“I didn’t know how he would react to what I was doing. 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. When Van Halen arrived at the studio in Los Angeles, Jones told him he could improvise. 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. “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, 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.
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