Joe Satriani may be filling Eddie Van Halen’s shoes during the Best Of All Worlds tour with Michael Anthony, Sammy Hagar, and Jason Bonham; however, he’s recently revealed that David Lee Roth tried to recruit him for a Van Halen cover band when the sorely missed guitarist was still very much alive and active.
“I remember in the mid-’90s, around ’95 or ’96, David Lee Roth called me and he wanted to put together a band to do Van Halen songs,” Satriani tells Thinking About Guitar in a new interview. “He went on and on about how we were the only guys who could really do it right.
“He had all these crazy plans, and I said, ‘But Dave, Ed’s still alive. He’s still making amazing records. He’s still on tour. What guitar player would ever try to imitate him while he’s still working?’ I said, ‘It makes no sense.’ And of course, I said, ‘Look, I’m not the guy.’”
Ultimately, Roth’s project didn’t transpire, and Satriani could breathe a sigh of relief. Following Van Halen’s death in 2020, though, the Surfing with the Alien virtuoso was once again approached for an Eddie Van Halen tribute.
“When he and Alex [Van Halen] called me after Ed had passed away, it made a little bit more sense, even though I tried to convince them I was not the person who could do it justice. I told them I had tried to avoid playing like Ed for so long that now I really couldn’t.”
He even tried to pitch a couple of other names for the job. “I called and said, ‘Really, are you sure you don’t want to call Nuno [Bettencourt] or Steve [Vai] , or someone obviously more well-suited to sound like Ed? Someone who has demonstrated playing this stuff live?’ But they were adamant that I was the only guy who was going to do it justice.”
Fast forward to 2024, and Satriani found himself joining Hagar on his Best Of All Worlds tour, which heavily celebrated his era with the legendary band.
When asked by Guitarist what it takes to tackle EVH’s parts live, he replied, “It’s all in the fingers; that really is true. We’ve heard Eddie play acoustic guitar, and it’s freakishly just as good as electric. I don’t know how he did that. I’ve seen players online get close, but there’s that magic thing that Eddie had, which was his personality and his heart. No one comes close to that.”
Elsewhere in the Guitarist interview, Satriani revealed the gear he uses to play Van Halen’s parts – and the level of dedication and practice required to nail them.
