Guitarist Joe Satriani, who’s touring behind his latest album “The Elephants of Mars,” will be stopping in Alabama Nov. 14 for a show in Huntsville.
I’ve been wanting to tell Joe Satriani my Grand Am story for at least a couple decades. On a recent afternoon I finally got to do it.
This comes up a lot in the Q&As I do before the shows out on tour, because generally music students want to learn how to join up with everybody else and be part of the movement. But the ultimate reward is actually when you flaunt your originality, which you have by default. Everyone’s unique. It’s just that there’s no exercise for it, no book about it, no scales or chords you can play every day that make you original.
But when you’re making an album, at least when I make records, it’s serious business because I know I’m the luckiest instrumental guitar player in the world. I get to make albums, first of all, and that it’s going to last forever. Whatever you record and release becomes the definitive version for your fans, so I’m careful about that.
We all learn from bands that we like. Like “When the Levee Breaks,” you mentioned Led Zeppelin earlier, the drums were recorded in a stairwell in an old castle and then slowed down. And then vocals and other instruments added on top of these slowed-down drums. And so the drums, it kind of seems like he’s playing on his own, not really listening to where the song eventually goes.
There’s both a relenting anxiety that’s represented in the drums and then this outpouring of their emotion, which is really the melody, as they’re trying to explain who they are, and trying to figure out how to get people to see them for who they really are. I started writing that song and album while I was on tour with a Greg Kihn Band, which is a local San Francisco area band , that I joined for one year, mainly because I had to figure out a way to pay for the first record, “Not Of This Earth,” on my own record label.And I thought, oh this would be a great way for me to just have solid work for a year and I could pay off that record and work on making another.
So they signed me, and I went back and I started working with John Cuniberti at Hyde Street Studios for a couple of days at a time here and there. But I thought, oh what the hell. So I bring this dusty old wah-wah pedal to the studio, and I think it was an about 11 to four in the afternoon session, and we’re just getting to the end, where I have to play the melody in the front and then the melody comes back after the solos and does this long solo.
And so I call the label and asked if we could change the title and find some different artwork and they acquiesced. And that’s a whole other story. We got the Silver Surfer on the cover and everything. All these funny little turns of events. The sophomore record is supposed to be the slump, and it turned out to be the hit.
While they were talking about their frustration trying to find a guitar player, there was a guitar magazine in the room, and I was on the cover. Doug said, “What about this guy? I just met him a couple of months ago. He seems like a cool guy.” So it’s totally random. But he took performing and his audience so seriously. I was so impressed. Every show, he was the one who worked the hardest and wanted to make every show amazing. He liked everybody to be themselves, didn’t tell you what to play.
So it seemed a little premature. But sometimes that happens, sometimes it’s a good thing for a band to start when they’re not ready.
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