Interviews

 

JOE SATRIANI

 

Words: Rod Yates

 

When most people take a holiday, they try and get as far away from their work as possible. Legendary guitarist Joe Satriani, by way of contrast, likes to jam. A lot. The last time he put down his instrument and took a break, he says, was one year ago when he drove around Italy. In the days leading up to this interview, however – a scheduled break from touring intended to provide him with a brief respite from the rigors of the road – he’s traded licks with a list of artists that would make any casual six stringer weep.

“I’ve played with so many people in the last eight days,” he starts. “I’ve jammed with Steve Vai and Steve Lukather, Slash… it’s a really long list. Billy Gibbons, Steve Miller, Paul Gilbert, Johnny Highland, Scott Henderson, Duff McKagan, Matt Sorum, Chester Benington from Linkin Park and Mark McGrath…”

Given that the San Francisco based guitarist has sold more than 10 million albums – a remarkable feat for an instrumental artist – it’s perhaps not surprising that he’s never short of partners with whom to play. In fact so enthusiastic is he about the idea of jamming with other musicians that he took the idea one step further in 1995 by coming up with the concept of G3, a touring package in which Satriani is joined by two other accomplished players who each perform solo sets before uniting at the end of the night for a shred-fest finale. Accompanying Satriani on the latest G3 stint – which lands in Australia this week – are long-time companion Steve Vai and Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci.

“I became a solo guitarist by accident,” explains Satriani of the motivation behind G3. “I was always the guy in the band, and then purely by accident someone said, ‘Hey, that’s a weird tape, I’d buy that’, and then someone asked me to make another record, and then they said you have to go on tour, and each time I said, ‘It’s not what I do’. And all of a sudden it became what I do. So when I came up for air one year it was like, ‘Where is everybody?’ So when I thought of G3 I thought, Boy, this would be a way to make sure that every year I’m still finding the time to play with friends and other people that I find really amazing.”

Since that inaugural 1995 tour, which featured Vai and Eric Johnson, the likes of Robert Fripp, Michael Shenker and Yngwie Malmsteen have all taken the stage as part of the G3 experience. It’s not surprising that, more than 10 years on, Satriani still gets as much pleasure from the concept as he did that first year.

“Every night we leave the stage laughing at the absurdity of what we make each other do,” he chuckles. “We close our eyes and it’s like we’re five-years-old and we’re in my backyard and we’re just playing crazy music.”

There must be a lot of friendly rivalry between the guitarists on the tour…

“All of us know that the G3 brings the level of what we expect from ourselves up, I think that’s what it’s good for. Every night you know the other two guys are going to be trying their best to play really great, so you just naturally want to bring yourself up to that level.”

As impressive as the cast of past G3 performers is, there’s a notable absence of “new” players involved, despite the fact that Satriani has openly expressed his admiration for The Mars Volta’s Omar Rodriguez and Guns N’Roses ring-in Buckethead.

“Well, this is how it usually works,” he explains of the composition of each year’s bill. “You hear a record and you hear the guitar work on it and you go, ‘Oh my God, that’s great. Wouldn’t it be great if that guy was around and we could hang out and play?’ And then once you move to the next step, which is the G3 idea, the next question is, ‘Is this guy comfortable walking onstage by himself as a solo act and playing?’ Cos maybe it’s not his thing. Maybe his thing is the band. It’s like, Kirk Hammett or Tom Morello, I would love to have them out on G3, but they kind of do whatever they want in their own band anyway. I’m sure they’d probably think to themselves, Why would I go out on G3 when I’d just have to bring my entire band with me? And so I respect that, because not everyone’s cut out for it.”

Ask Satriani about the lessons he’s learned since his Surfing With Alien album introduced him to the mainstream in 1987, and he recounts a story of the time he joined Alice Cooper onstage to jam back in the early ’90s. Following a typically over the top introduction from the shock-rock king, he ran onstage and plugged in, only to spend the entire song looking on in horror as his amp refused to work and techs tried in vein to fix it.

“What was even funnier was that I was kind of dressed up for the occasion as well,” he laughs, “because I remember working with Alice in the studio on the record that spawned that tour, Hey Stoopid. While I was recording he was getting dressed up for the album cover, so he had on all this make-up and was going crazy with whips and chains, and he would come into the studio and listen to what I was doing, we’d laugh about his get-up and then he’d go back in the other room and get photographed. When they invited me to play I knew Alice liked to be theatrical, and so I think I had my hair tied up like a samurai and I had a leather jacket and I came running out…” He trails off, still laughing at the memory. “If I’d just walked out casually in jeans and T-shirt it would have been less embarrassing. There’s a lesson there.”

 

 

 

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