Answering a fan’s social media question a few days ago, Jason Bonham revealed that his 10-year tenure with the Circle and last year’s Best of All Worlds tour band had come to an end. “Sammy has decided to carry on with Kenny,” Bonham wrote, referring to Kenny Aronoff, who filled in during the four Best of All Worlds shows in August when Bonham rushed to England to help care for his mother, who’d suffered a stroke.
“Sammy rang me awhile ago. He was asking about my mom, but then he said, ‘Y’know, I’m not gonna do much next year,’ blah, blah blah, ‘and I’m gonna go with Kenny.’ I was a little shocked, I must say. I’d be lying to you if I wasn’t a little sad, because we were on fire at the end of the tour. And I got a little upset. That was strange, after 10 years of being with him.”
Summer Nights: Sammy Hagar The Best of All Worlds: An Insightful Look Into The Van Halen Homage That Lit Up The Rock N’ Roll World Paperback Following Eddie Van Halen’s untimely passing in 2020 it seemed that Van Halen could be no more….Until now.
In the summer of 2024 Sammy Hagar decided to pay the ultimate respect to one of the greatest rock n’roll bands of all time. Alongside former Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony Hagar also recruited guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani, legendary drummer Jason Bonham and Rai Thistlewayte on keyboards to create the ultimate legacy band. This five piece would celebrate Van Halen’s music with many songs sung for the first time by Hagar himself, alongside his very best solo work and a few surprises in between. The North American and Japanese tour would be played in front of an estimated 350,000 fans.
This book follows the rehearsals, the US tour, the Japanese shows, backstories on the bios of each member and a deep dive into the setlist that would rock, surprise and a bring sheer emotion to all of the fans who would witness this special tour. So grab a tequila or two and relive this glorious summer over and over again.
In an interview in the new issue of Guitar World, Satch details some of the Van Halen classics that proved difficult to master in time for the tour.
“Opening with Good Enough, Poundcake and Runaround is amazing. I quickly realized that the order of Eddie’s embellishments is really important to the fans,” he recalls. “Even though Ed would move things around, this audience knows the studio versions and they will want the scream here, the harmonic cascades there and the finger tapping there.
“As for challenges, the Poundcake drill is hard to nail. The beginning of Summer Nights is difficult because of the picking and gain structure. I don’t think I got the intro right until halfway into the tour. It felt so odd to my fingers.”
Elsewhere, Satriani touches on EVH’s evolving tone throughout the years, and how he approached making sure his tone for the Best of All Worlds tour was as accurate as possible.
“Ed had a million sounds. Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love to Panama is a huge jump, then to Summer Nights is a crazy jump,” he says. “He went from mono to mono with a little bit of stereo from the Eventide to widen the pitch, and then full stereo.
“He used Marshall, Soldano, Peavey and EVH. Those are huge changes in terms of preamp gain and compression. He went from a lot of midrange to quite scooped. So I asked Dylana Scott at 3rd Power Amplification to solve it for me. We went for the 1986 Live Without a Net tone, because it was all Marshalls but with the extra stereo-ness.”
That collaboration with 3rd Power yielded the DRGN 100, the result of a “deep search into Ed’s tone”.
“Going back some years, when David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen first called me about a tribute, I started this deep search into Ed’s tone. His sound was lighter and thinner than my JVM, which was designed to make all my high notes super fat.
“That’s what I usually do for two hours on stage. I’m not playing many chords. But when I play with Sammy, it’s 95 percent rhythm and then eight or 16 bars of solo. A quick rip before coming back.”
