Featuring Sammy Hager, Michael Anthony and Joe Satriani, Chickenfoot were one of the great good-time supergroups of the 21st century. In 2011, as they geared up to release their misleadingly-titled second album, III, Classic Rock caught up with the trio.
It was one of those gigs you’d bore your kids about for years to come. February 2008, the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. Sammy Hagar – the Red Rocker, tequila proprietor, club impresario – is rocking the Pearl Concert Theater with his band the Waboritas. The night’s in full, loud swing, Cabo Wabo style. His buddy and former Van Halen bandmate Michael Anthony digs into his Jack Daniel’s design bass. Cocktail waitresses cut their way through the sweaty audience. Some fans are even up on the stage, rocking out with the band. Good times.
For the encore the singer calls up two special guests. Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith gets behind the kit, and the guy Hagar calls the best guitarist in the world, Joe Satriani, steps up and plugs in his Ibanez. Together they rip through I’m Going Down and Traffic’s Dear Mr Fantasy and the place goes wilder. They sign off with Led Zeppelin’s Rock And Roll. A supergroup is born.
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“Something happened,” Joe Satriani tells Classic Rock. “We all came off the stage wide-eyed and very excited. This super-chemistry had popped into being. I got together with Sam a few days later to see if we really could write, and in 45 minutes we had six pieces that were almost complete.”
That year, Satriani was touring his album Professor Satchafunkilus And The Musterion Of Rock, but he and Hagar continued to write via iPhone and email, all the while sending demos to Anthony and Smith. Eventually the four convened at George Lucas’s Skywalker Sound studio and recorded their debut album. Kicking off with the spunky romp Oh Yeah, the album, Chickenfoot, was a sleeper hit. It went gold in the US, selling 500,000 copies, and reached No.4 on the Billboard chart.
“The first album was a piece of cake,” remembers Hagar, 64 years young and radiating positivity. “We went in there and knocked it out, and it was so easy that I can’t believe it was so good. III was not an easy record.”
You read that right, their second album is called Chickenfoot III. It’s the band’s way of dodging the curse of the ‘difficult second album’. Since the release of the first one, Hagar sold his stake in his beloved Cabo Wabo tequila brand to Gruppo Campari for a cool $80 million, and published his candid autobiography Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock. The book details the darkness behind his bright persona – his troubled youth spent with an abusive father – and his successful, turbulent stint with Van Halen.
“I’d worked pretty hard the year before we made III,” he says. “I’d just done my book tour, which wore me the fuck out. So I didn’t really want to go and make a record, but because of Chad’s schedule we kinda had to.”
Satriani had been squeezing in his Chickenfoot commitments while touring his hit album Black Swans And Wormhole Wizards. “We started this Chickenfoot album with a bit of trouble with our schedules,” he explains. “I was off on tour, and Chad’s commitment with that other band I’m not allowed to mention was looming. That makes everybody focus even more.”
Chickenfoot III was recorded in just four days at Hagar’s studio in Marin County, California. It is indeed a more focused record than the first, and a more textured one. Their debut was a blast of spontaneity and a great surprise, which made it easier to forgive its rougher edges and often jammed-out material. On this follow-up the four-piece finally sound like a band, the songs are more developed and the album has an arc. There’s good-time classic rock in spades – lead-off single Big Foot is a great slice of West Coast fun –balanced by the ruminative blues of Something Going Wrong, the earnest ballad Come Closer, and the experimental Three And A Half Letters on which Hagar uses excerpts from letters he’s received from desperate fans, begging him for help, money, or work.
The other side of the coin is Different Devil. A bright, Stonesy anthem, Satriani had a real problem with the initial cheeriness of his demo. He urged the others to make it darker, but they went the other way and made it the most radio-friendly tune on the album. In Chickenfoot, democracy rules. “We don’t have months together,” says Sartiani, “we don’t play on the road much, so everything has to be worked out in a matter of hours and then we move on. If three of the guys say it’s working, I have to get with the program.”
Despite its evasive name, the second album wasn’t without its difficulties. There’s an air of poignancy about it that stems from a human tragedy within the band’s circle. John Carter, Hagar’s long-time personal manager and one of Chickenfoot’s two managers, was diagnosed with cancer during the recording. He died in May, aged 65. “He was my manager and my balance,” says Hagar. “He was the guy I threw the ball against the wall with. Like Joe says, it kinda felt like there was a dark cloud hanging over this album. We wanted to prove something and do something for him. We all cared a lot.”
“It was very hard for all of us,” Satriani adds, “but we weren’t really talking about it. Everyone was just trying to forge ahead, stiff upper lip and all that. When the record was done, Sam and I both started listening to it as a whole, and began to realise why it seemed very difficult at times.”
Fraught with worry for their friend and gaffer, the band pumped their energies into the music. You can hear it in the opening track, Up Next. Over a whittled-down hard rock riff, Hagar is entering Heaven in flip-flops and sunglasses. It’s fun, but it’s also a pointed contemplation of mortality. “With the first record I just did whatever came to mind,” says Hagar. “I didn’t struggle with anything, and it was great and it felt smooth and natural. With this one I didn’t do that with the lyrics. All these songs are personal. Joe and I are the songwriters. We’re the Page and Plant, the Keith Richards and Mick Jagger – we fit right into that mould of guitar/singer songwriting teams.”
Again, the two came up with demos and these were then sent to Anthony and Smith. “Chad might say: ‘Can we change this part,’” explains Satriani. “Mike’ll say: ‘I’d like to add this bass line here.’ As we work at it, it moves away from the demo and begins to sound like Chickenfoot. The music we make together is unabashed classic rock. It’s just what happens when we get together. It’s a celebration.”
An integral part of the band’s sound, Mike Anthony’s bass is way up in the mix this time, and he’s in fine voice. “His personality through his bass lines makes some of the songs for me,” the guitarist enthuses. “When we were mastering I was still hearing more and more of it and I’m going: ‘Yeah, listen to that!’ He’s always adding this musicality to everything. He plays through a teeny little amp, and he sounds like six bass players playing together. Then the tone of his voice and where he chooses to sing is unique. There’s no one like him.”
As a rhythm section, Mike Anthony and Chad Smith have clearly found a chemistry. But unfortunately, due to his commitments with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the drummer won’t be available to tour Chickenfoot III.
“I already miss Chad,” says Hagar. “Everybody thinks that I’m the spark-plug in the band and the energy force behind everything, but when Chad’s around I become the straight guy.”
Chad’s most likely replacement for the tour is Kenny Aronoff, a seasoned session drummer who sometimes sits in for Smith in his other outside-Chilis side project the Meatbats. Hagar is keen to keep the Chickenfoot vibe intact. “Hopefully Mike and Kenny together will develop some kind of chemistry that keeps that craziness going.”
The tour for Chickenfoot was brief – dates in just nine cities – yet it was an education for all the members, not least for Satriani. For his entire solo career he’d stood centre-stage and wailed for two to three hours. Now he was having to accommodate one of the biggest voices in rock. “I’d scratch my head over how different it was to what I’d been doing for the previous 25 years,” he says. “Just simple, basic guitar stuff was so different. Suddenly you have to leave room in the middle for somebody, and then when your part comes you can go crazy, but then you’ve gotta come back.”
“This time we’re gonna do five cities,” says Hagar, “play some smaller venues, and make sure that after one week the chemistry still feels good. And if that’s the case, then we’ll book a world tour. We gotta play this music for the world, man. It’s too good!
“The female side of Chickenfoot’s audience comes from the Wabos [the Waboritas], Van Hagar and my solo career,” Hagar continues. “Joe doesn’t really have a female following. He’s a guitar player – he’s got a bunch of guitar nerds out there, they come. The Chili Peppers fans come a bit, but not really, because they’re an alternative band. We’re a guy band.”
And after that pencilled-in world tour? Well, the jury seems to be out. While Hagar can’t imagine them not writing a pile of songs and recording another album, Satriani feels that part of the focus of the second album comes from the very uncertainty of the band’s future. “Maybe we’re feeling like we’re not going to be doing this forever,” he says. “It’s not like we’re 22 and we feel like the horizon is endless. Everybody knows there’s a finite number of albums. We don’t know how long every band member is actually going to be available. And I have to say, we all have other jobs. From the start this really was for us, because we were getting off on it. If it didn’t work out we could go back to what we were doing. It was a super-bonus that we found our fans.”
“It’s even more fun than you can imagine,” agrees Hagar. “And a lot more fun than being in Van Halen. We took the business out of it. Nobody has ever told us what to do – no record company, no producer, no management. We’re all successful, we’re all fine. So why are we doing this? Because we love it, man. I’d rather be in Chickenfoot than doing anything else.”
Originally published in Classic Rock issue 163, September 2011
