Joe Satriani recently opened up about the scrapped Eddie Van Halen tribute tour plans involving Alex Van Halen and David Lee Roth. He shared new details in an interview with Thinking About Guitar.
Satriani revealed that Alex and Dave were unwilling to include Michael Anthony as the bassist for the planned project. He also reflected on his own uncertainty about doing the tour justice without representing the full scope of Van Halen’s catalog.
When asked whether the project was intended as a full tour or a one-off show, Satriani explained the scope of what was being planned and how it ultimately fell apart.
“So after Eddie Van Halen had passed away, this was David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen reaching out to do a similar project. Or was it just going to be a one-off show?” the interviewer asked.
“No, they wanted to do a tour. And we got really close to doing one show when New York City was having their big coming out festival after the pandemic. And I rehearsed by myself for weeks. Weeks. Months. Trying to figure out how I was going to do it. And it was all David Lee Roth era stuff, which was really different,” Satriani said.
He also described his hesitation about being the right fit for the project. He had suggested other guitarists who were more closely associated with Eddie Van Halen’s style.
“And so, as I said before, a couple of times I called him and I said, really, are you sure you don’t want to call Nuno or Steve or someone obviously more well-suited to sound like Ed. And, you know, he’s demonstrated playing this stuff live. But they were adamant that I was the only guy who was going to do it justice,” he continued.
“So I just thought, okay, I’ll just keep working on it. And when it fell apart, I was kind of relieved, because I was really concerned about how we were going to do it justice as a show, top to bottom and not reflect Sammy’s period in the band. Which was huge. I think they got more number one records and sold more records in general than the Roth era. So it was confusing to me that they wouldn’t want to reflect that at all. But that’s a whole other story that it’s not my place to get into.”
Satriani then addressed the unresolved question of who would play bass. He revealed that Michael Anthony was explicitly ruled out by the band.
“They didn’t know who was going to play bass. Yeah, that’s why I suggested Jason (Newsted). Because they asked me and I was like, ‘Well, that’s weird. You know, it’s got to be Mike (Michael Anthony).’ But they said, ‘No, it can’t be Mike.’ So I thought, well, I knew Jason was a really crazy Van Halen fanatic. And an awesome bass player,” he said.
Satriani’s comments stand in contrast to a previous statement by Alex Van Halen, who claimed that he and Eddie did reach out to Michael Anthony before Van Halen’s final tour. “For the record we did call Mike, because we owed him that. We did call him, and he just didn’t answer,” Alex had said. The two accounts present differing perspectives on Anthony’s relationship with the Van Halen camp.
While the tribute tour with Roth and Alex never materialized, the collapse of that project ultimately led Satriani down a different path — one that would reunite him with another chapter of Van Halen’s legacy.
As MusicRadar reported, after the Roth and Alex Van Halen tribute project fell through, Sammy Hagar came forward with an offer Satriani couldn’t refuse. This led to the formation of the Best of All Worlds Tour, which notably featured Michael Anthony on bass and Jason Bonham on drums — two figures who had been central to Van Halen’s history but were absent from the Roth-Alex plans.
The contrast between the two projects is striking. While Alex Van Halen and David Lee Roth were unwilling to include Anthony, Hagar’s touring lineup embraced him as a core member. This reflected the longstanding bond between Hagar and Anthony that dates back to their shared years in Van Halen. Satriani needed a new direction after the tribute plans collapsed, and Hagar’s offer provided exactly that, MusicRadar noted.
The Roth and Alex Van Halen project was described as a full tour from the outset, not merely a one-off performance, Thinking About Guitar reported. This makes the months of preparation Satriani invested all the more significant. The guitarist spent weeks rehearsing David Lee Roth-era material on his own, only for the entire endeavor to unravel before a single show was performed.
The failed tribute project also raises broader questions about the internal dynamics of the Van Halen camp following Eddie’s death in October 2020. The exclusion of Michael Anthony — a founding member who played on the band’s most commercially successful records — and the conflicting accounts from Satriani and Alex Van Halen suggest that tensions within the group’s inner circle did not end with Eddie’s passing. For now, Satriani has moved on, bringing his talents to a project that honors the full breadth of Van Halen’s catalog rather than a single era of it.
