JOE SATRIANI Reflects On Being Asked To Play With ALEX VAN HALEN And DAVID LEE ROTH: 'I Kept Saying, 'I'm Not The Guy. Call NUNO BETTENCOURT''

In a new interview with The Weekly Show With David J. Maloney, Joe Satriani once again reflected on being approached to reproduce Eddie Van Halen's guitar parts as part of an all-star VAN HALEN tribute project with Alex Van Halen and David Lee Roth. Recalling how the proposed pairing came about, Joe said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "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."

Referencing the fact that he eventually took part in the 2024 "The Best Of All Worlds" tour with Sammy Hagar during which Hagar and his bandmates in THE CIRCLE — Satriani and ex-VAN HALEN bassist Michael Anthony — performed largely VAN HALEN material, Joe said: "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.' 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.'"

Satriani continued: "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."

In January 2024, Joe was asked during an appearance on "The Hook Rocks" podcast why he thinks the 2024 "The Best Of All Worlds" tour came together while the proposed VAN HALEN tribute featuring him, Roth and Alex Van Halen failed to materialize more than two years earlier when it was first brought up. Joe said: "That's tough. I didn't know Eddie [Van Halen] and I don't know the family and I don't think I'll ever really understand David Lee Roth. I thought I really understood Alex, and I think I do. I really think I understand his point of view or where he's coming from.

"I tend to think that the real difference here is that Sammy has a real sort of inclusive way of looking at life and he notices when there's conflict that is getting in the way of doing something good and he'll try to fix it," Joe continued. "So as a result, it's just like he says, 'Yeah, we're gonna do 'Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love'. I know it's not my song, but that's cool.' Now you ask David Lee Roth, 'Hey, are you gonna do '5150'?' Of course he's never gonna do it. So there's a big difference there, is that you have one guy who is very flexible because he's thinking about the fans, and then you have another guy who, I don't know why Dave is so inflexible on a couple of subjects — I really don't, because I don't know him. I should ask Steve [Vai] about it; I mean, Steve knows [David well]. I can't say that I really know him.

"I felt that Alex really wanted to do it and his heart was pure in its intention. But I don't know about Dave. I know that Sammy and Mike, their intentions are pure. They really do wanna celebrate the music and they're willing to mend any fence to make it happen on stage. They're the original guys. It's more than just a tour. And you feel that when you're standing next to Sammy and Mike. There's just an immense amount of power and love with the two of them and playing those songs. And people, they want to experience it and they should be able to experience it.

"I would hope at some point that [Alex, Eddie's son Wolfgang Van Halen and David] figure it out. Basically, Wolfgang is the guy to do it — he's the guy to do any tribute there is. The rest of us are just gonna be copying the album as close as we can, but it'll be fodder for the guitar army out there to criticize, like, 'Well, you should have done it like this,' and, 'He could have done it like that,' and, 'She should have done it like this,' because we're not Eddie, and we're not Wolfgang."

Satriani added: "It's taken a while for me to get a really good perspective on it, but I do think that we should all just kind of leave that alone and let them figure it out. It really is up to, I think, Wolfgang and his uncle Alex to figure this out."

Back in December 2023, Satriani spoke to Ultimate Guitar's Justin Beckner about how he planned to play Eddie Van Halen's parts on "The Best Of All Worlds" tour. Asked if there are some VAN HALEN songs that he found most challenging to perform, Joe replied: "The main thing is that for the last five decades I've tried so hard to be myself and to be me and not copy anybody. I've been lucky, since the late '80s, to have a solo career, so I really had a job that forced me to be myself as much as possible. So I made a point not to play like anybody. But it happens eventually when you're having fun, you're at a party and someone says, 'Oh, can you play this song?' and you realize, 'I have no idea how to play that song. I love that song. I've listened to it a million times. I don't know what the guy's doing.' And then you go to learn it and you go, 'Wow, that's really weird. It feels so awkward for me to be like this.' And it's not the parts, 'cause I can hear the chords and I know what everything is when I hear it. It's just the sensibility of timing, vibrato, picking. If you're so deep into your own thing, it's really hard to get out of it and try to properly emulate somebody else's playing. It would almost be like if you gave a guitar to Eddie and you said, 'Okay, Eddie, we want you to play 'Summer Song' note for note.' He'd be, like, 'What? I don't play like that. I don't do that. I just kind of do this, this and this.' Of course we'd love it no matter how he did it — it would be fun — but it wouldn't be exactly the same."

Joe continued: "When I was young and I was in cover bands, I knew what it was like to try to get as close as possible when you were playing — for me, it was [LED] ZEPPELIN and [BLACK] SABBATH and THE [ROLLING] STONES and stuff like that; that's what we played. But eventually, you'd have to go, 'I don't play like that. That's not my vibrato.' If I go to play AC/DC, there's no way I can do Angus's [Young] vibrato. He just has his own vibrato. If you're gonna try to play like Jeff Beck — he's so personal. You can play the notes and remind people of this part he did and that part, but it's not gonna sound quite the same.

"If we heard Eric Clapton trying to play 'Since I've Been Loving You' by LED ZEPPELIN, there's no way it would sound the same. It would be great, but it wouldn't sound the same. So, what I noticed right away, when I realized, 'I really have to figure out these songs,' [I asked myself] what is Eddie — what's he operating on?

"So here are a couple of things I've noticed," Satriani added. "Number one, he plays so on the beat and makes it feel like he's pushing the beat, but he's actually not. It's really amazing how he does it. And I realized, when I went back and I listened to my stuff back to back, I thought, 'Oh, that's me, sitting on the backbeat as much as I can,' because I'm playing the melody. When you play the melody, you don't wanna be on top. Actually, you want the band to be pushing, and you're sitting back here, like a singer, playing. I like the way Robert Plant sings in 'Since I've Been Loving You'. He's so behind. Or listen to any hip-hop song — the vocals are way in the pocket; they're just late on purpose. So that's something I've worked on my whole life is 'sit back, sit back, sot back,' and all of a sudden you go to play a song like 'I'm The One', and it's like, 'No, you have to be the guy way in front.' And Alex [Van Halen] is gonna be going, 'No, no. Sit back here.' And that's a difficult sensibility when every nerve ending in your body is saying, 'Sit back.' But to make the song work, you've gotta sit forward. That's the first thing I noticed, like the difference between Eddie's sensibility in timing and mine in terms of timing.

"Our vibratos aren't that different," Joe said. "He holds hick pick [with his thumb and middle finger], so he's always got [his index] finger for tapping, and I don't. So I always have to do something. And what I started to do early on was to use my pick for a lot of hammer-ons because I just wanted to be different, and I thought I'd get a better sound, I'd be able to do some different things that other players weren't doing. And I saw guys using their fingers back in the early '70s, when Eddie was my age, just a young teenager. There were other guys doing tapping for decades before, but as my generation started to figure out how to do tapping, I saw the thing was a split. There's tapping for effect, tapping for riff, and then there's tapping to create an entire musical piece. And Eddie did all of it. The way that he would do the tapping, when he would use it, [was] totally opposite of the way that I had forced myself to go with it.

"The third thing is… Again, we're talking about someone who was just an incredible virtuoso in several areas. One of the things that Eddie had was this super-tight swing that was ultrafast with his right hand. And that is something, again, that once… I remember hearing for the first time and thinking, 'Well, I'm gonna have to work on that.' That's gonna take me, I thought, I bet, three months of 45 minutes a day just working with a metronome to work that into my bag of tricks.' 'Cause that's kind of like what it is."

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.