To prepare for the Best Of All Worlds tour, Joe Satriani watched as many live performances of Van Halen as he could. It led him to an even bigger appreciation for Eddie Van Halen’s creativity.
During an appearance on Sirius/XM’s Trunk Nation this week (July 25), Satriani told host Eddie Trunk he took advantage of YouTube to get closer to Eddie Van Halen’s sound.
“Well, here’s the interesting point about some of the simplest pieces that Eddie would do,” said Satriani. “He’d do the album version, and from the stories that I’ve heard from the bandmembers, there was that Eddie and Alex 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.”
Satriani also decided to watch videos of other guitarists performing Van Halen songs live.
“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,'” said Satriani. “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.”
Ultimately, Satriani concluded that half of Eddie Van Halen’s sound came from his hands.
“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,” he said. “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. 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?’
“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,” Satriani added. “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.”