In a new interview with Sirius XM’s Eddie Trunk, Joe Satriani chatted about touring with Sammy Hagar. The rocker shared the challenge about one song in their setlist — ‘Can’t Stop Lovin’ You.’ The problem is that his setup makes it difficult for him to get the signature clean guitar tone.
“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,” Satriani said of the song. “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.’”
He added: “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.”
The ‘Best Of All Worlds’ tour kicked off on July 13. Satriani joined the band for the tour and has performed consistently ever since.
Satriani’s preparations for the tour might be a bit different from what you would expect. The guitarist prepares himself with cover videos of other guitarists on YouTube.
“Well, here’s the interesting point about some of the simplest pieces that Eddie would do,” he started about EVH’s guitar parts in another interview, “is he’d do the album version, and from the stories that I’ve heard from the band members there was that Eddie and Alex [Van Halen] 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.”
He explained why he prefers YouTube guitarists: “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. And so 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.’”
For The Best Of All Worlds tour, Hagar is joined by Michael Anthony, Jason Bonham, Satriani, and multi-instrumentalist Rai Thistlethwayte.