In a recent chat with the UCR Podcast, Joe Satriani revealed that he never had Eddie Van Halen on the lineup although he wanted to work with him.
“I called Eddie’s number, office, whatever, almost every time,” the guitarist shared about his efforts to reach out to Eddie. “I didn’t want to be a pest, but I didn’t know him. So I couldn’t just call his house or stop by, because I don’t live in the same city.”
Satriani added, “I would go through channels — you know, I tried every angle to say, ‘We’ll take care of everything.’ Which we do, myself and my management, we took care of all of the technicalities of putting on this show. We made it so it was the easiest thing for the artist to come.”
“In terms of Ed, we always made the offer that we could put the band together. He could play whenever he wanted. He could play for as long as he wanted. This was basically the structure of the show and I literally never heard back,” he further recalled.
The musician eventually accepted that Eddie might not have been interested in joining G3. He said, “So I suppose, maybe after six or seven G3 tries, I just thought, ‘Well, it’s cool.’ Because not everybody is comfortable standing next to two other guitar players every single night.”
“They may do it once at a special show, charity event or something really big [like that], but once you sign on to G3, it’s a responsibility to the audience to show up every night and play,” Satriani concluded.
In a 2022 interview with Face Culture, Joe talked about Eddie’s playing, explaining, “The odd thing about Eddie is that sometimes he would play stuff that didn’t make any musical sense but made sense in terms of how much fun it was to listen to. When you heard the whole band, you went, ‘Oh, that’s so much fun.’ But if you go back, and let’s say, you learn it note for note, you go, ‘That doesn’t make any sense at all.'”
Satriani played EVH’s guitar parts on The Best of All Worlds tour in the summer of 2024, joining Sammy Hagar, and Michael Anthony to perform Van Halen, Chickenfoot, and The Circle songs.
