did not know anybody named Quincy. Only when the man said “Quincy Jones, man” did the penny finally drop.
Eddie Van Halen CNN Interview
Even then, he was not fully convinced. He told Jones he would come down to the studio the next day and see for himself. He arrived, and there were Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson, and the engineers. It was real.
Now here is where it gets better. Van Halen had a strict rule with his band about never taking outside session work. He broke it. And he asked for no money at all. Not a fee, not a credit, nothing. His reasoning was simply that he wanted to. In his own words, he said he did it as a favor; according to the rest of the band, their manager, and everybody else, he was a complete fool, but he was not used because he knew exactly what he was doing.
Michael Jackson – Beat It (Official 4K Video)
Michael Jackson was not even in the room for most of it. He had stepped across the hall to record some voice work for a children’s project. So Van Halen asked Jones what he wanted him to play, and Jones gave the most dangerous answer you can give a genius. “Whatever you want to do.”
Van Halen warned him to be careful saying that. Then he listened to the track once and told the engineer he wanted to rearrange the entire song. The section he had been asked to solo over had no chord changes underneath it, which he felt gave him nothing to work with, so he had them chop the arrangement apart and rebuild the middle. It took about ten minutes. Then he recorded two takes of the solo.
The whole thing took roughly 20 minutes of his life.
When Jackson walked back in, Van Halen was nervous enough that he warned him first about what he had done to the song. Jackson listened. Then he turned to him and thanked him for having the passion not just to come in and blaze a solo, but actually to care about the song and make it better.
“Beat It” won Record of the Year. It helped push Thriller past every album ever made. Van Halen was uncredited on the record, and every guitarist on earth worked out who it was within about four seconds.