Interview with Guitarist Joe Satriani
Februrary 11, 2010
www.satriani.com
www.myspace.com/joesatriani

By Mike Bax
Live Photos by Jaylyn Todd

Joe Satriani is arguably one of the most prolific guitarists in the world today. His talent seems limitless on many of his numerous solo albums. Recently, a double live CD and CD called Live In Paris: I Just Wanna Rock saw release through Sony Music. Live In Paris: I Just Wanna Rock showcases Satriani at his very best with over two hours of live music, some of which dates back over twenty years. The audio on both the CDs and DVDs is the same, but the DVD has some behind the scenes footage and interview material not present on the CDs.

Originally a guitar teacher, Joe has forged an interesting career for himself as an innovative guitarist as well as a go-to man for bands in need of a talented live guitarist to tour with. In the past year, Joe has been attached to Chickenfoot, his own solo career, and he is going to tour with some living legends on the Experience Hendrix tour throughout the USA in March.
I chatted with Joe by phone from his home in California on February 4th in what must have been mid-morning for Joe. Having seen Joe interviewed on television, I knew he was an articulate speaker. My expectations for the interview were easily surpassed, as Joe graciously entertained some of my fan-boy questions around his 1987 Surfing With The Alien album, a personal favourite of mine from the first moment I heard it.



Joe: How are you doing?

Mike: Hi Sir, how are you?

Joe: Very Good today thanks.

Mike: Good. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today Joe, I know you're a busy man.

Joe: That's alright man; it's nice to talk to you.

Mike: Can you remember when you decided to stop being a guitar teacher and start persuing your own career as a recording artist?

Joe: Well, I think after your first day of teaching, that's really what you're thinking about.

Mike: That's fair.

Joe: Because teaching is very difficult… it is for somebody who has got lots of music in their head and who is really thinking, "The recording studio at this stage is really my venue and not a teaching studio". I suppose I was right in the middle because I really did like teaching but I was torn, because for every hour that would go by I would be thinking that I was losing time; I really needed to be spending these hours composing and working on innovate techniques if I could come up with some. That moment really didn't come until my last lesson which was with Kirk Hammett actually; he was working on And Justice For All and I'd just released Surfing with the Alien and was just about to go on tour. So Kirk was the last guy that I taught. As a guitar teacher in a guitar store, it was a cool moment for us because he had come to me as a younger kid not being in Metallica yet and we experienced that happen together, which was fantastic. It was a dream come true not just for him but for me as a teacher. All of a sudden my second album (which really was my third) Surfing with the Alien was taking off and so it was an exciting time for both of us at that last lesson.

Mike: You must be proud having so many professional guitarists in different genres of music achieve their own levels of success and knowing you had a hand in shaping their craft early on.

Joe: It's always a hope of every teacher that their students achieve greatness and they move forward in a way that the teacher hasn't. I got that feeling way back when I was fifteen and I was teaching Steve Vai. Steve was a complete beginner when he came to me but you could tell right away that he possessed an enormous amount of talent not only in his hands but in his brain, he just had this capacity to absorb and interpret information, not only quicker than my other students but it seemed like he was doing it faster than I had done it. As a teacher at that time, I remember thinking I was just a few weeks ahead of this kid…
(Both laughing)

Joe: So, I'm learning stuff and I'm figuring out what to do with it and then I'm showing Steve, it was so exhilarating and I think that was a moment in my mind where I realized that this is what a teacher is suppose to do, which is to hand over everything you know and give the student every insight and opportunity to move beyond the teacher that they possibly can. Civilization can't really move on unless teachers do that… you can't withhold knowledge.

Mike: Very true.

Joe: It was such a great experience and I was lucky that I learned it while I was a teenager, which is generally a rough period. A lot of things you get done when you're in your teens are based on you believing in yourself with unshakable fervor, you just have the one track mind. I had to come to grips with the fact that I had already met a younger kid; a student who I knew in my heart who was going to play better than I would and he had better physical attributes and the mind was so huge, and I thought, "Ok I'm learning this early; this is good. So I'm not going to get hung up on it". It turned out great ‘cause Steve and I turned out to be closest friends for life and we still play together, and still talk to each other so it's a relationship that has been moving forward ever since we met.

Mike: I'm of the opinion that you are one of the finest living guitarists in the world, Joe. Yet you somehow manage to maintain an interesting level of obscurity. By this I mean you're not the household name that some of your students have become. Do you feel that's accurate?

Joe: Oh yeah, it's a blessing and a curse but I suppose to explain that - the blessing is that I have a career… (Laughs)

Mike: Yeah…

Joe: I have been able to release whatever it is 15-20 records, live DVD's, and I've toured all over the world from India to New York and all over Europe; from Moscow to Santiago, Chili. I have a worldwide audience; I don't have to have a day job to continue playing guitar and I have had a long standing relationship with Sony music to do my solo stuff. Yeah, there can't be anything negative of how it's played out for me, so I see that as a positive side. Where I'm really lucky as well is; I can still go down the street and go to a hardware store and forge around for the proper nuts and bolts and things and people don't bother me… (laughs)

Mike: Good point.

Joe: I don't have TMZ following me around or lurking outside the house, taking pictures of the shoes I'm wearing or whatever I'm doing. To a certain extent that level of obscurity is great and that allows me to be a normal person… which I try to be. But it's not easy. It also allows me to write about my experience as a normal person, I'm not in an ivory tower or shoved away from normal life so that's really been a blessing and I've been able to have a normal life with a family and all that comes with it.



Mike: You tend to play primarily instrumental music and have done so for 20 plus years. I would think this would present some unique challenges from both a creative standpoint and from a marketing angle.

Joe: Oh yeah, instrumental music is a hard sell; let's put it that way. When you love something it's really not hard. The difficulty is really just an artistic struggle to get it right, but that's something I love to do. It is something that's difficult to market and but I've been fortunate over the last 22-23 years that I've been associated with two labels that have been really creative in marketing the music that I've made and have been very flexible because I have made all kinds of records. Some of them have been more rock or metal, some more classic rock sounding, techno, bluesy….

Mike: Yeah.

Joe: The landscape keeps changing, so on one hand that's what has allowed my audience to grow because I don't keep sending them the same kind of music all the time, but it has definitely put the record companies through their paces so both relativity and to a large degree Sony Epic and Sony around the world have had to really receive each record and scratch their heads and say, "Now what's Joe up to?", and get people to understand what it is and to experience it. But a big part of that is touring. When I signed onto Bill Graham's management his whole thing was, "You have to be able to do it live". He wasn't into becoming a manager for people who were just studio rats.

Mike: Right

Joe: His whole thing was performance and getting out there and through a great education from all the managers working under Bill, they've taught me how to be a performer in an area I had no experience in. I mentioned before, going out on that very first "Surfing with the Alien" tour; that was the first time I ever played instrumental music in front of people where it was my band. I had never done it before and I had no idea what to do. I had real good chops being a guitar player in a rock band; I knew exactly what to do for that, but just to get up there and not sing was unusual. That first year of touring in 1988, not only was that breaking me in as a live solo musician but I also toured with Mick Jagger that year and we did two extensive tours; I spent a little bit more than four months working with him and that was also a great shot in the arm. Trying to change the way I was performing and learning how to be a front person… who better to learn that from than Mick Jagger?

Mike: Absolutely. When I look at a traditional pop song being three to three and half minutes long and broken into vocal, percussion, rhythm and base, your material is not really like this, Joe. A lot of times with other bands the guitar work will take a back seat to the vocals in a given song and you don't have that luxury in your material. It's like your guitar work needs to do your singing for you, as well.

Joe: Yes, well it all starts with a song; the song has to be a good song and the melody has to be very strong. If you're building a song that has not only a verse and chorus but also a bridge, you really have to be just like any other song writer and embrace all the great songs ever written and understand why they work and why people like them. You can go against the grain for effect but you'll reap what you sow; if you start adding notes in with too many notes or notes that are very unfavorable, you will get the results from the audience. A melody still has to be somewhat uplifting and capture a mood, if you're going for brooding it has to be really good. You can go all the way back to Beethoven, he was one of the great brooding melody guys and as a student of music, you can really learn how to get power from delicacy and to fill up space with dichotomy. I know it sounds like I'm talking about things that don't go together with musical dichotomy, but this is actually the stuff of composing. When you get that inspiration and you write a song you just go with the feeling but then afterwards you sit back and go, "Okay, what have I done? How can I make it better? How can I tweak it and tighten it up so that what I experienced writing it is something people can experience when they listen to it?" That's two different things. That's where the professional composer has to come in and tweak it with an ear towards the audience and what they need to hear to understand the story you are trying to tell.

Mike: When I first picked up Surfing With the Alien back in '87, I worked in a music store and I didn't know anything about you or the type of music that you played. I am a comic book fan I like the Silver Surfer so I just bought it because the Surfer was on the cover and it was dumb luck that the music was awesome and I really got into your sound. Are you a comic book fan?

Joe: You know, when I was growing up my parents really frowned upon us reading comic books.

Mike: Yeah, I hear you.

Joe: So we had to read books, you know. (Laugh)

Mike: Yeah.

Joe: And so you know, there were lots of science books, novels, and we had an excessive of library in the house. My father was an engineer and my mother was a school teacher. So I grew up just reading books and my friends all had comic books, so I'd see them at their houses and stuff like that, but that's about it. So I didn't know anything about the Silver Surfer until I had completed the album and I had already sent it off to Relativity. I was doing an interview actually and the album was going to be called Lords of Karma and I was doing an interview with a British journalist who said he loved the album and hated the title.

Mike: (Laughs)

Joe: And afterwards I remember sitting in my apartment and I'm thinking, "This isn't good", you know? One of the first actual interviews I do and this guy has something really bad to say about the album (Laughing).

Mike: Pretty ballsy for the guy to say it straight out, too.

Joe: Yeah! Well, you know, that's the European press. That's what they are like. So I looked at all the titles, so I got to pick a title that no one could grab offence at and that would be easy to understand. So I looked at all the titles and the only one that really popped out was "Surfing with the Alien" I thought, "They obviously know that it's funny and everyone can read it. It's not weird, like ‘Ice 9'; it's not enigmatic like ‘Echo'. So I called up the record company and I said to the production manager (Jim Kaslasky), "Jim, I want to change the title of the album to Surfing with the Alien", and the first words out of his mouth are, "That's great! We should put my namesake on the cover". Then he goes on to tell me because of how he looks, he's about 6'4, long platinum blond hair, when he used to do radio in Boston, they use to call him the Silver Surfer.

Mike: (Laugh)

Joe: And I said, "What is a Silver Surfer?" He couldn't believe it that I didn't know about the Silver Surfer, so anyway, he quickly sent me to the first edition examples of the Silver Surfer comic strips. He said, "I know these guys at Marvel, I bet we could get the cover for the cover of the album, we could probably use the moment where Norin Radd is born out of the hand of Galactus", as he's telling me, I'm saying, "What?! What are you talking about?"

Mike: (Laugh) Yeah!

Joe: Anyway, I like the imagery because at the time there was a lot of horrible, terrible, violent, disgusting album covers out that were selling a lot of thrash records. I was signed to a label that was making a lot of success out of selling these albums. So in my contract was that the record company could not force me use negative images on my album cover. I actually had it written into my contract. (Laugh)

Mike: Nice one.

Joe: So they (the label) were struggling with this guy who played instrumental music and what they were going to do and how were they going to market me. So when that little exchange happened between Jim and I, it was just perfect; and when the guys at the record company saw we could get the Silver Surfer on the album cover, they thought ,"Oh, this is great", you know? This is an iconic image that no one has used yet. It's perfect for somebody who doesn't sing. So, the rest is history, it's true.

Mike: That cover sold me. That was the reason I bought the album. It's totally cool.

Joe: A lot of people have said that, you know. Let me tell you a funny story really quick. The album gained popularity and I was still living in Berkley, California. One of my students was the art director at Tower records, back then, a thriving record store. He had created a store long window display. I mean this is a big, big record store. For the entire length of the wall, it was the largest display of the "Silver Surfer" you would have ever seen in your life, right. His name was Zak Wilson. Zak was a great… he still is a great artist. He's a working artist now. Anyway, without my knowledge the guy that was writing the revised comic strips for the Silver Surfer lived in the area and used to go to town records. So one day he walks into the store and he sees his character displayed everywhere. He's thinking, "What is this; that's my comic strip". So he finds out that there is this guy Joe Satriani, he's got a new record out. So he, as you did, bought the record based on the image and he eventually wrote my name into the comic series. There's a troubled world of Satriani in issue #13, I think.



Mike: I remember reading that issue and wondering how that happened, Joe. Now when you recently formed up with Chickenfoot I thought the most interesting aspect about that project was that you were going to participate as an active member of a band contributing as a songwriter with other musicians. How was that experience for you?

Joe: Fantastic! I told you a little about me in the younger years having only experience in rock bands. So when this started up it was so natural. I mean, it felt so familiar to me; it was almost like I was 14 years old and in my first rock band playing, you know the Stones and Led Zeppelin. The only difference is I could actually play guitar (because when I was 14 and I could barely play). So it was like this explosion of all this stuff I have been storing up for decades of this kind of music and finally I was in a band where every other player in the band was sort of complementing with the way they play with the stuff, I was playing and it was sort of mutual. We sort of synced up together and at the same time we were looking at each other going, "How is it possible that a group of guys from different places in the music industry are somehow coming together and it's clicking like that, you know?" It was so exciting and always fun, I mean the vibe is very much fun. I should point out that this record was really a do-it-yourself project, we had no record playing involvement. It was Sam, Chad and Mike jamming at Sam's club in Cabo San Lucas, for just a couple of months. Then they draw me into it and we are all thinking, "Oh, we know there's the Chili Peppers, theirs Sam's solo career with Mike and there's my solo career, this probably won't work, so let's just do it for fun". Months go by and were meeting together, 2 or 3 days at a time, separated by a few months of work, with us going off with our separate project. It's starting to come together and everyone says, you know we really want this to be a band so we paid for the whole thing ourselves and didn't get into the industry until the record was done. Then we sought out the most independent deal we could which was with Gary Arnold at Best Buy, which was great because he became an extension of the band because he really knew what we were about. So the whole thing ……if you could ever conceive of doing it the right way, in every way, this was it.

Mike: Was Chickenfoot a one time deal, or do you guy think you will put another album out?

Joe: Oh, we're definitely putting another record out; we've started to write for the record, and I think were thinking of getting together for two days, which is not unusual for us. So, come April, when I come back from the Hendrix tour (The 2010 Experience Hendrix tour running in March), we'll spend those 2 days just putting whatever we've got on tape. Anytime we get together it's always fireworks. There are always good things happening. We make sure, when we get together, that we are in a studio that can record it, because we take that with us, after those two days and that becomes the inspiration to write more, to see how we can turn it into a next record.

Mike: The Hendrix tour - is that what you are going to be doing for the next little while? Promoting their new album Sony are releasing of unfound Hendrix music?

Joe: Yeah! What I am really doing right now, I've been doing TV, radio and press for my "Live in Paris" DVD.

Mike: Yeah; just watched the DVD last night.

Joe: I will be on Jimmy Fallon on Monday night. I just did the tapping for that metal show. I think we have some other stuff lined up as well for this month, so during the month of February I'm still doing this. When I'm out with the Hendrix tour, I'll be doing in-stores promoting the Live DVD and showing off the new 24 Fret Ibanez guitar at stores.The guys on the Hendrix tour really aren't signed on to promote anything.

Mike: (Laughs)

Joe: …which is part of the attraction of doing the tour - it gives everybody a break from their career, you know, as promo people…which is a big part of what we do. All of a sudden, everyone goes, "Great, now I can be just a guitar player", like when I am at home or with my friends, and just play whatever they want. In this case we are celebrating Jimi Hendrix and we're just playing with each other, which will be great. We get to mix it up every night and we get to stand on the side of the stage and watch each other play and just basically have a great time with the audience. It's one of those rare concerts where it's not just us and them. I don't think there's a big distinction between the audience and the band. The band is celebrating with the audience, the legacy of Jimmy Hendrix. I think that makes the vibe very, very, special, very unique. Anyway that tour will start and end in March and then I will be back living my double life a Chickenfoot guy and a solo artist. (Laugh)



Mike: This is my last question, Joe. Do you have to do any extra touring work and PR for this new Live In Paris DVD/CD? I just watched the DVD last night and I really liked it. I'm wondering if there's any other work you have to do around that new release?

Joe: Well, the kind of thing we do now, I will spend a few hours every day doing radio and press interviews of all kinds from all over the world - overseas in Asia gets done at night and early morning stuff for Europe, and right about now for the U.S. and Canada. Then I will be visiting some of the radio stations and doing the in-store when I'm out doing the Hendricks tour, so double duty with that and then doing the appearances. These days you don't get an opportunity to go on TV and play an instrumental song. It used to be possible 10 years ago. I've been on Letterman three or four times and done some of the other late night shows, but you just don't see that anymore.

Mike: True.

Joe: You've got to have a singer to do those shows now. I will be sitting in with Jimmy Fallon's band which is great. I'll get to play with The Roots one of my favorite hip hop bands, too.

Mike: That's interesting.

Joe: I'm looking forward to that.

Mike: Cool! Thank you for your time, sir. It was really good talk to you.

Joe: Thank you