Steve Stevens reminisced about recording “Dirty Diana” with Michael Jackson, highlighting how he was given full creative freedom during the process. He mentioned that Jackson responded to his guitar solo with the same praise he had previously given to Eddie Van Halen for his work on “Beat It.”
Despite occasionally joking that the five decades filled with hard work and dedication in his career feel as trivial as pulling the trigger on a toy ray gun, Steve Stevens is an exceptionally talented guitarist with an impressive resume.
In addition to the iconic ray gun and Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell,” it’s interesting to note that Michael Jackson and the legendary producer Quincy Jones reached out to Stevens to create a “spiritual successor” to one of the best-selling songs in history, “Beat It.”
The result was “Dirty Diana,” another smash hit of historical proportions, released in 1988 as the fifth single taken from the “Bad” LP. Reflecting on the experience in a new interview with Guitar World, Stevens said:
“I had never done a session outside of Billy Idol. With Billy, it was always myself, Billy, a producer, and an engineer. It was a very small group of people. When I flew to LA to do the Michael Jackson thing, I was thinking, ‘There’s going to be this huge entourage and all this crazy shit.”
When he arrived at his destination, Stevens realized that the scene was nothing like what he imagined:
“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. And 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 recalled Michael Jackson’s reaction to his solo and the guitarist offered:
“One of the funny things was after I had done the solo, I came into the studio, and Michael says to me, ‘Hey, I really like the high notes.’ I go, ‘Okay, cool.’”
An interesting thing happened as he subsequently met Eddie Van Halen, who recorded the famous solo on “Beat It”. Stevens went on:
“And then, when I met Eddie [Van Halen], I said, ‘Oh, I just worked with Michael. I did the follow-up album for ‘Thriller’.’ He goes, ‘Hey, man, did he say he liked the high notes?’”
