Guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani recently opened up about being approached by Alex Van Halen and David Lee Roth to participate in an all-star Van Halen tribute project. Despite his reverence for the late Eddie Van Halen, the guitarist admitted he initially tried to pass the opportunity to someone else.
During a new interview on “The Weekly Show With David J. Maloney,” Satriani detailed the early stages of the proposed tribute band and his hesitations regarding replicating the iconic guitar parts.
“Well, it started, really, when Dave and Alex had called, and they wanted to put together a band, and they were insisting that I was the guy to do it. And I kept saying, ‘I’m not the guy. Call Nuno [Bettencourt]. He can really do it.’ And there’s thousands of kids around the world who’ve dedicated their life to sounding exactly like Ed. And I said, ‘I’ve always tried not to sound like Ed.’ I’m a huge fan, but I’ve tried to respect that. But they were insistent. And we rehearsed. We came really close to doing our first show, but it all kind of started to fall apart, and I’m not really sure what happened with that. And I was busy as well, so I was just waiting to hear what was happening month by month,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
Following the collapse of that specific tribute project, Satriani eventually found a different way to celebrate the music. He joined former Van Halen frontman Sammy Hagar and bassist Michael Anthony as part of The Circle for the 2024 “The Best Of All Worlds” tour.
Explaining how this alternative retrospective tour came together, the guitarist stated:
“When it seemed like what was going on in the [Van Halen] family and the bandmembers was getting really out of hand, Sam had called and he surprised me by saying, ‘Look, I know you’ve been going through this thing with those guys, and it’s insane and everything. How about if we did a retrospective tour — not an Eddie Van Halen tribute thing — but where we get to do Montrose, Hagar, Chickenfoot, my stuff and his era, and even some David Lee Roth era of Van Halen?’ And I liked that idea, because I know Sam and Mike very well — they’re just super-great people and they’re always fun to hang out with and play with — and then I liked the idea that we would create our own sound as a band. And we kind of had it with Chickenfoot, so it felt like we weren’t trying to copy anybody else. But still, just technically, I had to remind Sam, I said, ‘Sam, I’m gonna tell you what I told Alex, which is I don’t really play like Eddie,’ but he kind of knew it and we played for so long together. He said, ‘That’s not what it’s about. We’re not gonna do that. Let the imitators do that. Leave that for social media.’ And so I thought, ‘Cool. Okay.'”
While Sammy Hagar gave him the freedom to maintain his own style, Joe Satriani still faced the massive logistical challenge of dialing in a cohesive guitar tone that could cover decades of drastically different musical eras.
“However, it was difficult to make the equipment transition, and that that required not only a lot of money, but just a lot of changing of direction, of equipment to try to figure out, how do you play stuff within one show that is so old, like the Montrose stuff, and then slowly transition… Even from ‘Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love‘ to ‘Poundcake‘, the sound of the guitar is just so different. So we had long talks about that, like, literally the whole band’s gonna suddenly change their sound? And we thought, ‘No, we shouldn’t do that. We should just find a sound.'”
To solve the tonal puzzle, he collaborated with the amp builders at 3rd Power to create a specialized rig inspired by a very specific era of Van Halen‘s live history.
“Working with the guys from 3rd Power, we figured out, Dylana [Scott], she’s just an amazing engineer, and she figured out with this amp, this Dragon amp, that she could get this sound that I was aiming for, which was basically kind of like Live Without A Net [from] Van Halen, which was a very interesting transition point for Ed where he was go leaving the Marshalls and heading towards using the Soldano and he was going into the stereo chorus phase, but it still sounded like it worked for the David Lee Roth stuff, which was very different sounding. I mean, you could go up there and play the gig with any sound, but to get in this right frame of mind where you are inspiring yourself, you really do have to hear the right sound, to some degree. That has been an ongoing thing. And we’re still working on it.”
