“I’m not the guy! Call Nuno Bettencourt!”: Why Joe Satriani turned down Alex Van Halen and David Lee Roth’s request to perform at a Van Halen tribute show
Despite regularly performing Eddie Van Halen’s riffs while touring with Sammy Hagar’s Best of All Worlds band, Joe Satriani wasn’t always brave enough to tackle Eddie’s iconic tone. In fact, even when Alex Van Halen and David Lee Roth asked him to perform at a Van Halen tribute event in 2021, he was too intimidated to accept the invitation.
Speaking to The Weekly Show With David J. Maloney, Satriani recalls how, when the Van Halen drummer and frontman approached him to perform at the We Love NYC: The Homecoming Concert event, he refused. “They wanted to put together a band, and they were insisting that I was the guy to do it,” he explains [via Blabbermouth]. “I kept saying, ‘I’m not the guy! Call Nuno Bettencourt, he can really do it!’”
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Satriani was adamant that they should reach out to another guitarist. Despite being a “huge fan” of Eddie’s, the Satriani explained that he’d spent his entire career trying to avoid comparison with the guitar legend. “There’s thousands of kids around the world who’ve dedicated their life to sounding exactly like Ed… And I’ve always tried not to sound like Ed,” he says.
However, the Van Halen pair were “insistent” that Satriani was the perfect fit. “We rehearsed, and we came really close to doing our first show, but it all kind of started to fall apart,” he explains. “I’m not really sure what happened with that. And I was busy as well, so I was just waiting to hear what was happening month by month.”
Despite the project not coming together, Satriani would eventually become comfortable with the idea of tackling Eddie’s riffs. When he was approached by Sammy Hagar to join Michael Anthony and Jason Bonham for the Best Of All Worlds band in 2024, a tour that largely tackled Van Halen’s vast back catalogue, he accepted.
“Sam called and he surprised me by saying, ‘Look… how about if we did a retrospective tour – not an Eddie Van Halen tribute thing – where we get to do Montrose, Hagar, Chickenfoot, and even some David Lee Roth era of Van Halen?’ And I liked that idea,” he says.
“I liked the idea that we would create our own sound as a band…” he adds. “I had to remind Sam [that] I don’t really play like Eddie, but he kind of knew that. He said, ‘That’s not what it’s about, we’re not gonna do that – let the imitators do that.’”
This year, the band are embarking on yet another tour. Kicking off this month, the band will be warming up with 6 dates performing at the Las Vegas Dolby Live, before the summer will see them performing across the US in June and the UK in July. The year will be rounded off in September, with the band returning for 5 dates back in Las Vegas to wind down.
For more tour information, head to Ticketmaster.
The post “I’m not the guy! Call Nuno Bettencourt!”: Why Joe Satriani turned down Alex Van Halen and David Lee Roth’s request to perform at a Van Halen tribute show appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
