via Freedom Ranger Hatchery; not pictured—Anthony, Hagar, Satriani, Smith.
In spring of 2009, I was living in Seattle and preparing for a life change. My girlfriend at the time was going to grad school at Columbia University and we’d been apart for a year; I would spend July and August there with her in SoHo while her parents summered upstate, then move to Brooklyn that October. None of that was in motion yet when a Rolling Stone website editor emailed with a proposal. El Corazon, a small dive in Seattle with a capacity of eight hundred, would be hosting the first-ever show by a new band of old players: Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony, both formerly of Van Halen (with Hagar a longstanding solo act), Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers on drums, and on lead guitar, the iconic eighties shredder Joe Satriani. Unpromisingly, they called the group Chickenfoot. Either way, this was Rolling Stone fodder. It wasn’t necessarily in my musical wheelhouse, they knew, but might I be willing to go write a “report—not a review, a report”? Why not?
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