Rehearsals for the upcoming Best Of All Worlds tour got underway today (May 27th) with Sammy Hagar, Michael Anthony, Jason Bonham, and Joe Satriani. Anthony gave Ultimate Guitar’s Greg Prato an update on Satriani, who will perform several Van Halen riffs each night.
Below is an excerpt from part one of Anthony’s Ultimate Guitar interview contributed to the Van Halen News Desk by Prato:
About the “Best of All Worlds” tour, Joe Satriani talked about the challenges of playing Eddie Van Halen’s parts. How is Joe handling it now, and what does it sound like?
“Oh, well, we haven’t gotten together to start rehearsal yet! I’m actually flying up to San Francisco here on Monday [May 27], where we will start rehearsing. So we’ll see what happens when everybody gets together. Because the only time that we ever played was when we did some press at the end of last year, we did The Howard Stern Show. And I’m sure Joe’s been working on everything. So, Monday, we’ll find out how everything’s gone. I imagine everything’s good, though. I haven’t heard anything from anybody.”
How would you compare Satch with Eddie Van Halen guitar-wise, since you’ve played with both?
“I played with Joe in Chickenfoot. And they’re both great guitar players in their own right, different styles of the way that they play. Whenever you play with someone different, it’s like, I know that everybody’s got their own thing. Eddie did the tapping and all that stuff. And Joe doesn’t really do a lot of that. But they’re both great guitar players though.”
I thought it was strange that Joe took a lot of heat when he tried playing the beginning of “Mean Street” on The Howard Stern Show since it was a song that he probably hadn’t practiced before.
“Yeah, I think I remember reading on Instagram somebody had commented like that. And I answered back to them. I said, ‘Well, wait ’till we have a couple of rehearsals under our belt, and check it out then.’ Because that was basically the first time that Joe probably ever played that. He was probably just kind of going off memory.”
“Joe’s such a polished guy and pays attention to detail. In Chickenfoot, I don’t think I ever heard him play a wrong note when we played live. So I’m sure once he gets in there and he starts working all that stuff out, it’s going to be… And obviously, he’s not going to play it exactly like Eddie. And we don’t expect him to, because he’s Joe Satriani. Of course, there’s certain lines, certain melodies that he’ll have to play because that’s something that’s trademarked to the song. But I’m looking forward to hearing Joe’s spin on all the Van Halen stuff.”
The Best Of All Worlds tour kicks off on July 13th in West Palm Beach, Florida. Go to Hagar’s official website for more ticket info.
Hagar posted a video on rehearsal day one to social media today: