The guitarist Sammy Hagar thinks was better than Eddie Van Halen: “Probably the best guitar player in the world”
The world of rock and roll is much more competitive than we would probably like to admit. The rebellious side of music has made a name for itself as the lifeblood of artistic expression, and to put a quantitative view on art always feels dirty. Eddie Van Halen and guitar playing is just the same.
The creative genius behind Van Halen and perhaps one of the most gifted guitarists of all time, may not have kept score on his fellow six-string players, but he certainly had thoughts on the players he thought were among the best in the world. One might imagine he enjoyed doing so because he was painfully aware that few players could reach his heights.
There are only an elite few guitar players who have a slight chance at competing with the likes of Eddie Van Halen. In an era when everyone was still preaching the virtues of Jimi Hendrix, Eddie was a different animal than any of the guitarists that came before him, to the point where half of his licks sounded like he developed his own language on the guitar. When you get someone like that, you need to hold on tight, but Sammy Hagar felt that the next best thing was working with Joe Satriani.
When looking at Eddie’s technique, there is only a handful of scale shapes that he used most of the time. He would go outside the box when he needed to, but many of his core licks tended to come from the blues scale before he started introducing his signature tapping phrases to the world.
This was a game-changer for almost everyone who heard it…and an absolute nuisance for Eddie when he saw the copycats trying to ape his style. While there may have been more than a few people trying to do their own version of what he did, Satriani was already his own animal when he strapped on a guitar.
He may have tapped like Eddie, but he was already becoming a local legend while teaching in California, eventually having students like future Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett. While he stuck mainly to his solo career when it came to releasing his own music, an offer came in the late 2000s that was too good to turn down.
After Van Halen had relaunched themselves without Hagar, with Eddie’s son, Wolfgang, on bass and David Lee Roth returning on vocals, Hagar decided to form a new supergroup under the laughable name Chickenfoot. Despite the hilarity of someone naming their band that, the chops were no joke, especially with Satriani laying down leads and Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers laying down a hard rock groove on every track.
While Hagar could claim to be one of the few guys who hit the guitarist jackpot twice, he actually rated Satriani one notch above Eddie, telling Paulo Baron, “[Joe] is another nut, I love him to death, he’s probably the best guitar player in the world, and he’s definitely one of the greatest songwriters because Joe can write a song a minute, to where Eddie struggled. Eddie would take forever for whatever reason…[Joe] He can just write out of the ether”.
It’s not like Hagar is talking out of his ass here, either. When looking at the massive back catalogue that Satriani has made over the years, he has been able to create the kind of classics that Eddie has without someone like Roth or Hagar out front. There are also a few elements that Satriani takes from Eddie and expands on, like the two-hand tapping piece ‘Midnight’.
That’s not to say that Satriani didn’t have respect for what Eddie did, down to him not being able to figure out how he played a lot of his classic licks. He may have helped push rock and roll further after Eddie, but anyone who’s ever picked up the guitar owes Van Halen a debt of gratitude.
