Eddie Van Halen talks about alcohol and his guitar solo at “Beat It”

“I think it’s funny the way people talk about that,” he says. “It was 20 minutes of my life. I didn’t want anything for doing that…I literally thought to myself, ‘Who is possibly going to know if I play on this kid’s record?’ So I went to the studio and listened to the song twice, and I didn’t like the section they wanted me to solo over. They wanted me to solo over the breakdown. I asked [Thriller producer] Quincy Jones to edit the chords underneath the solo. Then I could play the solo in the key of E, but it was the chords underneath that made the solo interesting. So I guess I did rearrange it.”

“I was an alcoholic, and I needed alcohol to function,” he says now. For years, he awoke every morning with dry heaves. “I started drinking and smoking when I was 12. I got drunk before I’d show up to high school. My ninth grade science teacher, he could smell the alcohol, and he told me, ‘Don’t drink anything you can’t see through.’ And I was like, ‘So, vodka?’ And he said yeah. Which was great, because that was my drink…I’m not blaming my father at all, but he was an alcoholic, too. So in our household, it was normal. But it never affected his work, although I guess it didn’t affect my work, either. Around 2004, I suppose I became a very angry drunk. But [the stuff in Hagar’s book] was definitely embellished. That’s him painting a picture of something that never happened.”

Source: Billboard