CHICKENFOOT TRIVIA
Trivia
The Japanese edition of the debut album Chickenfoot came out on 8 July 2009. The details BARKS printed give the catalogue number as IECP-10190 and the price as 2,625 yen including tax. It arrived about a month after the international release of 5 June.
The debut album's sleeve was heat-sensitive: the artwork changed under the warmth of a hand. The band's own pre-release announcement pointed buyers at record shops specifically to get hold of it. It was a trick that existed only on the physical object, which is why the first feature listed for the band's official iPhone app, released later that year, was simulating the interactive heat-sensitive cover on screen.
Carter, Chickenfoot's co-manager, died on 10 May 2011 in Palm Springs at the age of sixty-five. The obituary on the band's own site calls him a legendary A&R man, producer, songwriter and manager, and a lifelong fighter for songs with proper bridges. The band said they would miss his unique and brilliant guidance.
Chickenfoot III was nominated for a Grammy - not for the playing or the songs, but in the Best Recording Package category. As the band's site reported in December 2011, the nomination was for the album's creative 3D packaging design. The same announcement pointed out that anyone who had downloaded the record digitally might have no idea what they were missing.
On 7 and 8 May 2016 Chickenfoot came back for two nights at Harrah's in Lake Tahoe. According to the band's own report the setlist drew on both Chickenfoot and Chickenfoot III, and a new song, Divine Termination, was unveiled for the first time. Those two nights were the band's first complete set in more than six years.
Chickenfoot did not begin at a planning meeting but on one night of jamming. Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony were playing at Hagar's own club, the Cabo Wabo Cantina, when Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith sat in with them. The three of them came away convinced by what had happened in the room, and it was from there that the offer of the guitar seat went out to Joe Satriani. BARKS describes the band's birth as an accident rather than a plan.
Chickenfoot was never a name the band chose in any formal sense. As Joe Satriani explains it, it was a goofy code name adopted because they had to call themselves something while they thought of a real one. They came up with cleverer candidates along the way, and none of them was ever as good. The name is eerie and perfect at the same time, in his view, and he was not surprised when the public simply went on calling them Chickenfoot until it stuck.
The debut came together at a startling pace. Speaking to Billboard at the end of October 2008, Sammy Hagar said the band had gone into the studio and cut eight demos in two days, and that nine songs were recorded by then. The plan was to go back in December for a couple more and aim at a February or March release. In the event the album did not arrive until June 2009.
The lyric of Three And A Half Letters is made out of real letters Sammy Hagar had been sent by fans. As Joe Satriani explains it, their manager Carter had been pressing Hagar to write something topical about the economy; Hagar's first reaction was that it sounded country. What changed his mind was a letter from a man in Afghanistan that ended by asking for a job and for help. The words condense around twenty such letters into three, which Hagar reads out in the verses before screaming the title line in the choruses.
Joe Satriani's own account of why Chickenfoot stopped came in 2015. Trying to get another record together over the previous couple of years had been impossible, he said; everybody wanted to do it, but schedules conspired against it. He also said he had been the one banging on doors, telling the others they had to come out and make another record. Scheduling was not the whole of it. The first album was fun because it was a crazy idea, but everyone else they worked with suddenly realised what would happen if the thing took off - that, in his view, was the first dark cloud, which made the second record harder to pull off and the third almost impossible. He was equally clear that there were no personal differences between the four of them.
Japanese coverage of the band arrived just after the domestic release of the debut. Writing in July 2009, BARKS presented the line-up - Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony from Van Halen, Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and, improbably, Joe Satriani - as a combination nobody had expected. The article set the scene with the North American Road Test tour that had begun in May and the European tour starting in late June, noting that the London show had sold out.
BARKS went on following the band long after it stopped working. Its March 2019 piece carried Joe Satriani's expectation that there would be a show in September, and his remark that they might record a new song while rehearsing for it. The same article notes that 2018, for all the talk of a proper return, came down to a single show in San Francisco, and identifies Kenny Aronoff as the drummer who played Chickenfoot's tours across 2011 and 2012.
The first tour Chickenfoot ever put together happened before the album existed. The Road Test shows, announced on the band's own site in April 2009, were a deliberately limited run built around material from the debut, taking in Seattle, Vancouver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Boston, New York and Philadelphia. The name says what it was: taking the record out on the road before releasing it.
The band called Friday Footday. The debut came out on Friday 5 June 2009, and the announcement on their own site used the word. On the same day they appeared on The Tonight Show, newly taken over by Conan O'Brien, and played Oh Yeah - during the first week of the new host's run.
In the run-up to the debut the band published a video serial called 12 Days of the Foot, one episode a day, one song per episode. Joe, Chad, Mike and Sammy talked through the background of each track and a clip of it played, so that by release day a piece of every song had been heard. They repeated the idea for Chickenfoot III in 2011, that time as a podcast series with a new episode every other day.
In the summer of the debut album's release, Chickenfoot played a free show at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Writing about the 15 August 2009 date, the band's own site noted that although the tickets were free they were hard to come by, being distributed through assorted local Cleveland promotions, so the band had worked out other ways of getting some into fans' hands.
Three shows fell out of the summer 2009 European run because of Chad Smith's injury. According to the band's own account he aggravated an old injury that had not properly healed while playing in Paris, and an MRI showed the damage. Madrid was cancelled so that he could be assessed in Paris; he travelled on to Italy hoping to play the rest, but after the weekend shows he was in enough pain that the sold-out Hamburg and Copenhagen dates were cancelled to give him time to see specialists in London.
Towards the end of the 2009 touring the band was filming shows for a future release. Their own site flagged the Atlanta date at the end of August and then the Phoenix show of 23 September, warning the audience they might end up on camera. The Phoenix recording became the source for the DVD and Blu-ray Get Your Buzz On, and in 2017 it finally appeared on CD as part of Best + Live.
The debut album was certified gold within the year of its release. On 6 October 2009 the band's site posted a photograph of Joe, Chad, Mike and Sammy being presented with their gold records as the tour wrapped up. BARKS reports that the album reached number four on the American chart and passed the half-million mark that earns the certification - and that the second album did not get there.
When the 2009 touring ended, the band's own site listed where each of the four was going next: Chad Smith back to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony down to Cabo, and Joe Satriani with a live DVD due in the new year. The scheduling problem of a band whose members all have another job is written plainly into its own news post.
Chickenfoot III began as a demo session and turned into the record itself. According to the band's official biography, Joe Satriani and Sammy Hagar started swapping song ideas early in 2010 while still on tour, and through that year Satriani kept sending the band demos in various states of completion. In February of the following year the four convened at Hagar's warehouse studio, where the sounds their engineer Mike Fraser was getting were so good that, as Michael Anthony put it, a session they had assumed was still demoing turned into: might as well roll tape, we are making a record.
Chickenfoot III was recorded in Sammy Hagar's warehouse studio, which the band called the Foot Locker. The nickname plays on their own name, and it was not only an in-joke: when they ran a public Google+ hangout in 2012, the announcement gave the Foot Locker as the place they were broadcasting from. Mike Fraser, the engineer they brought in - a veteran of AC/DC and Metallica records - also served as the album's co-producer.
During the demo stage for the second album, Joe Satriani made a request of Sammy Hagar: there were lights and shades in his voice that had never made it onto a record, and he wanted to hear the singer do something new. Hagar took it as a challenge and threw it straight back - fine, but you have to bring it too, I want to hear you play guitar like you never have. According to the official biography, the two of them shook hands on it.
Sammy Hagar was blocked on the lyrics for Chickenfoot III. As the official biography tells it, just as the band was going into the studio he learned that John Carter - his own longtime manager and Chickenfoot's co-manager - had been struck with cancer and that the prognosis was bad. With a book tour running at the same time, Hagar was, in his own word, blocked. From his failing body Carter issued his orders: make the greatest record you have ever made, make songs that matter, write words that mean something to people. After Carter died, Hagar found the themes he had been looking for. Joe Satriani said it was almost as though the minute Carter passed away, Sammy was unlocked.
Up Next is the song Sammy Hagar wrote as a tribute to his late manager. According to the official biography he had begun to think that anyone's number could come up at any moment, and pictured waiting at the pearly gates as though queueing at a fast-food counter - at which point somebody calls out that they will take the next one. That call became the chorus. The track also carries a long guitar solo from Satriani.
Come Closer was made back to front by this band's standards. As the official biography records, Sammy Hagar wrote the finished lyric first and Joe Satriani then composed music for it - and he composed it on piano. By the time the full band had worked the song over, Satriani had abandoned the piano and picked up his guitar, and the solo he played widened the scope of the song.
The chorus of Different Devil was written by the drummer. According to the official biography Joe Satriani wrote the music but was not convinced the arrangement was clicking, until Chad Smith took a whack at some chords and produced a new chorus. The song went smooth after that and they blazed through cutting it. It is also the track where Michael Anthony's voice is furthest forward: the band's ever-dependable backing vocalist is practically duetting with Hagar on it.
On Something Going Wrong, the track that closes the album, Joe Satriani plays stringed instruments other than the guitar. As Michael Anthony describes it, Satriani picked up a Dobro and a banjo for the song, and his bandmate's verdict was that he is not simply the shred king everyone assumes but a player with deep roots. Anthony adds that he and Chad Smith enjoyed wearing different musical hats on this one themselves.
Chickenfoot took two categories at the 2011 Ultimate Classic Rock Awards. As the band's site reported at the start of 2012, they won Best Song for Big Foot and Best Album for III, and the votes came from the fans - the Foot Soldiers, as the band calls them.
In the year of its debut album, Chickenfoot was named Best New Band at the Classic Rock Awards - as the band's own site reported in November 2009. A band whose four members' careers add up to several decades had won a prize for newcomers. The same announcement carried two other items: an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live on 6 November, and a deluxe limited edition released on 1 November exclusively through Best Buy.
The Las Vegas show of 5 December 2009 was the band's last stage of the year. According to their own report, Jason Bonham sat in that night for an encore of Rock 'N Roll - with Chad Smith moving over to guitar for it - and the evening ended in a mass of group drum mayhem.
The animated video for Get It Up came about because a fan proposed it. As the band's site tells it, one dedicated fan happened also to be a professional animation director, and it was he who approached the band about making a video. He ended up partnering with the Canadian animation house Pipeline Studios, and the finished film appeared at the start of 2010.
The Road Test for the second album was again a handful of rooms. The five American dates the band announced for 2011 were 1 November at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco, the 2nd at Avalon Hollywood in Los Angeles, the 4th at The Pageant in St. Louis, the 5th at Metro in Chicago and the 8th at Webster Hall in New York. The fan-club presale carried a two-ticket limit so that as many members as possible could get in.
On the touring that followed Chickenfoot III, the man behind the drums was not Chad Smith. Announcing the European Road Test dates in October 2011, the band's site remarked that the new material was sounding amazing and that Kenny was fitting right in on drums - Kenny Aronoff. The Road Test itself was a limited engagement in five European cities and five American ones, laid on ahead of a fuller tour of larger venues planned for 2012.
The Different Devil tour of 2012 opened with two shows in the South Shore Room at Harrah's in South Lake Tahoe. Both sold out, and according to the band's site people travelled from Europe and further afield for them. What makes that room special to Chickenfoot's fans and Sammy Hagar's alike is that there is a Cabo Wabo Cantina in the same building.
Chickenfoot's first new song in five years arrived not on a new album but as the opening track of a compilation. Best + Live, released on 10 March 2017, was the band's first-ever best-of, and Divine Termination sits at the front of it. It came out through eOne Music in North America and earMUSIC/Edel elsewhere. Joe Satriani described the track as bone-crunching, hell-raising rock, dripping with attitude and vibe.
The second disc of Best + Live carries over ninety minutes of live music. According to the band's site it was recorded in Phoenix in 2009 and this was its first release on CD; until then it had existed only as video on the DVD and Blu-ray Get Your Buzz On. The thirteen-song set takes in almost everything from the debut album plus Bad Motor Scooter, from Sammy Hagar's Montrose days, The Who's My Generation, and Joe Satriani's reading of The Star Spangled Banner.
Chickenfoot III entered the Billboard 200 at number nine on its release in 2011. The figure appears in the band's own description of their best-of collection. Where the gold-certified first album had reached number four in America, the second landed here.
A mastering fault turned up on the live disc of Best + Live shortly after release. Responding to complaints about gaps between the songs, the band posted a replacement scheme on their own site in March 2017: send back the disc or proof of purchase and Entertainment One Music would post out a replacement, and for anyone who did not want to wait, a photograph of the proof of purchase would get them the digital version immediately.
The music video for Divine Termination was built from footage of the previous year's Tahoe reunion shows. As the band's site describes it, the film features the live performance from those nights and Chad Smith's destruction of his drum kit. It premiered on 13 February 2017, in partnership with Ultimate Classic Rock in North America and Classic Rock Magazine in Europe.
The band's official site is still being updated. Its most recent post, dated 27 September 2023, marks twelve years since the release of Chickenfoot III with a previously unreleased moment from Joe Satriani and Chad Smith's studio sessions: the two of them playing around Smith's favourite seventies song, Nature's Way by Spirit.
Joe Satriani took the offer because being an instrumental player was never what he had set out to be. In the account BARKS carries, he had always wanted to be part of a rock band with a big voice in front of it; other offers had come along over the years and none of them had been right. Sammy Hagar's side of it was that he had not been looking for a real band at all, but that after playing with these three, turning it down would have been the ridiculous choice.
Sammy Hagar has called the chemistry in this band the best of his career, and the two bands he measured it against were Montrose and Van Halen. Change one man and sometimes the whole thing changes, he said in the 2008 Billboard interview - what happened when he joined Van Halen being his own example - and by that standard, he reckoned, Chickenfoot's chemistry beat both.
Soap On A Rope grew out of a single remark by Sammy Hagar. As Joe Satriani tells it, the two were drinking tequila and talking about what sort of song would suit this band when Hagar said it would be good to have one where the players play, he sings a section, and then the players play again. Hagar likes listening to the rest of them, and that shape would let him sing and then stand and listen. Satriani made a demo from it, sent it round, and the arrangement was settled on the spot at their second demo session.
Three And A Half Letters was cut live in one take on the last day of recording. According to Joe Satriani, Sammy Hagar did not want him to sketch out or demo what he would play: total gut-reaction spontaneity was the brief. Satriani wrote out the main framework of the song and then the band went for it together in a single pass. For the solo sections he stepped on a Proctavia; a second guitar was added afterwards for the chorus chords, and the live solo guitar was moved to the centre with delays panned hard left and right.
The band's second album is called Chickenfoot III because a joke was taken half seriously. As Sammy Hagar explains it, schedules meant a long gap before they could regroup, and when they started work they called it Chickenfoot IV as a gag. Once it was finished, it no longer felt like a joke: IV would have put a comic twist on it, but the music was far too advanced to be called Chickenfoot II. They had skipped the dreaded second record, so III it was. Joe Satriani, for his part, remembers the running gag as something Chad Smith and their manager Carter started.
The choice of Big Foot as the lead single was not Sammy Hagar's. By his own account he thought the song was too typical of what people would expect from Chickenfoot and it was not his first pick. The record company and others around them pushed for it, and his reply was that he did not care - every song on the album was good, so they could throw a dart. It was the first record, he added, on which he could honestly say he had no idea which song was the best one.
The debut was turned into a guitar book within the year of its release. Published by Hal Leonard at the end of November 2009, it contains note-for-note transcriptions with tablature for all eleven songs on the album - the whole record, in effect, put into circulation as study material.
Sammy Hagar's reason for not making another record was arithmetic. In the Rolling Stone interview BARKS reported, the figures he gave were half a million dollars to make an album at Chickenfoot's level and six months spent writing and recording it - and after all that, it would not sell in quantity. He did not like being disappointed, he said; he liked winning. In the same interview he called Joe his favourite collaborator since Eddie Van Halen, and said there was nobody he would rather make an album with.
What got the stalled band moving again was Joe Satriani's persistence. In a podcast appearance BARKS reported in September 2015, he said he was asked what was happening with Chickenfoot about ten times a day by journalists, and that his complaining and stamping his feet had worked. He had written a new song and sent it to Sammy Hagar, who replied immediately and with creative ideas attached. By then the song was circulating within the band: Chad Smith's drums and Hagar's vocal were on it, and Michael Anthony was due at the end of that week to add bass and backing vocals.
On 15 May 2018 all four of Chickenfoot played together again at the Fillmore in San Francisco, at the fifth annual Acoustic-4-A-Cure benefit. Sammy Hagar opened the evening with a short set of his own and then returned with the other three, playing Oh Yeah, Sexy Little Thing and Something's Going Wrong among others. It was their first performance together in just over two years. The event was created by Hagar and Metallica's James Hetfield, and its proceeds go to the pediatric cancer programme at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital.
Asked in 2019 about the chances of a reunion, Joe Satriani said the door is always open, because there is a true connection between the four of them and they would all do it in a second. He also brought up a habit of Sammy Hagar's: Sam says every year that next year he is taking off, and then about an hour and a half into the year, at half past one in the morning on 1 January, he rings up with an idea for getting the band back together.
In the autumn of 2017 Joe Satriani was caught off guard by a phone call from Sammy Hagar. As BARKS reported it, the call came just as he was getting into the car for the airport on his way to shows in South America: Hagar wanted him to know that in 2018 he intended to devote everything to Chickenfoot. All Satriani could say was that he had a solo album coming out, a tour to play and a G3 tour besides; he did not know how to react. In the event, 2018 amounted to one show in San Francisco.