Joe Satriani sat down with Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk for a new interview and discussed his part in the Best Of All Worlds tour.
During the chat, Satriani admitted to watching YouTube videos of other guitarists playing Eddie Van Halen’s parts while preparing for the tour. He explained why he didn’t watch Eddie’s own performances instead:
“Well, here’s the interesting point about some of the simplest pieces that Eddie would do, is he’d do the album version, and from the stories that I’ve heard from the band members there was that Eddie and Alex [Van Halen] would work on these things, let’s say, one song for two or three weeks, and then the other guys would come in to add to the track. And so the recordings would be like this culmination of the brothers jamming.”
However, things took a turn when they got on the road — Eddie started playing the parts differently in every show. As a result, Satriani decided he would watch other guitarists play his parts:
“And then once they took it out on the road, I couldn’t find one live clip of Eddie playing the same song that was remotely similar. He was just so creative, every show he would just do it a little different. And so I thought, ‘Okay, I should just embrace every different version. And I really do wanna see how other guitar players work around the fact that their hands are not Eddie’s hands.'”
Satriani Is ‘A Scholar’
The band is focusing on playing David Lee Roth-era songs and tracks from Sammy Hagar’s band Chickenfoot. In another interview, Hagar talked about Satriani’s approach to performing material originally written and recorded by Eddie Van Halen. He said:
“Oh, I gotta tell you, Joe is a scholar. I can’t tell you how good of a musician Joe Satriani is. He’s as good as any musician on the planet. He’s got his own style. It’s a little different than Eddie’s. Eddie was a genius musician too, but he had a different style and he had his thing. Joe’s got his thing. Joe went in the closet.”
He then shared how Satriani reacted to Hagar’s offer of playing EVH songs:
“Well, not in the closet — he went into the woodshed, and since the announcement [of the tour on ‘The Howard Stern Show’ last November]… I threw a couple songs at him and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you just learn this song or that song?’ And then Stern laid songs on us, that we’re going, ‘Well, shoot, we didn’t think about those. Joe, do you know that one?’ He goes, ‘Oh, I’ll try it.’ He’s that good. So now he’s dialed them in.”
The tour started on July 13 at the iTHINK Financial Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach, Florida. For The Best Of All Worlds tour, Hagar is joined by Michael Anthony, Jason Bonham, Satriani, and multi-instrumentalist Rai Thistlethwayte.
