Sammy Hagar, Michael Anthony, Jason Bonham and electric guitar legend Joe Satriani have announced a summer 2024 North American tour that's set to feature a very Van Halen-heavy setlist.
Its participants have been careful not to explicitly call The Best of All Worlds, as the tour is being called, a “Van Halen tribute tour,“ as original frontman David Lee Roth, drummer Alex Van Halen, and Eddie Van Halen's son – Mammoth WVH leader and one-time Van Halen bass guitar player Wolfgang Van Halen – do not appear to be involved.
Needless to say, though, given that Satriani was long involved in discussions for an official tour with Roth and Alex Van Halen that eventually petered out, it appears that this is as close to a genuine tribute tour as we're going to get.
“It’s crazy to think that it’ll be 20 years since Mikey and I played these songs with Van Halen on the 04’ Best of Both Worlds Tour,“ Hagar said in a statement. “With Joe on board, we can take a deeper dive into those years.
“We’re going to touch on some hits from my entire career, but seeing fans old and new really embrace [The Collection II, a new box set featuring remasters of Van Halen's four Hagar-era albums] set off something in Mikey and I. We were at my Birthday Bash in Cabo for my 76th and looked at each other and high five-d, like, ‘let’s do it.’ We pulled out a couple of them and it was an instant lovefest with the fans from our first riffs.
“The music we created is going to outlive us all,“ the singer concluded. “[The songs] deserve to be heard, so it's time we go out and serve the fans that music, while we still can.“
The statement announcing the tour highlighted latter-day Van Halen classics like Finish What Ya Started, 5150, Good Enough, Best of Both Worlds, Poundcake, and Right Now as examples of what fans can expect to hear at the shows, along with material from Hagar/Anthony/Satriani supergroup Chickenfoot, and modern-day project The Circle.
From there, one can naturally infer that – in Roth's absence – the setlists will be light on material from Van Halen's first six albums.
The Best of All Worlds tour is set to begin on July 13 in West Palm Beach, Florida and will conclude on August 31 in St. Louis, Missouri, and will be supported by Loverboy. Tickets go on sale this Friday, November 17, at 10 a.m. local time.
For tickets and more info, visit Hagar's website.
