Van Halen star on the video that got banned in Australia and the bust-up over Michael Jackson
Rock legend Eddie Van Halen’s brother has told how their band got cancelled in Australia – and why the famous Beat It collaboration with Michael Jackson backfired badly.
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Edward Van Halen was arguably the most famous rock guitarist ever – and his death in 2020 was mourned across the world. Now his drummer sibling ALEX VAN HALEN is telling their story in new book, Brothers.
In this edited extract, he reveals how the band was banned Down Under – and how Eddie’s legendary collaboration with Michael Jackson caused friction with flamboyant Halen frontman Dave Lee Roth.
BY the end of ’81, we’d basically been on the road or in the studio for four straight years. We were spent after the Fair Warning tour; none of us wanted to do another record right away. We wanted to catch our breath. And Ed was a newlywed! So to slow everything down without completely disappearing, we decided we’d start ’82 by releasing a single instead of a new album.
The previous summer, MTV had launched. The very first video they aired was Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles.
Prescient! Right out of the gate they’re announcing: Here is the beginning of the end of music for its own sake. The video has arrived and nothing will ever be the same. Those Buggles had it exactly right: “In my mind and in my car / We can’t rewind we’ve gone too far / Pictures came and broke your heart / Put the blame on VCR.”
I do! VCRs and MTV robbed people of the freedom to experience music and invent their own mental images and associations.
Naturally, Dave wanted to create “the most lavish home movie ever made” and get it on the air. And that was early on, so I’m sure we all felt like videos were a novelty, something different we could try that might be fun. We didn’t understand what was coming.
We decided we’d do a cover since the video was really the point. Dave wanted Dancing in the Street. Ed wanted to do Pretty Woman. Dave was very shrewd about things like this – he probably caved to Ed because he knew that way Ed wouldn’t back out of doing the video altogether. (Take a look at Ed’s face in our first video and you’ll have a pretty good sense of how happy he was about the whole event!)
The concept was simple: damsel in distress; Van Halen to the rescue. Only, because it was us, everything had to be twisted. The damsel was a guy in a dress (with great legs, by the way). The distress was that she’d been captured and tied to some poles and we were four different archetypal heroes showing up to save her: Mikey was a samurai; I was a shirtless Tarzan type in a loincloth – and a pair of aviator sunglasses! HA! Ed was a cowboy, and Dave was Napoleon with more makeup on his face than the guy in the wig.
We released our video in early ’82. Within weeks, it was banned.
First in Japan, and then in Australia. It offended their delicate sensibilities; we weren’t welcome on the airwaves. Bad news, right?
Not for us. The whole thing generated a ton of press, and suddenly we’re not just the guys who play loud music, have drunken food fights, and hate brown M&M’s, we’re victims of censorship! We’re champions of free speech! I love America.
Our version of Pretty Woman started climbing the charts.
Good news, right? Not for us. Because now that we’ve got a hit, Warner Bros. wants to profit from it. And for that to happen, they need a record to sell – right away, before the song is off the radio.
They insisted that we rush-record one immediately to chase the single. “We’re going wait a minute, we just did that to keep us out there, so people knew we were still alive,” Ed told Jas Obrecht in an ’82 interview, “but they just kept pressuring, ‘We need that album, we need that album,’ so we jumped right back in, without any rest, without any time to recuperate from the tour, and started recording.” Instead of pausing the annual cycle of recording and touring, we’d managed to expedite it.
How do you make a record with no time and no songs? You do a bunch of cover tunes. Now, you remember how sick we were of playing covers back in the clubs. So nobody was happy with the way our fifth album came about. “A lot of stuff on Diver Down we just threw together,” our producer Ted Templeman admitted. “It’s no surprise that we ended up doing five covers. As their producer, that frustrated me … we just didn’t have enough time to work on the record.”
The other drag on us was that Dave had become increasingly negative about (a.k.a. jealous of) Ed’s status within the music world, and he expressed it by discouraging Ed’s ideas and telling him “Enough with the solos … F**k the guitar hero shit, you know, we’re a band,” whenever he had the chance.
Luckily Ted had more appreciation than Dave did for the epic value of Ed’s guitar solos on our records.
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MIGHT AS WELL BEAT IT
I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, maybe somebody else in the band will get egoed out or something. But I’d love Van Halen to be forever … I’m getting hit up left and right now: “Will you play on my record, will you do this, will you do that?” And I go,
“No, Van Halen is my family. I’m not gonna wash your dishes. I’ll wash dishes for Van Halen alone.”— Edward Van Halen, in Guitar Player, 1980
So back in 1980, Ed got the concept: when you’re in a band, all of your efforts should go toward it. It’s never going to work if you dissipate your energy going in a dozen
different directions. For a band to succeed, everyone in it has to be focused on propelling that entity forward, as a shared mission.
That’s how we got to where we were.
But then Ed got a call from Quincy Jones in ’82 asking him to play on Michael Jackson’s record, and suddenly all of that went out the window. He asked me if I thought he should do it, and I said, “No! Use your head: they want you so they can broaden Jackson’s appeal. If you want to broaden our appeal, Jackson should be on our record! It’s not in Van Halen’s interest for you to be playing with other acts. Why would you burn up what creativity you have on someone else when we’re only given so much?”
It’s not like we’d never been through any of this in the past.
When we were making our second record, our producer Ted was simultaneously producing Nicolette Larson’s, and he asked Ed to play guitar on some of the tracks. Dave wouldn’t have it. “I got right between them, I said, ‘No way! You’re not going to run off with bits and pieces of the scenery before the play starts,’ ” Dave declared. “Ed wanted to play on it. I said, ‘Great. But you got to put a question mark on where your name goes. Got to keep it all in one camp.’ ”
Ed understood that back then and he acceded. You can hear him unmistakably on some of the tracks on Nicolette, but his name is nowhere to be found on the record.
An ensemble has to be all for one and one for all – or it’ll fall apart. The Michael Jackson thing was no different. “Whether you like it or not, you’re a valuable commodity, Ed,” I told him. “You’re being traded by other people, and you’re not getting anything out of it. And neither is the band.”
“Okay,” Ed says. “I get it. You’re right.”
I go away for the weekend, and when I get back, I find out he did it anyway!
I was furious! We had a huge fight … and then smaller versions of the same fight for years afterwards because the consequences of the whole thing were so far- reaching. I couldn’t understand what he was thinking. Dad taught us: everything you do in this life, you should do with laser focus. A light shining all over the place is just a blur. But focus it down to a laser beam and it can cut through a door.
Why would you diffuse your energy?!? Inspiration is finite.
“I was only in the studio for an hour,” Ed tells me. “I didn’t even get paid; it’s no big deal. And who’s even heard of this kid anyway?”
“You are in the fucking music business, Ed! And you’re asking who’s going to hear it?!”
Beat It went number one all over the world. Ed’s cameo on the Thriller album became one of the most famous solos in rock … and it wasn’t on a Van Halen record. It wasn’t just a solo, either: Ed had actually rearranged the whole track. (“I listened to the song, and I immediately go, ‘Can I change some parts?’ I turned to the engineer and I go, ‘Okay, from the breakdown, chop in this part, go to this piece, pre- chorus, to the chorus, out.’ Took him maybe ten minutes to put it together. And I proceeded to improvise two solos over it,” Ed admitted on television.) Ed’s musical contribution to Beat It was pretty substantial.
He didn’t even warn Dave it was coming. Beat It dropped in early ’83, just after we got back from the South American leg of the Diver Down: Hide Your Sheep tour. (Tagline: “Where men are men and sheep are scared!”) When Dave heard it on the radio, his first thought was that someone was knocking off my brother.
I think when he realised it was really Ed, he felt betrayed. And honestly, the way Ed went about it, so did I.
Look, Ed’s my brother, and I’m always going to take his side.
But this gave Dave a leg to stand on when he wanted to do things without the rest of the band. It amped up the game of tit for tat between my brother and Dave – it’s not like it started with the Michael Jackson thing. It was ongoing and intensifying: Dave was mad at Ed for upstaging him in the press with his romance with TV star Valerie Bertinelli.
Ed was mad at Dave for blowing off his wedding party.
Dave was mad at Ed for being a musical prodigy — for getting attention as an individual, a virtuoso, separate from Van Halen.
Ed was mad at Dave for putting up a fight about almost every instrumental track on our records.
And on and on, about matters large and small, creative and technical, sonic and visual, intellectual and moronic.
This is an edited extract from Brothers by Alex Van Halen. It will be published in Australia by HarperCollins on October 30 and is available to pre-order now.
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