Eddie Van Halen Broke This Van Halen ‘Band Rule’ to Play on Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’

Eddie Van Halen broke a Van Halen "band rule" to play the iconic guitar solo on Michael Jackson's 1982 hit "Beat It."

Jackson enlisted Toto musicians Steve Lukather, Jeff Porcaro, Steve Porcaro and David Paich to play on his Thriller album. While Lukather performed the rhythm guitar parts on much of the album, including "Beat It," producer Quincy Jones wanted someone else to do the solo.

"[Lukather] was happy to play on [the album]," Paich recalled during a recent appearance on the Broken Record podcast. "Then they said they were trying to get Ed Van Halen, which was Luke's friend. Luke's like, 'Right on.'"

When Jones first called Van Halen to discuss the opportunity, he didn't have much success. "This is Quincy Jones," he said, according to Paich. "Yeah, sure," Van Halen replied, "and he hung up on him."

Even after Van Halen was convinced that it really was Jones on the phone, he was still reluctant. "Ed didn't want to do it at first because Van Halen had a no-session band rule," Paich explained. "You can't play on other people's records."

Eventually, of course, Van Halen came around, and the rest is music history. Thriller became the best-selling album of all time, and "Beat It" was a chart-topping 8x platinum-certified hit that sold 11 million copies worldwide.

Although Van Halen wasn't officially credited on "Beat It," he revealed in a 2011 interview with Smithsonian Magazine that it was his favorite collaboration of his career.

"When I got there it took me 15 minutes to rearrange the song, and I played two solos and told them they could pick the one they liked best," he recalled. "Then Michael walked in and said 'Wow! I really like that high fast stuff you do.' It was a lot of fun to do. It's crazy that something could take such a short amount of time and can grow into something beyond anything you could ever imagine."