CAMBRIDGE - It's too easy to look at Chickenfoot and see only the two members of Van Halen who weren't invited on the recent reunion tour, the Red Hot Chili Pepper who is arguably the least crucial to that band's chemistry, and a guitarist most famous at the moment for suing Coldplay for plagiarism.
But, respectively, Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony played together for 11 years, Chad Smith's extracurricular drumwork with the Dixie Chicks proved his versatility, and Joe Satriani has always been more song-oriented than the rest of the pack of 1980s guitar shredders.
That doesn't mean the hard-rock supergroup is destined to be the new Led Zeppelin, despite Hagar's claims, but the sold-out show at the Middle East Downstairs on Tuesday hung together far more cohesively than anyone might expect. Chickenfoot sounded like a band, not a stunt borne out of boredom.
The tightness of the Middle East may have helped. More than once, Smith touched the ceiling with a raised drumstick, not exactly possible on the stages he normally plays. And the closeness combined with the mass of bodies made the venue simultaneously terrific and horrible for anybody hoping to get a good look at Satriani's fretwork.
With his more virtuosic background, Satriani seemed like the odd man out on Chickenfoot's occasionally paint-by-numbers '80s-metal material. "Avenida Revolution" and "Turnin' Left" were tuneless grinds, and the riffs of "Sexy Little Thing" and "My Kinda Girl" sounded like the Cult's "Fire Woman" if it had come from Van Halen's "5150." Hagar's standard, all-hedonism-all-the-time lyrical stance was in full force, which meant that even "My Kinda Girl," his seemingly heartfelt salute to the tribulations of single mothers, cast the titular woman as a backstage groupie.
But the grunting, hip-shaking riff of "Soap on a Rope," the AC/DC stomp-and-cruise of "Runnin' Out," and the heedless velocity of the linked versions of Montrose's "Bad Motor Scooter" and Deep Purple's "Highway Star" were all strong enough to match the band's ardor.
Chickenfoot is treating its current club jaunt as a warm-up for a larger tour. The band might even merit one.
Dennis Brennan opened in a practically defiant manner, just one man and an acoustic guitar singing blues and Dylanesque folk songs. He couldn't silence the audience but didn't incur its wrath, either, practically a triumph in itself.
