Sammy Hagar recently has waxed lyrical about Joe Satriani’s ability to step into Eddie Van Halen’s sizable shoes on the recent Best of All Worlds tour. But he now admits that the guitarist was “not a perfect match” for the gig.
For what was one of 2024’s most talked-about tours, Hagar put together an all-star Van Halen tribute band to celebrate Eddie’s legacy over both the Hagar and David Lee Roth eras. Satch has impressed while playing the role of Eddie, with former Van Halen bass player Michael Anthony also brought back into the fold alongside Jason Bonham.
Satriani took his role extremely seriously, bestowing his chosen fleet of guitars with one key mod to help him master Eddie’s parts and working with 3rd Power Amps on a custom tube amp based on his favorite era of Eddie Van Halen’s tone. For the tone-chasing masses, the resulting amp is now available to buy in a variety of formats, including as a plugin.
But, while saying “Joe’s a serious musician,” Hagar adds that there were elements that, on paper, didn’t make Satriani the best player to handle the role.
“He so good and he’s so focused,” Hagar tells Rolling Stone. “Joe’s a very serious musician, and he really brought it. Every night, I’m sitting there watching him do his long solos and stuff in a song like ‘5150,’ and I’m watching the fans and they’re checking him out, man. Their jaws are dropping, like, ‘Holy shit, he’s doing it.’
“Eddie and Joe don’t have the same style at all. A lot of people think, ‘Oh, yeah, he was a perfect match.’ No, he wasn’t a perfect match. There are a lot of guys that play much more like Eddie than Joe.
“A 12-year-old kid that can probably play ‘Eruption’ and those songs. There’s plenty of them, I’ve seen them. They’re just mimicking the song. I knew Joe could adapt. He knew what Eddie was doing, and so Joe does what Eddie was doing. He’s playing it in a musical sense, and feeling it, and knowing what it is.”
Interestingly, Satriani, who is a lifelong Van Halen fanatic, says he’d never learned to play his songs before the tour having been worried that his own music would be infiltrated with Eddie-isms. Instead, he focused on forging his own style rather than simply mirroring his hero. That, Hagar says, makes Satch’s playing of Eddie’s parts all the more fascinating.
“He brought his own thing to the music, but he honored the most important parts, the essence of the songs, and the essence of the solos,” Hagar believes. “He didn’t play note for note. Some things were almost note for note because a solo like Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love is iconic. You can’t stray from that. Other than that, when Eddie jammed, Joe knew he was jamming and [so] Joe jammed.”
Hagar has expressed his desire to keep the Best of All Worlds extravaganza going, but in the meantime Satriani has announced a new band with Steve Vai. The pair’s new venture will see them taking their newly devised Surfing With the Hydra tour on the road next summer.
It will be the first time in their nearly 50-year musical careers that the two electric guitar virtuosos have performed as band members, with new music mooted.
The tour follows Steve Vai also doing his best legendary guitarist fill-in as part of Beat, performing King Crimson’s ‘80s material with Adrian Belew. Reflecting on the new guitar partnership, in lieu of Robert Fripp, Belew opened up to GP about his early struggles adapting to Fripp’s playing style when he first joined the band, with Steve Vai facing similar challenges ahead of their live shows together.
