Strange Beautiful Music

by Joe Satriani

  When you're young, you don't realize you're being observed every day by your parents, and they're worrying about you. But that’s what was happening with mine, and they must have thought that I was really crazy about music, but I just needed a little bit of help. My parents let us rehearse in our basement, which was crazy, and I don't know what possessed them to let us do that. I remember being very proud of them when they would talk down the police, who would come over to try to stop us for making too much noise. Once in a while, my mother would be concerned about the kind of songs we were singing, if she heard sexual connotations or demonic verses or something. We were just acting out, I suppose, trying to be like the bands that inspired us. But the neighbors hated us, and they would call the police, and I'd see my parents arguing our case and think they were really cool. They earned the respect of all my friends as well because they would stand up to the square neighborhood.

  I still felt like I was going nowhere, mostly because the musical ambitions of the other guys in the band were different from mine. I still felt like I needed to understand the secrets of music, and I wasn't getting it from being in a rock 'n' roll band, and I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how I was going to understand what Mozart understood, or Miles Davis, or Jimi Hendrix, and no one was offering up any hints to me. The other big problem our band had was the lack of money. It was very difficult to make enough, and I didn't want to have to get a regular job. I was trying to figure out how musicians really made a living so they could take care of themselves.

  Back on the academic front, I didn't get into Juilliard, which broke my heart. After that, I was accepted to the Berklee College of Music and went up to Boston to check it out, and I was horrified that it really was more like Animal House! I wanted the secrets of the musical universe unveiled to me, but it was so disappointing. My parents helped me look for a college, and we found this place on Long Island just starting up in their first year, Five Towns College. I attended that college for one semester, and that did not go well, because to me it was a joke being in classes with kids who knew one-sixteenth of what I knew. It was just a waste of time. So after a while, I told my dad I was ready to drop out and go pro. He said, "Go for it."

  During this transition, I was fortunate to take two months of intense music lessons from bebop genius and father of cool jazz Lennie Tristano. He taught me what true musical discipline was. His ideas on improvisation as a way of life were eye-opening to me. However, his most important lesson was this: Don't live in the "subjunctive mood." Never worry about what you should have, would have, or could have played. Only play what you want to play. That’s a lesson I still work on to this day.

  I soon wound up in this disco band before it was called disco— they called it "progressive dance" back then, but it was really disco. For almost a year, I was in this band, and it was like being in hell, but I was working, playing music, and making money. The band was like this little corporation: The guys in the band were much older than I was, and they had it all worked out. Although I thought the music was horrible and didn't want to do it for the rest of my life, I really admired these guys who had figured out a way to be musicians and make a living. One guy was a music teacher but he played sax in the band. Another guy, all he did was this: He was the band leader, wrote the charts, and figured out how to get a loan to buy a van we could use to travel on these short tours around the East Coast. That was the first time I went on tour, the summer of 1975, and the whole thing was pretty interesting. Ultimately, that’s also when I learned that I would never do that again, and that I should avoid it if at all possible, as if my survival depended upon it. It was a soul killer, something where you would slowly die as you stood on a bandstand playing popular music for people who didn't really care about you or what you had to say.

  CHAPTER 4 * *

  Satch Goes west

  In the winter of 1976, when I was nineteen, I made my way out west and moved into an apartment with one of my sisters in Berkeley. When I arrived in the Bay Area, I realized that everybody out here was an oddball, so I figured I'd fit in, too! It seemed like there was very little conformity going on. Even the number of famous artists who lived here did nothing to try to be like one another, and that was just something I liked.

  To be honest, when I think back on what drew me out to the Bay Area, I have to say the weather was an obvious factor, because in Berkeley it was mild and gorgeous, compared to where I grew up in New York! No more suffering through freezing winters and humid 100-degree summers. It was also a lot cheaper to live out on the West Coast if you were at the bottom of the financial ladder. Since I was young and penniless, it seemed like a lot of fun.

  I wound up renting a house in Berkeley right across from a music store called Second Hand Guitars, right next to Fat Albert’s restaurant. I'd go across the street and play guitar all day long. One day the owner, Jim Larson, asked me, "Hey, you're not going to buy anything, are you?" I told him I wasn't, so he offered me a deal. I could come in and play as often as I wanted, so long as I also gave guitar lessons. I said straight out, "I don't want to get into that again," but he ended up convincing me.

  "Let’s just try it," he said. "I'll put an ad in the paper, and you can teach in the back room or during off-hours."

  We worked out a deal where he got something like $2 off the top of what I was charging per lesson. It was very equitable, and it was fun to teach in a store that had fantastic vintage guitars on the wall and an overall cool environment.

  Larry LaLonde, Primus lead guitarist: Within my age group around town, which was thirteen to fifteen, some of the other guitar players I knew had guitar teachers they were taking lessons from around the Bay Area, and it turned out in a short time we all learned that, ironically, OUR guitar teachers were all taking lessons from this guy Joe Satriani. And we were like, "Whoa, who’s this guy?" And the buzz on Joe at that time, just locally, was that "this guy is better than Eddie Van Halen." As far as kids my age who played guitar were concerned, there was Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads. So when we heard about this guy Joe, who at the time was also in this new band called the Squares, the question among my peers was, "How can we hear this guy?" because most of us were still too young to get in the clubs where his band played. So as fate would have it, I had around that time saved up enough money to go in and buy this Marshall cabinet at a place in Berkeley called Second Hand Guitars. And the day I went in to buy it, I saw this advertisement on the wall for "Guitar Lessons with Joe Satriani"! I couldn't believe it was him, so I immediately signed up for a lesson and he wound up becoming my teacher.

  My teaching had to be flexible, because each student was so different. In one day, I might see Alex Skolnick, Larry LaLonde, David Bryson, and Charlie Hunter. Everyone who took lessons from me had to know the name of every note on the guitar and of every chord. I insisted on it, because otherwise we'd have no basis from which to move in whatever direction a particular student wanted to head.

  Larry LaLonde: Joe was very good at assessing what your level as a player was right off, which for me at that time was still very low. The way it worked was: He would give you an assignment to learn over the next week, which was some form of exercise, a scale, for instance. When you came back in for the next lesson, he would also have you bring in a song you really wanted to learn, which he would figure out in two seconds. And the deal was, if you could pull off whatever technical lesson he'd given you to learn the week before, he would show you how to play whatever Van Halen or Randy Rhoads riff. So it was kind of a motivation to practice and learn the things he wanted you to, and it really made me want to practice, practice, practice whatever the technical lesson was that week. It would often be something repetitive and not that exciting from a playing point of view, but it was really fundamental exercise as far as getting your fingers together. It was the kind of routine where you would go up and down the neck of the guitar and if you'd miss even one note, he'd make you start over. So I would sit there and do these things that were hard exerci
ses week after week, so even when I was practicing on my own, he had ingrained a discipline into me in which if I missed even one note, I would have to go back and start over. That turned out to be a really good method of practicing, and it helped when he started teaching me theory and how notes, scales, and chords went together, which at the time made no sense to me. So, for the first couple of months, he would explain these things to me, and I'd nod my head, secretly confused. Then I remember one day it all clicked and I was like, "Oh my God." It was a pretty amazing moment for me as a player.

  Along with Larry, I was also teaching guys like Kirk Hammett and Alex Skolnick, who had gigs already where people were depending on them not only to write music, but also to shred. So part of the lesson always had to be about lead guitar, which would always involve more hard-core practicing. They had a real desire to get some work done fast. So if a guitar player like Alex came in and wanted to know how Allan Holdsworth, Hendrix, and Michael Schenker did what they did, then I'd tell them, and that’s what we'd work on. That was our deal, and they happily took abuse from me because they said they wanted to be the greatest, and I'd always be very up front with them: "You want to be the greatest, and you want to be the greatest by next week? Then this is what it takes . . ."

  Kirk Hammett, Metallica lead guitarist: Even back then he sounded like he does now. I mean, all the components of his guitar style were in place back then. I was just so totally blown away by his technique and his style. The first thing he said to me is, "Okay, if you're going to take lessons from me I expect you to learn your lessons. If you come in next week without learning the lessons, you're just going to be wasting our time and there’s no real reason for you to be taking lessons." So he basically told me to have my act together when I came in the next week. So I had the lesson, learned everything over the week, and came back the next week. It just totally grew from there . . . I learned a lot of things from Joe, a lot of things about technique especially. I also learned that feel is better than anything and everything. So I've always strived be a player with a lot of feeling rather than a player with a lot of technique. I was always aware of the fact that you can say just as much with five notes as you can with five thousand notes. Learning that was very, very important to me.1

  As I got more popular, I wound up with sixty students, and I could teach seven days a week, eight hours a day. I had a long waiting list, so that’s how I made my living while I was playing with my band.

  The Squares, my West Coast band, got together in late '79. When I first moved out to California, I had hung out with my sister’s soon-to-be ex-husband, Neil Sheehan, a guy I'd written music with back when I was fourteen years old. He was a very smart guy and an engineer, but he'd also had a short stint playing with a pop band called the Critters that had some marginal success before my time on the East Coast. He was also a creative songwriter. He and I decided to try to put a band together where he could be a manager and a songwriter, and we both could find really cool guys to play with. He knew a little bit more about the local scene than I did; I was still quite young and not old enough to go to a lot of the clubs. So the Squares were born one night after my brother-in-law and I went down to the Old Waldorf club to see a local performer, Jane Dornacker, play. Her backup band was these two guys, Jeff Campitelli on drums and Andy Milton on bass. After the show, we went up to them and said, "You know, we're thinking of putting a band together from scratch, and want it to be this kind of a band. Would you be interested in doing it?"

  The Squares playing in Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley circa '80

  PHOTO BY RUBINA SATRIANI

  Jeff Campitelli, drummer: I remember Joe had come down to one of our shows to check out the band I happened to be playing in with one of his students, and we just hit it off backstage. We started talking and quickly found we had very similar interests in music, and he said he was putting together something, and he really liked my drumming and our bass player. So we got together at Joe’s apartment the very next night and he started playing some demo ideas he had, and, of course, just listening to his playing, I immediately thought, "Wow, this guy’s really good. He can actually play!" And at that time, I was coming from more of a school of playing with a lot of punk-type bands, just real fast three-chord stuff, and I remember being impressed by the fact that Joe could rock, but that he also had this incredible technical ability. So it struck me right away that it was pretty amazing. We all decided that night to get together and play. Within a couple days after that, we got together in my parents' garage—I was still living at home at the time—and played some Beatles tunes and a couple of Joe’s tunes he'd been writing with his brother-in-law, and we just hit it off musically. It was one of those things you don't question; it just felt right. So we just started the band right there—we all said, "Hey, this is pretty cool," and started rehearsing. Andy had star quality without a doubt, and was one of those very strong yet extremely vulnerable, beautifully gifted singers. He was a fun bass player; he wasn't a guy who would ever consider trying toward any kind of virtuosity. He just wanted to rock 'n' roll; that was his thing. He had a beautiful voice, and the combination of being big, tall, and handsome and really sensitive was just this thing that made you want to watch him.

  I could sense that Jeff liked the same drummers that I did, and although he was a lot younger than I was, he had elements of Ringo Starr, Charlie Watts, Mitch Mitchell, John Bonham, and Keith Moon. These were drummers who were all part of my foundation—they played in the bands that I thought wrote and played the greatest music, yet they were all different from each other. So it turned out that Jeff and I had this mutual appreciation for how different these drummers were and how they were at the core of the bands' ways of expressing themselves. If you had tried to switch their drummers out, they would kind of fall flat, so we knew it was more than just the technical ability: It was their feel, and that’s what attracted me to Jeff’s playing. I just thought he had a great feel on his own, and then when you presented him with music, he would seek out what he thought was the best feel for that piece of music, as compared to other drummers, who might simply take whatever you had and filter it through their "thing."

  Jeff Campitelli: I remember Joe had a really great Marshallamp rock tone, and at that time, he came into the group playing what was—and I don't want to pigeonhole him—a style that was a little more Van Halen-esque, because at the time they were huge. Back then, Joe was also playing through this Roland JC-120, which gave him a nice clean, chorus-y sound, and he could blend them together. I was coming from a more John Bonham, heavy-rock background. Back then, the Police were breaking, too, and New Wave was becoming more commonplace and breaking on a larger scale, and we were all three drawn to that. Once I heard Stewart Copeland, I thought, "Ooh, I can do a little fancy hi-hat thing," and Andy was definitely into Sting and trying to sing a little more like that. So we had a few ska-influenced beats and vocal parts coming in there, and collectively, along with my style of playing, I thought we stood out because we had this great pop vocalist and this heavy, great guitar player who really rocked. When we started rockin', it just felt right—an interesting combination of heavy but good melodies and some great background vocals, with some pop in there, too. So we thought, "All right, it’s different," because nobody else was really doing anything like it at the time.

  What made the Squares stand out from our Bay Area peers began with our very unique approach. For some reason, we decided right away that the band wasn't going to be about shredding at all—that was the part of the Squares that reflected New Wave music. It was guitar, bass, and drums, and a lot of the lead vocals were sung harmonized all the time, sort of like the Everly Brothers.

  Jeff Campitelli: It was a really great music scene, with lots of clubs, lots of gigs, and lots of bands, and we immediately jumped right in. We had local management that came through Joe’s brother-in-law—he did all the schmoozing with club managers so we didn't have to, because Joe and I didn't hang out a lot at these places. Andy was more
social than me and Joe, but we were able to open up for some of the larger bands in the area. So for instance, our very first gig was opening for Greg Kihn at Keystone in Palo Alto, which was probably a 500- or 600-seat club. Then we found ourselves opening for Huey Lewis, and the Go-Go’s would come through town and we'd open for them, and Squeeze, just all these great, larger touring bands!

  We worked because we were different enough but still could fit in with some of the more punky, New Wave bands, so we played a ton of shows with bands like that. Then, when the metal stuff started to happen, some of those bands would open for us. So in a short time we built up a nice following, which allowed us to start headlining on the weekdays because we got to know all the club managers. We could just kind of keep up with everybody. We were all pretty good players, and I still get compliments to this day, like, "Man, you guys were the best band 'cause you guys could all play. We were all trying to write 'My Sharona,' and you guys would just come out and just jam for ten minutes on a song." Joe would stretch out on a solo, but we would hold the audience’s attention throughout our shows. So quickly we also found ourselves headlining on weekends, and before long, we were selling 300, 400, or 500 tickets a show on Friday and Saturday nights.