The Eddie Van Halen Compliment That Michael Jackson Recycled

Michael Jackson once paid Steve Stevens a huge compliment. The guitarist only discovered later it was the same one Jackson had previously given Eddie Van Halen.

Stevens had never worked with anyone but Billy Idol when he got the call from producer Quincy Jones to work on Jackson’s Bad album, which arrived five years after 1982’s Thriller. Stevens admits to being apprehensive about the gig, but he soon discovered there was nothing to worry about.

“With Billy it was always myself, Billy, a producer and an engineer. It was a very small group of people,” Stevens tells Guitar World. “When I flew to L.A. to do the Michael Jackson thing, I was thinking, ‘There’s going to be this huge entourage and all this crazy shit.’”

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That turned out not to be the case: “I opened the studio door, and it was exactly like doing an Idol session – it was Michael, Quincy, and the engineer. So no big egos, no entourage, none of that stuff.”

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What Michael Jackson Told Steve Stevens at ‘Dirty Diana’ Session

Stevens soon began to enjoy the experience. “What was cool is we got what they had in mind, the melody and the rhythm stuff – and then Quincy said, ‘You go in there and do what you want,’” he remembered.

The result was a solo that helped “Dirty Diana” become a No. 1 hit in the U.S. and other locations, emulating the success of Van Halen’s contribution to “Beat It.”

“After I had done the solo … Michael says to me, ‘Hey, I really like the high notes,’” Stevens recalled. “I go, ‘Okay, cool.’ And then when I met Eddie, I said, ‘I just worked with Michael.’ He goes, ‘Hey, man, did he say he liked the high notes?’”