Strange Beautiful Music

by Joe Satriani

  CHAPTER 2 * *

  High School Confidential

  Almost as soon as I got that Univox amp and my electric guitar, I started playing with some older guys in school. I was in a few no-name, no-gig bands before I joined a group called Mihchuacan. This was a band of guys who were a year or two ahead of me in high school. I'm not even sure how I got in the band, but somehow I wound up playing with these guys.

  I learned A LOT from the guitar player, John Riccio, who could not only play a lot of different styles of music, jam, and improvise, but he could also play rock very well, either with a pick or by Travis picking. He was a very versatile player, and I was not; I was just a straight-ahead electric guitar player who used a pick. We had a lot of great times playing together, just the two of us, as he would instruct me with the band’s material before we got together with the whole band for practice.

  I remember the first show I ever did was a high school dance in the gym. I had extreme butterflies, so to help with that, I brought my Hendrix candle to the show. It was a very small, empty bottle of cheap champagne with a multicolored candle stuck in it. I would burn this candle and several candles like it every time I practiced. It was like a confidence booster to get me in touch with the spirit of Hendrix, to increase my talent, I guess. I don't know what I was thinking at the time—I just wanted some Hendrix mojo. So I brought it to the gig, and we played on these little risers that the school had provided for us. I was kind of in the middle by the drums. I remember feeling exhilarated the first time I stepped onstage to perform before a real rock 'n' roll crowd, but at the same time, I had my back turned to the audience, and I was petrified. I remember thinking it was the greatest thing ever, even though I don't think I really faced the audience throughout the whole performance!

  After that, I went from being a kid on the football team to being a kid who just wanted to play music all the time. At the time I must have been responding to Jimi’s pure genius, tempered with his sound, which was completely unconventional. In other words, he sounded like a virtuoso who never practiced a day in his life. He just sounded like a totally natural guitar player. Of course, years later, I'd learn that wasn't the case. I toured with Billy Cox, Hendrix’s bass player, who told me that Hendrix practiced all day long. He said, "You hear those silly stories about someone sleeping with a guitar, that’s the way he did it. He always had the guitar on, he was always working on his rhythm-and-blues guitar playing. That was his love, and he would practice it over and over again. He wouldn't practice scales; he would practice rhythm."

  Once I'd caught the fever, I became obsessed with practicing, to the point that I was relentless about it: I had to do it every weekday, and then on the weekends. When I got to be sixteen and seventeen, I would stretch it longer when the summers came. I would just stay in and practice all day long. My friends would always call me on a Saturday night, asking, "Where are you?" or saying, "We're going to this big party," and I would say, "I'll meet you there after eleven. I'm busy practicing." I had to prove to myself that I could play as well as I had the day before, as well or better.

  As I continued to grow more and more into myself as a guitar player, I started playing with a group called Tarsus, which featured Tom Garr on drums, Steve Muller on bass, and Danny Calvagna on vocals. Pete Maher replaced Tom on drums when Tom went to college, and we added a second vocalist, Paul Lancaster. It was a lot of fun. I did a lot of growing up through crazy rock 'n' roll experiences, the kind you have when you're young and in a band!

  Steve Vai: Joe and I went to high school together. He was three or four years older than me, so his social group was very different from mine. He was part of the older cool kids. When you're twelve years old, a sixteen-year-old that plays the guitar can seem like a god. But there was no mistaking that he was very well known in our school and town as a great guitar player. He was the only one in our town, or many surrounding towns, who could really play. He was in a very cool band called Tarsus and they did rock covers from Led Zeppelin. I was in a band with the younger brother of the singer who was in Joe’s band. We tried to emulate them in every way—we even named our band "Susrat," which is Tarsus backward.

  Joe was different from anyone else in our school. He exuded a cool that permeated the vicinity he was in. He had the longest hair of anyone and everything he did or said just seemed cool to us. We all looked up to him and talked about him all the time. We would wait in the hallways that we knew he was going to pass through just to say hi to him. My standard presentation was a nervous smile, a little wave of my hand, and a "Hi, Joe." Any elicited response from him was fetishized and discussed among our group.

  It was really great having someone like that in our fold that we could worship. I mean, this was a guy who could actually play the solo to Led Zeppelin’s "Heartbreaker"! Although I was listening to guys like Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, and Ritchie Blackmore while growing up, in all honesty, I thought Joe was better than any of them. I couldn't figure out how someone who was living in my town, who was sitting in front of me, could be so good. Better than my so-called heroes. Joe was my hero. Even when I was becoming successful with folks like Zappa and Roth, I would talk to the press about this guy who was leagues above us all. I thought that if the idea of a person becoming successful was based on their talent, then Joe would be an icon one day. I discovered this to be true because I can count on one crippled hand the number of people I have felt this way about, and Joe is one of them.

  As soon as I started playing high school dances, kids started to ask me to give them guitar lessons. So when I was still fifteen, I started giving guitar lessons in my bedroom! My parents thought it was the greatest thing ever, mostly because it gave me money to buy my own guitar strings. It was mostly kids, but I had a few grown-up students as well. That’s where I wound up teaching Steve Vai, and that’s how we started our long friendship.

  Steve Vai: There’s no way to quantify the importance my lessons with Joe had for me. From the first time I ever laid eyes on a guitar I was enamored with it. I never felt I was good enough to own one or play it, perhaps because of self-esteem issues. Finally, when I was thirteen years old, I got ahold of a guitar but never told anyone I played it. A friend of mine who lived a few houses down was taking lessons from Joe and he gave me Joe’s number. Joe’s a great teacher for many reasons, firstly because he could really play! He knew all the cool songs that I wanted to learn and his rock playing sounded authentic. Every time he touched the guitar something musical came out. he had a vast understanding of music theory and how it could apply to the guitar, and was very strict and demanded that I understand and memorize any theory he taught me.

  When you're a teacher, you realize that you have to clearly encapsulate some unrelated technical ideas that you take for granted and understand and put them into words so someone else will understand them. That process crystallizes the lesson not only for the student, but for the teacher as well. So, I found the process of having to organize my thoughts about music helped me crystallize them for myself, and maybe understand them just a little more.

  I got a kick out of sitting across from a thirteen-year-old Steve Vai and realizing, "This kid is going to be playing better than me." I knew it, I just instinctively knew it. One thing was for sure: When I suddenly saw talent in front of me, like I did with Steve just innocently playing, it instantly made sense to me that there was no other way to be a teacher than to simply surrender everything that you knew. It was amazing to watch him take something that I figured out maybe just months ago, and watch him learn it and come back and play it better than I could. I thought, "Well then, if you're a teacher, you have to do it, surrender everything you know." You're bound by some sort of moral compass to do it that way.

  Steve Vai: He set an amazingly high standard and pulled me up to it. I'm sure he gave freely to all of his students. He was a selfless teacher, meaning he gave you everything he had. But most importantly he inspired you to find yourself within it. He taught me to think independently an
d to find my own voice on the instrument. He always seemed to have a warehouse of information that never stopped flowing. He was very effective when teaching things such as form, style, exercises, scales, chords, theory, and so forth, because he was an example. I was able to see with my own eyes that what he was teaching he had mastered. That’s the richest kind of inspiration. Along with that, he did not skimp on the academics. I was a subpar student in school and struggled terribly to comprehend and retain anything I learned in academic studies, but when Joe told me to learn something I committed it to memory unconditionally. It’s amazing what you are capable of doing when someone you deeply respect has great expectations of you.

  There was no time more exciting than 4:00 P.M. Thursday afternoons when I would walk across town to his house and sit in his room for my lesson. Even his room was the coolest. He had rock 'n' roll posters covering every wall, a stack of exceptional records, amplifiers, guitars—the works. My lessons were the most important thing in my life. They were treasures. They were my escape from some of the personal challenges I was going through. My lessons were my sanctuary and were all I cared about and focused on. My entire goal in life at the time was to make sure that Joe would approve of how I learned and grew from the previous week’s lesson. Just being in his room was glorious. There’s a psychological exercise that people do if they are experiencing a difficult time in their life. They focus on a "happy place," a time or place in their life where they felt safe, content, happy, and secure. For me, one of those places is Joe’s teenage bedroom and my guitar lessons.

  CHAPTER 3 * *

  Learning Curves

  During this time, when I was sixteen and seventeen, I would turn on the radio and be mesmerized by what I was hearing. But every time I played the guitar, even though I loved it, there was always that frustration of wishing I could play better. I think for every musician, that’s a daily reality where, if you're lucky, you can say, "Wow, I am a little better today than yesterday. I do remember this. I'm not in the dark with this concept." Even with that, I always ended every session thinking, "I wish I was better—maybe tomorrow."

  Back then, influences were flying at me from all sides of the music spectrum. Growing up in the seventies exposed me to a crazy variety of musical styles. The radio was playing the Beatles; Led Zeppelin; America; Steve Miller; Steely Dan; Crosby, Stills & Nash; the Stones; Queen; Humble Pie; all that classic rock. So from 1970 to 1974, my formative years of learning how to play electric guitar while in high school, I heard all that music, everything from James Taylor through Black Sabbath, and I loved all of it. So I kept thinking, "I want to be able to play acoustic like James Taylor; I want to be able to make this dark, incredible music like Tony Iommi." I was still chasing Hendrix, but I was curious about all these other artists like John McLaughlin and Allan Holdsworth, and what they were doing. To me, it seemed like I needed time to stand still, so I could have another couple decades to work this all out. That’s why I was staying in on Friday and Saturday nights practicing: because I was overwhelmed by the amount of talent out there. I would ask myself, "How do I get to the point where I sound as good as Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck? How do I play this Black Sabbath song and really sound like I'm where Tony Iommi is?" I was totally driven at that early age, from fourteen on through my later teens.

  In high school, I had this brilliant music theory teacher, Bill Westcott, who really unlocked the power of the musical brain to me. His message was, "Your fingers may fail you, you may not turn out to be as physically talented as you think, but your mind can keep going, and the musician in your head is the one who’s going to instruct your body how to best use your physical talent or lack thereof." This was a very important lesson to learn, and a very tough one when you're a punky teenager playing Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin in a band and getting the adulation of your peers. To have some guy say, "Hey, you may suck when you turn twenty-two, and it may turn out everybody’s better than you." So teaching me music theory, music history, ear training, learning how to sight-read better—all those things were invaluable. I really count that as the most important instruction of my whole life, those two years taking advanced music theory at Carle Place High School.

  Me and high school music teacher Bill Westcott at Carle Place High School in '73

  PHOTO BY SATRIANI FAMILY ARCHIVES

  I remember very clearly back in New York—when I was already playing guitar at a point where I thought I was pretty good—sitting on my bed and turning on the radio, and on came a song by Yes. I remember sitting there listening to it, thinking, "I don't know what they're doing—what is that? How does a band create a piece of music so easy to listen to, and yet it’s made up of parts I can't even recognize. How are they building that? How are they putting that together? How do they understand music rhythmically and harmonically and melodically, and make it all fit together?" And then of course the sound was fantastic as well. That’s when I realized that I wasn't really that good after all, and that I could benefit from some music theory.

  As a beginner, I would learn some chords, I would hit one chord I really liked, and then play another chord. I started playing them back and forth, and I would think to myself, "That sounds like a song," like I could hear somebody singing on top of that. So I would write the names of the chords down, and then I would say, "What does it sound like?" So I'd come up with a name for the song, and maybe write a description, like, "This song is about a bluebird." So every time that I would pick up the guitar to practice, that’s what I would do, play my made-up little two- or three-chord song. This was before I took lessons, before I started playing with any other friends who played guitar. So I was left to my own compositional devices for material to play. As time went on, what I found was that it was more interesting, more compelling, and more artistically satisfying for me when I would play or work on music that came from an inner vision. Every time I went back to a song like that, I said, "This is where it’s at; this is what makes the world go 'round for me. Not playing this other song that’s popular in my school at the moment."

  Early on, I experienced the emptiness of simply playing other people’s music, even when it went over well. I realized that it wasn't like playing my own music, that I didn't have that insight into the composition process like I did with my own music. I learned in my music theory classes how conductors would really have to learn and understand a piece of music. They'd have to get into the heart and soul of the composer to properly direct the orchestra. And I thought, that’s what it is—when I'm in a band playing a Black Sabbath song for a high school dance, I don't know why the guys in Black Sabbath wrote it. Well, no wonder I liked playing my own music, because this is a very long, accepted tradition in music, to be emotionally connected to what you're playing. That’s the mark of a true artist.

  What I started to understand was that the whole thing was a musical statement, that I couldn't just break it down and listen to the guitar part and say, "He’s not doing much." That’s when I started to understand that "technical perfection" had very little to do with it. So, for instance, when you hear John Lee Hooker singing "I'm in the Mood," you really can't find any way to dissect it, because what he’s playing is such a beautiful, unique, and original statement that you have to figure out how to classify it in a way that doesn't break it down to its technical elements. It’s selling the music short to say, "Well, he’s playing the E chord, and then he’s singing this note on top of it . . ." Because that’s really not what’s happening. If that’s what was happening, then everybody who knew how to play a guitar could do it.

  As I felt myself continuing to develop as a player, I applied my new listening lesson to Hendrix, and from there, I applied it to other players. Jeff Beck is so different from Hendrix; as players they're two different people. That’s what we hear when we hear these guys: we hear them. Music gets filtered through their fingers and the technique they've picked up along the way, but their talent is really getting their unique personalities to come through their music. An
d that to me was the most important musical quest. I knew that’s what I should be practicing at that age. I learned theory and fingering; I learned how to Travis pick, the details. But those are just little things in comparison to the real lesson: how to bring "yourself" out and represent it musically.

  Jimi remained my greatest teacher throughout it all, directly influencing my use of feedback within melodies, solos, and even as harmonic beds. All that probably comes from him directly, from his recordings, both in the studio and live. He could use feedback to be musical—in other words, he would play with the notes melodically, just the way a horn player would. Before Jimi, people didn't really do that. They would use the noise simply to be a noise. I picked up on what Jimi did and it became part of my style. My blues style of playing is really based on his blues style; I know that his style is based on Buddy Guy and Albert King and a host of others, but I started with him. Then, as I got better at playing blues, I looked to Jimi’s influences and educated myself all the way back. Today I know that every time I play blues, I'm pacing myself and looking for the same end result that I heard when I was listening to Hendrix’s "Red House" back as a teenager.

  By the time I was seventeen, I was so focused on mastering my craft and pursuing my dream that I actually graduated high school half a year early. I was a disruptive element and the school was happy to see me go. Hard to believe now, but back then, a rock 'n' roll playing, longhaired guy was just someone they didn't want in the school. It was a public high school in a small town on Long Island, and in retrospect, it’s laughable, because that group of us who were musicians were actually the good guys, the harmless ones. The real troublemakers were the ones who didn't look like it, but society back then still did not like longhaired rock musicians, so we were vilified for wanting to do what we wanted to do. So they didn't want those of us who were good students but looked like rockers around. Maybe by getting a few of us who were musicians out of there, they were thinking, "They may not be playing at the high school dances anymore, but they won't be influencing the other kids to grow their hair," or whatever. They also probably thought we were doing drugs all the time, which we weren't. What I was doing all the time was practicing music.