Strange Beautiful Music

by Joe Satriani

  At that time, I believe I only owned two Marshall half stacks, because that’s what I had been using in the Squares, and I didn't have any extra equipment. So I had the two Marshall slant-bottoms and the two Marshall heads. One was a late-sixties 100-watt, slightly modified, and the other was the MKII Lead, but I didn't own any small amps. I believe I had an MXR Flanger. In different moments on that record, I definitely needed distortion, and I think I had my original Big Muff Pi by Electro-Harmonix, which was still working at the time, and DS-1 and OD-1 Boss pedals. I used my two Echoplex tape delays as well. Every time Jeff and I would start recording, it was a brand-new experience for me.

  Jeff would always come in with a good word of caution. For instance, on "I Am Become Death," after the backward stuff, the song is a bunch of single lines and harmony, and I was using the pick to scrape the strings down by the bridge to create a violin-bow effect. And I'm describing to him how I want it to sound, and he, of course, being the voice of reason, is saying, "Let’s record these things flat and dry, and then we can add the stuff later."

  I realized he was right, that I didn't want to commit too early to certain things, just in case they didn't work with the other things I wanted to try out. Jeff never knew exactly where I was going to take everything, because I wasn't clear in my own head—there was always 10 or 20 percent where I was going to wait to see how it developed. But we had to start somewhere.

  I'd first come across the Maxon Digital Delay rack mount when they'd just started putting out consumer-level, rack-mounted digital delays, in '83 or '84. Jim Larson, the owner of Second Hand Guitars, where I was teaching, was importing some of these things, and I realized they had this hold-and-repeat function. You could set it at 1,000 milliseconds, you'd play a figure, push the button, and it would just simply repeat that figure. It was trial and error, but Jeff and I were able to create the end of "Banana Mango" with a set of hold-and-repeat figures that would go left channel/right channel, left channel/right channel. When we were recording that ending, to me it sounded like something no one had ever done before. It was just so unique, and I remember being so excited at how much it sounded like I had imagined it. Sampling is one of those things that maybe goes past people today, but back then it was just being born because of this technology. We were fascinated that a unit could capture a short burst of something, manipulate its time, and use it as a rhythmic figure, as if it were a recording of somebody doing something over and over again perfectly. Plus it had a little bit of distortion, just a certain tone, slightly degrading as it repeated. It was something that we found beautiful, and it finished that song so wonderfully.

  Jeff Holt: Joe had been using digital delay live at the time as an outboard effect, because a lot of the live clubs back then just had basic reverb and delay. It was a real high-end piece of gear, and it was rare for a player to walk into a club with his own outboard gear. So both onstage and when he brought it into the studio, I thought that was a really cool example of his natural desire to push the boundaries of what other people were doing in context of his own sound. We came up with this thing on one song where the old machines had this VSO feature where you could slow the tape down, so we played around with that, and also with panning, and I had this really cool Lexicon Prime Time, which had different outputs, so we were able to throw the sound around in different delay lines.

  Control room at Jeff Holt’s Likewise Productions, '84

  PHOTO BY JEFF HOLT

  As we finished the part of the record-making process that I greatly enjoyed—creating and playing—we arrived at a part I wasn't so crazy about, where we might be almost finished with a song, everything’s perfect, and then something would suddenly go wrong. A piece of equipment might make a noise, or a knob was acting funny, or when you made that one little fader move, maybe you went a little bit too far. For instance, when you pushed a fader up it might react a little differently each time, and you've got two people leaning over each other with their arms on the board making moves. Jeff would say, "I'm going to do tracks one to seven, and when we get to here, do me a favor, reach over and turn this knob like that, and then I'll move over to that part of the board." It was like a four-handed organ performance, and one of us would always do something a little different.

  When we were dealing with nonautomated mixes, the good side of it was you had to make a decision, and then you moved on. Those were things I learned again later on, from Andy Johns, who said that in the old days of multitrack recording, they had to commit on the spot to effects and submixing of vocals and guitars. He would tell me, "The idea was: If you had a guitar part that was in reverb, you just recorded the guitar part with the reverb—done." You never went back and said, "Oh, is it too much reverb; is it too little reverb?" You'd just say, "I made that decision, and now we're living with it," and that’s how you made records. That’s why, when we go back and listen to the records made in the sixties, what we're hearing is bold decisions made by people who knew how to make decisions with the attitude of "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" They got good at cutting tape, too, which John Cuniberti would introduce to me later during the making of Not of This Earth. His idea was that if we couldn't get through the mix in one pass, we would mix only those sections we could get through. Then we would mix the next section, and so forth, and then we would splice all the sections together and have a final mix. I thought he was nuts, but when I heard the result I just couldn't believe it, because it sounded like one beautiful mix.

  From that experience I gained a new respect for working with another person. Every time Jeff would say, "I think we have it," or "I think we should do it again," or that it should be brighter or less bright, I trusted him, and when we went back to it, I realized he was always right. When you're the one actually playing the music, you can't truly evaluate the performance. Certainly the way that I play, I lose perspective. I go headfirst all-the-way emotionally into a performance, but that’s the only way I can get the whole "Joe" into the music. But the lesson was that I needed somebody to tap me on the shoulder and say, "Do it again," or "I'm not going to let you do that again because it’s so unusual." That’s another way Jeff helped me—by telling me when I got it right—because he would say from time to time about a particular performance, "I really think you have it. That’s so unique, please don't make me erase that," and he was correct each time. So you've not only got to find that person you can work with, but you have to learn to trust them. You have to be open to when they give you very interesting comments, be they technical or emotional. They might say, "We've got to change the mic," or "You've got to go outside and walk around the block"— you never know what it might be. That was the most important thing I learned while working with Jeff, and I remind myself of those lessons every time I make a record with anybody.

  Jeff Holt: I think making that first record was something Joe needed to get out of his system—doing an instrumental, all-guitar record. This was a very different approach, which is why it falls in the category of experimental, because when the EP was done, it wasn't a traditional record, more of a sound-effects type of situation. That record was a big breakout moment for Joe from the band construct, and he proved to me he was a very deep musician and composer, because he was coming up with stuff that wasn't consistent with the power pop of the time. From a production standpoint, Joe has a great ear for tone and I could tell he was taking it all in. I'm sure these early experiences behind the board helped him with ideas for future projects.

  At that point in the mid-eighties, we were doing things on that EP that other people hadn't done before. For instance, on "Banana Mango," I tuned the guitar to a D7 with an added 4th, and I put the guitar in my lap, and with both index fingers I tapped the guitar on the twelfth fret—almost like I was tapping a dulcimer. After you hear the initial rhythm guitar come in, which is just a single-performance figure, when you hear these other dulcimer-sounding harmonics come in, that’s me tapping the guitar as it’s sitting on my lap in the open tuning. And to this
day, whenever I listen to those three guitars, I think, "I have never heard anything with that sound, ever." It’s a dream. It sounds so un-guitarlike, and yet Jeff and I just did it on a Stratocaster with some interesting tuning.

  After the record was finished, I showed up with the recording at the next series of Squares rehearsals and said, "Look what I did, guys! We should be doing this, we should be going our own route." And it was a very interesting moment, because the manager hated it, the bass player hated it, but Jeff Campitelli said, "This is cool." That was unusual because the record had no drums on it, so you'd think a drummer would say, "I hate this," but he said, "This is really cool. You did this on your own?" Those reactions were a big part of what started to make me think, "This band is going nowhere," because, besides Jeff, I didn't think they understood what was happening in the world. I knew in my heart that was the real end of my days with the Squares.

  CHAPTER 6 * *

  Not of This Earth —1985-1986

  When the EP was done, I was excited because I was so pleased with how Jeff Holt and I were able to capture all these unusual moments. The record was a funky little EP that most people played at the wrong speed (I'd manufactured it as a 12-inch EP at 45 RPM, and most people played it at 33 RPM) and thought I was on heroin or something. But artistically, I thought it was fantastic. I couldn't believe that I'd made all those sounds. I was so happy because I thought I had been captured completely without compromise, being as weird as I could be, combining R&B phrasing with all the odd recording techniques and scraping and all the other odd things I had done. But as pleased as I was with it, I realized that for people to really get into my style, I needed to record an album with bass and drums.

  Leading up to that time in the mid-eighties, I was always thinking that I would be lucky to be like a Jimmy Page-type figure in a four-piece rock 'n' roll band, with the singer being one of the quartet. That classic rock-band model had always made sense to me, and as I got older and more honest with myself about my abilities, I began thinking that that’s where I could thrive the best. I knew I could write—I was prolific—and I liked working with vocals-oriented rock music. The music I listened to over and over again, year after year, was made by bands pretty much like that: these three-, four-, and five-piece bands, guitar/bass/drums/singer, maybe a keyboard. So that’s what I kept working on. It really wasn't until after I did the record with Jeff Holt that I started thinking there was any hope of playing instrumental music professionally.

  John Cuniberti: With Joe, we've always seen that he has a rhythm section, then a melody guitar—and it can have harmonies or not, usually a harmony to the melody would happen at some point. And that could be a two-part, three-part, or even five-part in some cases. Then there’s what we'd call the solo sections, and we always saw those three things separately. It’s not unlike a pop song where you have your rhythm section, you have your lead singer, and then your soloist. So the records have always been constructed in a very similar manner. In other words, when Joe says to me, "I'm going to do a rhythm guitar part," I know what that means—it doesn't mean a solo or melody part. And when he says he’s going to do his melody, I know it doesn't mean a solo; it’s what someone would sing if there were a singer. It’s what’s played during the verse and what is played during the chorus, and what might be played during the bridge—it’s the melody line. So he could take his guitar and make a full band out of it.

  I arrived at that evolution in my sound after I recorded the EP, which I felt was more of an experimental calling card. In other words, I had to make that record just to show people how artistically odd I was, that I wasn't just the professional pop-rock guitar player that had been gigging around town with the Squares. And because there was no outlet where I could do that music, the only way I could do it was to record it, send it out, and see if there was someone out there who would respond to it. Even then, I wasn't thinking about replacing vocals with my guitar playing—I was writing serious, original guitar music. It really wasn't until I saw a review of the EP in Guitar Player magazine that I caught a glimpse of my musical future.

  This was when I was selling the EP out of the trunk of my car, and there were maybe fifty copies floating around, so I had no real idea who it was reaching. That changed one day when I was at a rehearsal with a band I'd been playing with following my exit from the Squares, and I remember our bass player, Bobby Vega, came in with a copy of Guitar Player, handed it to me, and said, "Hey, you're in this magazine," which was a little surreal. I remember as I read the review, they were talking about this guy, Joe Satriani, who they thought was one of the strangest, most avant-garde guitar players they'd ever heard. Once I read it, I realized they didn't know who I really was. They thought I was some obscure musician, somebody new on the scene. They had no idea I was Joe, formerly of the Squares and now struggling to find another band to play with.

  Promo shot for NOTE

  PHOTO BY PAT JOHNSON

  That’s when I knew I wanted to be that guy they were talking about. I wanted to be that odd, new guitar player. I saw a glimpse of my future, and said to myself, "You've got to figure out a way to be 'that guy.'" So I quickly left that group I was playing with and decided I had to figure out a way to make a record with real bass and drums, because my EP could only get me so far. That really was the next step in putting together what would become Not of This Earth. The challenge was how to maintain my odd sense of tone, harmony, and melody, while bringing in the elements that people relate to—drums, bass, guitars, and keyboards, playing together like a band.

  Before I recorded the EP, Steve Vai and I had been communicating with each other regularly. He was still sending me these odd tapes, just some of the most bizarre recordings of the stuff he was making in L.A., where he was becoming a composer, learning all about recording on his own, and actually becoming the Steve Vai that we all know. He'd been up to see the Squares, and thought it was fascinating and yet strange that I would be in a band like that, because he knew my other self.

  Steve Vai: I would send much of this stuff to Joe. Stuff that I would not dream of letting anyone else hear. Tons of stuff that, to this day, he may be the only one who has. It was all obviously very crudely recorded with little real production value or time spent on things to make it actually sound good.

  I had all this unusual music in me, and now there’s this magazine review, and they have no idea that I'm this struggling guitar player here in San Francisco. They think I'm a successful nut job who’s at home in his studio creating this odd music, and the outside world actually thinks that’s who I am, because it’s written down in this magazine. And the review was actually quite favorable, too!

  John Cuniberti: Honestly, at first, I'd been terribly disappointed when the band broke up. It was like, "God, after all that work . . ." Because we had recorded nearly two albums' worth of material, and there were a couple of trips to L.A. for showcases, but they could never get themselves a record contract, so after a while everything just dissolved. So when Joe’s band broke up, he went about his way and I went about mine. I was making records with other people, and I didn't see Joe again for at least a year and a half to two years, and he was teaching and did his first solo EP with Jeff Holt, which was an all-guitar-based recording.

  Once I had John in place as engineer/coproducer, I realized I needed to bump up the budget. After I'd formulated this idea for the record, I assumed that I could get what they used to call a "spec deal," where you go into a studio, they front you the time to record, and then—and this is right out of the film Boogie Nights—when you get a recording deal, you pay everybody back. That was a very naïve way of looking at things, but I had so much confidence in it, even though John was of course the first guy to tell me, "Are you out of your mind? Nobody is going to front you money for instrumental rock, it’s not even a genre anymore!" And he was right.

  I remember returning home from that discussion feeling quite deflated, worrying that I'd never get this project off the ground. By some
stroke of fate, the next day I got a credit card in the mail, preapproved with a $5,000 credit limit. This was the eighties, when banks all over the country were sending out preapproved credit cards to total strangers. I probably qualified because I'd been successfully paying off the van we'd purchased so I could drive the Squares around. They didn't know that in reality I was a broke musician. The letter said something like, "Joseph Satriani, because of your good standing in the community, we're giving you this credit card and it comes with $5,000 worth of checks." So I took that checkbook to John and said, "What if I paid you up front, what kind of a deal would you make for me?" So John worked out this deal where I would pay him and the studio up front, and I wrote $4,700 worth of checks to the studio that day so I could get Not of This Earth recorded.

  John Cuniberti: I was managing the studio at the time, so I had a little bit of leeway with what Joe’s rates were. We'd worked a thing out where he'd come in some days after a session had ended at seven or eight at night, and we'd work till three, four, or five in the morning at some ridiculously low rate, and we did that a lot for that record.

  As a player by this point, stylistically, I was a weird combination of a guy who would listen to Prince and Van Halen and would tune in to dance music stations, but also would still be into Weather Report, John McLaughlin, and Alan Holdsworth. I've always been the kind of person who listens to a wide variety of music and really identifies with all of it. Along with that, there was a lot of music at that time, in the early eighties, that was drum machine driven—a lot of new rock from the UK and Europe. I was also a fan of bands like Kraftwerk, and there were very few bands like Kraftwerk. But you either responded to that music or you didn't. Part of me really loved that strange, drum machine style of music, with humans overdubbing on top of repeating drum machine patterns. When I started to hear the way the new bands were getting a drum machine to sound like a drummer in a big club, I started to get more excited about it. I realized that the music I was writing didn't really have that sort of verse-verse-chorus-bridge thing where we really needed typical drum fills. What I was really writing was stuff that had more of a "stream of consciousness" approach to it. That was the phrase we used a lot.