No one can say Joe Satriani went into Sammy Hagar’s Best Of All Worlds Tour underprepared. Playing Eddie Van Halen’s guitar parts was not a job Satch took lightly. Indeed, he took it so seriously he collaborated with 3rd Power on a custom tube amp just for the tour.
But as the tour rolls on and songs are swapped in and out of the setlist, new challenges keep coming up. Like when Hagar says they should revisit his final studio album as Van Halen frontman, 1995’s Balance, and put its most successful single, Can’t Stop Lovin’ You, into the set.
Speaking to Sirius XM’s Eddie Trunk, with a few shows under his belt, Satriani sounded wholly at ease with the gig, knowing where and when he had to nail Eddie’s solos just like the record and where there was room to put his own stamp on it, to “pay homage, be respectful, try just to memorise the stuff but at the same time celebrate it as it was intended”.
But Can’t Stop Lovin’ You is a problem. How to get that clean electric guitar tone with his rig? This was going to be the challenge, covering all bases, and even for Eddie Van Halen this is tone out of left field, a sort of gussied up Nashville tone, a little LA studio polish and '80s pop on top. This, right now, is top of Satriani's to-do list.
“When [Sammy] mentioned Can’t Stop Lovin' You I realised it was a technical issue for me because it’s got that super-clean guitar sound,” says Satriani. “Eddie’s got one or two or three guitars playing super-clean on that song, and so when Sammy mentioned it I said, ‘You’re gonna have to give me a few weeks’ notice to do some tweaking with my tech to make sure I can get that guitar sound together.’”
Satriani says he is approached this tour with Van Halen’s 1986 concert movie, Live Without A Net, as the reference. This was Eddie Van Halen on the road, playing a little fast and loose with his arrangements because, as Satch says, he would never play the same thing twice.
“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!” says Satriani. “He was just so creative.”
Live Without A Net demonstrated that it was one of Eddie’s talents that he could assemble a live rig that offered an “all-purpose sound” that covered both the Roth and the Van Hagar eras of the band, but that, of course, pre-dated Can't Stop Lovin' You. “That’s what I’ve done with the [3rd Power] Dragon Amps,” says Satriani. “But I may need a separate amp to cover that just one song.”
Satch’s 3rd Power Dragon Amp was designed by the company's founder, CEO and designer, Dylana Scott, and it is nominative determinism in action, a real fire-breather with a Plexi/Cascade gain switch and all sorts of tricks for getting that juicy Van Halen saturation. As it turns out, Scott might already have offered Satriani a workaround.
“It’s funny, we started thinking about that, and she solved it really fast,” he says. “It was just switching out a tube to basically go in the other direction [gain-wise], because when you think about it that is a unique guitar sound for Eddie. That was really clean and, I dunno, pop-country, whatever he was trying to achieve, but it was beautiful sounding and I’ll do my best to get as close as I can to it.”
There’s no sign yet of Can’t Stop Loving You in the setlist. File that under coming attractions. The Best Of All Worlds Tour rolls on, with the Hagar-led band hitting Ridgefield, WA, on 14 August. Tickets are on sale for all dates.
