By Joel Selvin, San Francisco Chronicle Senior Pop Music Correspondent:
Sammy Hagar, who was touring on the other side of the country with Van Halen in 1991, wanted to fly home and play the Golden Gate Park memorial concert for Bill Graham. He lined up former Montrose drummer Denny Carmassi, and called guitarist Joe Satriani to ask if Satriani would join him to play Montrose’s “Rock Candy.”
“You know what he said?” Hagar asks. “He said, ‘I don’t do other people’s material.’ I thought ‘What an upbeat f-.’ ”
“I don’t remember that,” an astonished Satriani says. “Why would I say something like that?”
But Satriani finally did join Hagar for a brief jam session in February last year in Las Vegas with Hagar’s Chickenfoot, a three-man weeknight poker circle that used to get together and jam at Hagar’s Mexican beach cantina, Cabo Wabo, featuring Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony, long a Hagar partner-in-crime.
Now Satriani, rock’s leading instrumentalist and hero of a thousand guitar magazine covers, has joined forces with rock’s most irrepressible front man and his monumental rhythm section.
People make a bad habit of underestimating Hagar, 61, the Energizer bunny of hard rock, who is about to begin his fourth platinum career. The Chickenfoot album, produced by Led Zeppelin engineer Andy Johns, will be released June 9, and the band starts an instantly sold-out, nine-city Road Test tour next Sunday at the Fillmore, before heading off to tour Europe in June and July, and returning to do a proper tour of the states in August.
“You’re not a band unless you gig, I say,” drummer Smith says.
The band members are sitting around a giant Chinese lacquered table that Hagar found while bargain hunting with his wife in Chinatown. They are passing around Satriani’s laptop and goofing with the video. Anthony and Smith are staying at the nearby Terra Linda Motel. Satriani drove up from San Francisco and Hagar came down from his Mill Valley mountaintop. They have gathered to rehearse for the shows.
“I’ve got ideas pouring out of me today,” Hagar announces as he walks into his Red Rocker Recording Studio in this quiet nook of warehouses and industrial buildings outside San Rafael.
“After Van Halen, I said I would never work with a genius guitar player again,” Hagar says. “But after jamming with these guys for a while, we decided, ‘Let’s get a good guitar player.’ I got his number and started calling Joe. This time it worked.”
Hagar put his regular band, the Cabo Wabos, on retainer (“As much as they’ve done for me, they can be on salary the rest of their lives”) and started working up material. The band took Johns into the huge orchestral room at Skywalker Ranch to record.
“This record was pretty live,” Hagar says. “I did half the vocals live. I spent 10 days singing eight hours in a row. I would sit out, thinking I’d save my voice, but they would sound so good, I would want to get in there. We sound like a band because we did it like a band.”
“Old school, baby,” Anthony says.
The album smokes – an hour of ripping hard rock based around Hagar originals such as “Sexy Little Thing,” “Get It Up” and the leadoff single, already a Canadian smash, “Oh Yeah.”
“Doesn’t Sammy’s voice sound big?” Satriani says.
Guitar wizard Satriani uses the finesse and power made famous on million-selling instrumental albums such as “Surfing With the Alien” and “The Extremist,” but he is clearly comfortable in this supporting role, able to play in ways he couldn’t as an instrumental soloist.
“He’s playing so much,” Hagar says.
“It’s a whole new Joe,” Anthony adds.
“My career sort of fell in my lap,” Satriani says. “It was almost accidental. This is more in line with what I always thought I would be doing since I was 14 years old, Jimmy Page, standing behind some guy like Sammy, playing the song.”
When native New Yorker Satriani arrived in the Bay Area in 1978, he played with a popular Berkeley club attraction called the Squares before being drafted by the Greg Kihn Band, then in its final stages. Satriani was working on “Surfing With the Alien” when the Kihn band finally dissolved. At one point, he was signed to a second record deal with Epic Records as part of a group-to-be-formed, but he could never find a singer and returned the advance after a couple of years trying.
Memorabilia on the studio walls tells the story of the extraordinary career of Hagar, a working-class kid from Fontana (San Bernardino County) who came to San Francisco in 1970 with a band called the Justice Brothers before guitarist Ronnie Montrose picked him to form his new band, Montrose. There not only are gold and platinum solo albums and photos from his years with Van Halen, one of hard rock’s all-time greats, but also posters of liquor bottles from his tequila business, his restaurant chain, even his mountain bike enterprise. He is wearing a faded T-shirt with his new band’s insignia and the lettering “Pataepollo” – Chickenfoot in Spanish – already half worn out.
The record is not being released by a label, but by the Best Buy chain, which is distributing the CD on a non-exclusive basis. The chain has previously made exclusive deals for independent releases by bankable acts such as Journey, Guns N’ Roses and Elton John, but this is its first new-band, widespread release.
“Obviously, they want to be in the music business,” Hagar says.
“Plus we all get free TVs,” Smith says.
The band’s gear is set up in a tiny, crowded studio space down the hall. The musicians all wear earplugs. Tall, muscular Smith may be one of the loudest drummers this side of Keith Moon. At Satriani’s feet is such a bewildering collection of foot switches, pedals and signal processing equipment, even he admits to getting confused and stepping on the wrong button sometimes.
Satriani spent a month in the studio by himself, overdubbing guitar parts with producer Johns, scrupulously layering in textures and weaving little details deep into the fabric (is this the first hard-rock record with banjo?). Johns and Satriani previously collaborated on “The Extremist,” and Johns did a Van Halen record with Hagar (“I fired him from doing my vocals,” Hagar says). On the Chickenfoot record, the veteran British engineer ended up in the hospital, and another engineer finished the mix.
“He cared so much,” Satriani says. “We got the best of Andy.”
“We almost killed him,” Smith says. “Nobody dies on a Chickenfoot record.”
The band played its first real date for an audience of Best Buy executives in March at the Grove Anaheim on three days’ rehearsal. “We were excited,” Hagar says. “The first song seemed like it took an hour.”
“It was one of our longest numbers,” Smith says. “The adrenaline was on 12.”
“We really did play for an hour and nobody had heard one song before,” Satriani says.
All the band members swear allegiance to Chickenfoot.
“I’m a decade man,” Hagar says. “If I can get 10 more years out of this old body.”
Smith mumbles something about Chili Peppers obligations as if they are annoyances. Right now, Satriani doesn’t care if he ever makes another instrumental record.
“He had credibility up to this point,” Hagar says. “But Chickenfoot is going to be way too successful for credibility. It sounds too much like a hit.”
“I have been nurturing obscurity for years,” Satriani says. {sbox}
