Joe Satriani recently talked about accepting Sammy Hagar’s offer to join The Best Of All Worlds tour in 2024. He revealed his one key condition during an interview on The Weekly Show With David J. Maloney.
Joe Satriani said Sammy Hagar once suggested doing a retrospective tour during tensions within Van Halen‘s secret reunion, run by Alex Van Halen. The idea was to perform songs from Hagar’s career—including Montrose, his solo work, Chickenfoot, and different eras of Van Halen, even songs from David Lee Roth’s time in the band—rather than making it strictly a tribute to Eddie Van Halen.
“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?’” Satriani said.
Joe Satriani liked the proposal because he already had a strong relationship with Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony, describing them as great people to play and spend time with. He was also drawn to the idea of creating a unique sound as a band—similar to what they had with Chickenfoot—rather than copying anyone else.
Satriani made it clear that he doesn’t play like Eddie Van Halen, but Hagar reassured him that imitation wasn’t the goal, saying they would leave that to imitators on social media.
“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,” he continued. “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.’”
Joe Satriani said one challenge of the proposed retrospective tour was adapting his guitar equipment to cover songs from very different eras. Music from bands like Montrose required a very different guitar sound compared to later Van Halen tracks such as “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love” and “Poundcake.”
Because constantly changing gear and tones during the show would be complicated and expensive, the band ultimately decided it would be better to settle on one consistent guitar sound instead of trying to recreate every era exactly.
“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.’”
