Eddie Van Halen is no stranger to lending his talents to movie soundtracks, having scored 1984’s coming-of-age comedy-drama The Wild Life at the height of his Van Halen powers. The band also contributed “Humans Being” to 1994’s disaster movie Twister, and in 2006, EVH added his flair to the adult film Sacred Sin.
Perhaps with this lineage in mind, esteemed film composer Tyler Bates (Halloween, Guardians of the Galaxy) says he turned to Eddie Van Halen for a special rendition of the John Wick theme in the guitarist’s later years.
Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t turn the idea into reality.
“At one point, we almost had Eddie Van Halen play on the John Wick theme toward the end of his life,” Bates reveals to ScreenRant. He was chatting to the website about his latest work for Ballerina, an action thriller set in the John Wick universe.
“He came over to my place. It was really sweet of him to come over, and he hung out for a while, but I got the sense he was not in the mindset that he really wanted to do anything,” the composer explains.
“He said he hadn’t played for quite a while. We spoke on the phone a couple of times after he split. I wanted him to touch my guitar, but I didn’t want to say, ‘Will you touch my guitar?’
Bates can't recall if he and Van Halen were discussing 2017's John Wick 2 or its 2019 follow-up, but his comments about EVH’s rustiness corroborate recent remarks by Sammy Hagar. The Red Rocker has said the guitarist was creatively “dried up” by the turn of the millennium, and that he was more interested in the cello than the electric guitar in his final years.
Van Halen’s final, David Lee Roth–fronted album, A Different Kind of Truth, was released in 2012, and it seems EVH minimized his playing when that touring cycle came to an end.
“Anyway, he called me a number of times,” Bates continues. “I just said, ‘Look, Ed, you live 10 minutes from me. If you want to do this, I’ll set up a guitar for you, and if you don’t like what we do, I’ll just destroy it in front of you.’ He really appreciated that.”
Bates' work on John Wick has seen another near-miss collab. Star of the show Keanu Reeves, who plays bass in the band Dogstar outside of his Hollywood acting fame, refused to feature on the score, Bates divulges.
“I asked Keanu, ‘Hey dude. Why don’t you just play bass on the John Wick theme? No one even has to know, but it would be cool for all of us just to connect that way. We would love it,” Bates says.
“He was like, ‘Tyler, come on, man.’ He didn’t want to just take some pony ride on the score only to have it leak out at some point, and he probably knew that he would get all the credit for the score.”
He did at least convince Jerry Cantrell to write a piece for the John Wick 2 soundtrack. "A Job to Do" was penned from the protagonist's perspective and features pensive acoustic guitar parts, the guitarist's perpetually dark and pained vocals, and some signature grunge grit towards the end.
Cantrell also features on the soundtrack to the 1930s blues-honoring film Sinners, alongside Buddy Guy, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, and some extremely hard-to-find 1932 Dobros.
And on other near misses, Alex Van Halen says he and his brother were going to form a band with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell before he died in 2017.
