JOE SATRIANI Prepared For 'Best Of All Worlds' Tour By Watching Videos Of Other Guitarists Playing EDDIE VAN HALEN's Parts

During an appearance on Thursday's (July 25) episode of SiriusXM's "Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk", Joe Satriani spoke about his participation in Sammy Hagar's summer 2024 tour, which kicked off on July 13 at the 20,000-capacity iTHINK Financial Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach, Florida.

For "The Best Of All Worlds" tour, Hagar and his bandmates in THE CIRCLE — ex-VAN HALEN bassist Michael Anthony and drummer Jason Bonham — are being joined by Satriani, who has recorded and performed with Hagar and Anthony in the band CHICKENFOOT, and multi-instrumentalist Rai Thistlethwayte.

The 21-song setlist for the tour consists largely of VAN HALEN material, including the opening track "Good Enough", from 1986's "5150" album, as well as two songs from 1991's "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge", "Poundcake" and "Runaround", and a pair of David Lee Roth-era VAN HALEN classics, "Panama" and "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love", as well as a section of "Jump".

The rest of the set includes Satriani's "Satch Boogie", the rousing rock-swing guitar instrumental that put him on the map in 1987 and helped propel his second album, "Surfing With The Alien", to platinum status. and several of Hagar's solo classics, such as "There's Only One Way To Rock", "Eagles Fly", "Heavy Metal" and "I Can't Drive 55".

Asked by "Trunk Nation" host Eddie Trunk how the first few shows on "The Best Of All Worlds" tour have gone, Joe said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Oh, it's a thrill. It is so difficult to explain the complexity of emotions that I have playing this role in the band. First of all, they're just fun shows. They're just completely rock and roll fun shows with an amazing setlist to play with every night. I mean, that's obvious, and the fans are right there with us celebrating all this great music with us. But just me being with my buddies, celebrating Sam's legacy and Mike's legacy — we have a lot of years together, so there's this great feeling of friendship, and I'm just happy to be there to help them celebrate. And I'm a huge Eddie Van Halen fan, as you know, and so I approach this gig with this feeling of a huge responsibility to do it right, to be respectful, but to keep the spirit that Eddie invented alive when I play these songs."

Satriani went on to admit that, while preparing for "The Best Of All Worlds" tour, he watched YouTube videos of other guitarists playing Eddie Van Halen's parts. Asked why he chose to do that rather than focus exclusively on studying videos of Eddie playing the same songs, Joe explained: "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 bandmembers 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. 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.'"

Joe continued: "Eddie held his guitar in a certain place. A lot of guitar players don't hold it like that these days. He would hold his pick in a different way. He would pick in a different way. And there were all these things that were part of his physicality that were quite different. So when somebody does, like you go and you check out a VAN HALEN tribute band, you're looking at a different person with a different body and they have to deal with the fact that they're different, they hold their pick differently, they position the guitar and their body at a different height or something. It all makes a difference. It all adds up to creating that right vibe, the rhythm, the tone. And then then there are the amps. I mean, my god. There's a great picture of Eddie's rig from in the mid-to-late '80s, and it's insane what he put together. He was so gifted in pushing the envelope of how he put his gear together to attain this really unique sound. And I think that there's that — I'm gonna say maybe 50 percent; maybe this is a bold statement, but I think 50 percent of what we hear really came from his hands, because when you really do the deep dive into the amps and you realize, well, he's played all these different amps in the course of a couple of decades, but he never lost that intensity, the snap, just the overall aggressive-yet-beautiful sound that he created. So it was in his hands. And so you can get the amp — the EVH amp, the Soldano, the vintage Marshalls — but you're not gonna be there; you're not gonna be able to really do a great impression of Eddie Van Halen without his hands. He was that special, that unique. And I would think anyone who's done it, and I saw it online, which is basically anyone who's decided, I'm gonna try to play, let's say, the first VAN HALEN record live in front of an audience for a tribute, they realize this right away that it's impossible to copy that element of him. So you learn the songs, you try to learn the fingerings and then you go, 'Now, how am I gonna do it, 'cause these are my hands?' And I think Eddie would have wanted anyone who played any of his music to inject a healthy portion of their own personality and not to try to imitate him. So maybe that's the thing — don't imitate, but pay homage, be respectful. Try to memorize the stuff, but at the same time celebrate it the way it was intended. Don't be like a parrot."

Produced by Live Nation, the 28-date "The Best Of All Worlds" tour will conclude on August 31 in St. Louis, Missouri.

During an appearance on the July 18 episode of "Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk", Hagar stated about Satriani's approach to performing the material originally written and recorded by Eddie Van Halen: "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. 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."

Hagar continued: "What [Joe has] done, for any of you guitar players out there that wanna come and see what Joe's doing, or wanna criticize Joe or wanna praise Joe, whatever you want to do, he has taken the essence of Eddie's guitar solos and parts and he plays the necessary parts to make sure it sounds just like the record, the way it's supposed to. The solo on a song like 'Jump' — I hate to use that one 'cause it's not my song, but we do 'Jump'; we do a piece of 'Jump' on the encore. We do a five-song encore that's got a little bit of 'Jump' in it. And when he plays that solo, he plays it like the record. And then he'll go off in the middle somewhere. He'll do a little tiny thing. He'll do little things that says, 'No, this is Joe Satriani playing Eddie,' but he's doing Eddie right. No one could complain. He's hitting all the right notes that make the essence of what Eddie invented. And he puts his own heart and soul into it, which makes it so much different and so much better, in my opinion, than a guy just mimicking him exactly. And his tone is different. It's kind of like Eddie's, but I don't know — Joe's just so good. I don't know how he's doing this. I really don't know how he's doing this."

Regarding the setlist for the tour, Sammy said: "This setlist is deep, brother. We're playing two hours and 20 minutes. We're only playing like five of my songs, one CHICKENFOOT and one MONTROSE. The rest is VAN HALEN. Get out of here, man. That's a hour and a half, about a buck 40 of VAN HALEN. In VAN HALEN, we didn't play as many songs as we're playing, 'cause Eddie did a big 20-minute solo, Al [Alex Van Halen] did a 20-minute solo, Mike did a 15-, 20-minute solo, and I did 'Eagles Fly' by myself. So, you add that together, we did about 12 songs."

As for how the tour has been going so far, Hagar said: "Honest to God, I haven't felt like this about a show since walking off the stage at some of the greatest VAN HALEN shows in my life. And I'm telling you — I'm not just saying that, I'm not trying to hype nobody, and 90 percent of these shows are sold out, so it's not like that. It's from the bottom of my heart. Mike and I walk off stage so exhausted — 2:20 in Atlanta the other night; we played two hours and 20 minutes — and I just haven't done that. I just haven't had this deep of a setlist. I haven't had this big of a production. I don't know. I've been having fun, but now I've stepped it up and Mike and I, like I said, we look at each other every night walking off stage, and we hug backstage for about 20 minutes. It's just fantastic. The whole band is — they came to the party. Joe came to the party. Jason came to the party. Rai came to the party. The people are happy, we're happy, and I just never felt like this walking off stage since VAN HALEN. I can say that. I can honestly say that."

Hagar and Anthony previously worked with Satriani in the supergroup CHICKENFOOT. They recorded two albums between 2009 and 2011 and toured across America but never performed any VAN HALEN material. More recently, Hagar and Anthony have played some of the VAN HALEN catalog with guitarist Vic Johnson and Bonham in SAMMY HAGAR AND THE CIRCLE.

Hagar mended his relationship with Eddie Van Halen months prior to the legendary VAN HALEN guitarist's October 2020 passing.

Sammy, Eddie, Alex Van Halen and Michael last teamed up in 2004 for a U.S. summer tour. In exchange for taking part in the tour, Anthony reportedly had to agree to take a pay cut and sign away his rights to the band name and logo.

Eddie Van Halen died in October 2020 at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California. The iconic VAN HALEN axeman passed away from complications due to cancer, his son confirmed.