eddie van halen
18:42 Thursday, 28 December 2023
The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers TV series originally ran between 1993 and 1995, and featured a shreddin' theme song written and performed almost entirely without guitar by Ron Wasserman. Though if you asked anyone at the time, including the legendary Eddie Van Halen, they would've told you it was some seriously incredible guitar work throughout
In an interview with the Monsters, Madness And Magic podcast, Wasserman said the theme was almost entirely a guitar-sounding patch on the keyboard save for some actual lead guitar later on. Which leads us to the biggest compliment Wasserman ever got about the fake guitar, which was when Eddie himself asked him how to play the riffs that weren't actually on guitar.
"I had a band called Fisher with my ex-wife, and Eddie Van Halen's wife, Valerie Bertinelli, was a big fan of the band. So she put one of the songs in a movie she was doing, and she said, 'Come on up to the house.'"
"We came up to the house, the estate, the compound. I was talking to Eddie for a bit, and he handed me a guitar and said, 'I have to learn that damn riff for [his son Wolfgang Van Halen]. Show me how you played it.' And I went over to the grand piano and said, 'Don't kill me.' And he said, 'All right.' [Laughs] 'Good job!' So I fooled the master."
Check out the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers theme songs below, both in full and in its edited TV form. As for the composition of the song, Wasserman said he banged it out front to back in roughly two hours. "From 'We need a theme' to completion, [it] took two and a half hours. I mean, it was a great night. I just banged the thing out. Then, when they said, 'Fox loves it,' I asked, 'Who are we gonna get to sing it? It's the first thing I ever sang like that.' And they said, 'No, it's you.' And that took off a whole new career for me of screaming incorrectly into a microphone."
