Best of 2019: No, it’s not an April Fool: David Lee Roth really did join Dutch DJ Armin Van Buuren on stage at the Ultra Music Festival this weekend to perform a remix of Van Halen’s Jump, the band’s synth-powered 1983 smash.
In an interview with Rolling Stone conducted ahead of the unlikely trance-rock crossover, Van Buuren revealed that the remix came about when he was given the stems from the original track by a friend.
“I didn’t change the song too much,” he says. “We recreated the Oberheim synth that was in the original. I just completely replayed it with respect to the original obviously. And the original track is not in time, so I had to spend a lot of time putting all of the original stems onto a click.”
Van Buuren sent the completed remix to Van Halen’s management, and that’s when dance music fan David Lee Roth got involved.
The rest, as they say, is history, but this may not be the last Roth track to get an EDM update. “They’re all eminently remixable,” he says, “but there are so many different genres of ‘the groove’. And whether it’s dubstep, chill, trance and on and on, and yeah, judge, I admit it. I knows the difference.”
Glad we’ve got that cleared up.
