Strange Beautiful Music

by Joe Satriani

  Me and Greg Kihn live at a UC Berkeley outdoors show in '86

  PHOTO BY ZAK WILSON

  When I got into the band, it was clearly falling apart. Back when I was in the Squares, we'd done a lot of shows opening for Greg Kihn, and I just knew them as a really great local live band. But as I drifted away from pop music, I had paid less attention to them. Still, from having played with Greg, there were several things that I immediately found very impressive about the band. For one, Greg himself was a fantastic front person. He had the gift. I think he was the first lead vocalist I ever worked with who had it and was comfortable with his position. He could walk out onstage with very little planned, talk to people, and get them to have fun. He was a great talker, he had a good voice, and the other guys in the band were very much what you would expect for their positions in the band. Especially Steve Wright, with his personality as a bass player and his great bass technique: how he played, how he tuned his amp, how he used compression live—I'd never known a bass player at the time to use a dbx compressor in his rig. I was so surprised that someone would do that, but he got this big fat sound and it was fantastic.

  Once I started playing with the band, I remember standing behind Greg Kihn every night, saying to myself, "This is what a lead singer is supposed to be doing." I thought Greg and Steve were just so unique. Everybody else in the band was new; we had a new drummer and keyboard player, and me, the newest of the three guys, so it was more like a gig to us. But Greg and Steve were the original guys, and I just thought they were exhibiting the sort of great rock 'n' roll musician traits that I should be paying attention to. It came to a tragic ending—I was with those guys from the end of '85 to the end of '86, and it was like being on a 747 that was on fire, slowly crashing into the ocean. It was kind of sad in a way, but at the same time, during the better gigs and moments when they were very good at what they did, I was able to learn from that professional side of them. The other benefit of the tour was that I had started writing "Surfing with the Alien," "Ice 9," and other songs for what would become the Surfing album, and recording demos in various hotel rooms between shows. I wrote many of the album’s songs that year.

  While I was out on the road, Steve Vai and I had been talking on the phone, and I told him that I'd decided to release Not of This Earth as the second record on my own label, which at the time was called Rubina Records, after my wife. Steve told me about this label in New York that had agreed to manufacture and distribute Flex-Able, Steve’s first solo record. That piqued my interest a little because Steve’s record was much stranger than mine, and so he said, "You know what, if this guy is going to put out Flex-Able, I bet he'd put out your record. Can I give him a copy of the cassette?" I agreed, but I wasn't expecting anything to come of it.

  Steve Vai: Once I moved out of Carle Place, Joe and I always stayed in touch, exchanging tapes and stories and marathon phone calls. That’s when I was able to shed much of that high-school-kid bewilderment and teacher-student dynamic and allow our bond as true friends to grow. We obviously had a great bond, though, and shared some personal moments in those early days. There was this huge field between the schools, and now and then Joe and I would drive there in his Volkswagen and sit and stare out into the field and just talk for hours about everything. We called that area the "Sea of Emotion." Those were treasured moments. But the greatest moments were when my lessons evolved into these long jams in his backyard, up to six hours at a pop. We would just sit back to back and play. There’s a very intimate place you can go with someone you are sharing music with, if they have the ears to listen and respond creatively and without prejudice. And to this day, those backyard moments of pure sharing and expressing musical ideas with Joe are my favorite musical memories. There is nobody I have ever played with who can listen and respond like Joe.

  There has been, and still is, amazing synergy in our careers together. After I recorded my first solo record, Flex-Able, I tried to find a record deal. It was difficult, and the one label that offered me a deal presented something that was a music-business eye-opener. Conventional record deals at the time seemed completely lopsided (and still do today). From working with Frank Zappa, I learned to never get emotional about a deal or sell myself short. If it doesn't feel right, just don't do it. Do something else. So I set off to get my music out on my own and studied the infrastructure of the music business. I discovered that I could start my own little label and go directly to a distributor instead of a label, thus cutting out the middleman that would usually take ownership and control of your music and pay you a mere pittance for it. What I didn't realize was that finding a distributor was more difficult than finding a label that would sign you. I sent my stuff to everyone, and the only person who responded was Cliff Cultreri at a distribution company called Important Records. Cliff actually knew some of my work with Frank and saw that I had some kind of a built-in audience because of that. He gave me a distribution deal that was much more lucrative than a record deal. Because Joe and I were trading tapes all the time, I sent some of his stuff to Cliff and hooked them up. It was a good pairing.

  Cliff Cultreri: I had known Steve Vai for a while, and one day in early 1986, he stopped by my office and was hanging out for a bit, and I remember he kind of nervously pulled this ragged-looking cassette out of his pocket and said, "I usually don't like doing this, but you really have to hear this guy, I've taken some lessons from him and he’s really something special." So I put it in the cassette player and a minute or two in I stopped the tape and looked at Steve to ask, "WHY did you wait so long to give me this. What the hell is wrong with you?" I listened to that tape over and over. Well, Steve had Joe’s phone number on the tape, and so the very next day I cold-called him, introduced myself, and he started firing away questions at me.

  During that first conversation, Cliff let me know that he really liked my compositions. It was a real boost of confidence, and a recognition that my approach to strike out on a different path from everybody else was perhaps worthwhile artistically. When you do something different from the popular crowd, you really feel you're out on your own. You realize, "I don't fit anywhere. Nobody’s doing this like me." When people hear your music for the first time, you're afraid they won't know how to categorize it, or how or when to listen to it. And all it takes is one person to say, "I get it, I know what you're doing, DON'T COMPROMISE. Keep being yourself." For me, Cliff was that guy.

  Cliff Cultreri: As we began talking back and forth about a P&D [pressing and distribution] deal for Not of This Earth, Joe was really sensible about it all—that’s the best word I could use. Among his concerns were the guitar lessons he was giving at the time, which was how he made his living, and his questions were things like: What does he do to replace that? How does he support his wife? How does he support himself? What becomes of his students? How soon does all this happen if it does happen? He was very smart about it, and certainly expressed interest in wanting to do it, and he explained what his situation was and what his needs along the latter lines were going to be to make it happen, so I tried to put a deal together that worked for him and protected him. That was no problem for me because I already knew I wanted to sign him before I called him.

  One thing I knew was that for instrumental guitar rock to be successful in that era, it had to take the place of the lead vocalist, and it needed to be lyrical. Those guitar riffs and lines had to put the listener in a place where they're sort of making up their own words to the music, and Joe was completely about that. Every song, all the way through each song, was just so incredibly lyrical and memorable, so you could just let your mind wander with the music. I thought if anybody was going to break through as an instrumental artist, he was the one.

  If you sort of look at history, there was a big instrumental hit with the Miami Vice theme a year or so before I started talking to Joe, and ten years prior to that, there was a huge hit over in Europe with Jeff Beck's Blow by Blow. So it seemed like every so often, the cycle repeated where instrumental musi
c sort of got its foot back in the door and got some of the attention it deserved. So to me, hearing Joe’s album was perfect timing in that context, because the guitar was back dominating again, and you had the new wave of British metal bands, you had a new wave of American hard rock and metal bands, and even the alternative rock that was popular at the time was shifting from synthpop to more guitar-driven pop music. So the guitar was certainly in the limelight.

  After my first phone call with Cliff, Rubina and I drove down to L.A. one weekend to meet him. It took almost the whole year to get the deal done, but Cliff really wanted to get it released. So I thought, "Okay, I'll hold off on putting it out myself." In the interim, I had the gig with the Greg Kihn Band, so that sort of tided me over until Cliff was able to work out my deal with Relativity Records to get the album released, which finally came in November of 1986.

  John Cuniberti: I thought the album was pretty amazing when it was done, but honestly, I didn't ever think anything was going to come of it really, for the simple fact that Not of This Earth began as essentially a vanity record. It wasn't for a label, but rather I think something Joe had to do musically for himself. He had all this music in him, and all these frustrations from the Squares, and he really needed to prove to himself that he really could do something remarkable and special. I never remembered a time when we were together making that record where we thought to ourselves, "Man, this is gonna be a fucking hit." Remember, this was an instrumental record, and was way before there was any progressive music movement, so there were no record labels dedicated to this type of thing. Everything happened for a reason—it’s quirky, it’s weird, you can shoot holes through it, or take exception to it, but as far as I'm concerned, it’s a perfect little piece of art and I couldn't have done it better. I just felt it was something Joe had to do to show the rest of the world that he was a guitar player who was going somewhere.

  Along with the support I received from John and Steve along this journey toward getting signed, Cliff Cultreri was now providing me all kinds of energy—catalytic, creative, and supportive—which is what makes a great A&R guy. He really made things happen for people. Very often, artists just need that one person to help them with the creative connections that make an album happen, which was absolutely the case with my next record, Surfing with the Alien. Cliff was the one who really pushed Relativity Records president Barry Kobrin to bring me to New York for a showcase so everyone at the label could see me do it in the flesh. He knew what kind of record we were making, and no one had really made a record like that before for Relativity, so they were in virgin territory as well.

  Cliff really believed in me, partly because he and I thought alike. I liked him, I liked his taste in music, he understood where I wanted to go with my album, and he was very encouraging all the time. After I got off the road from touring with Greg Kihn, Cliff hooked me up with this Swedish bass player named Jonas Hellborg, and I was off on this crazy tour of Scandinavia for about a month. It was a very interesting time, where a lot happened in a period of two months, as I continued to lay the foundation for my future as a solo artist, finishing with a make-or-break showcase that Cliff had set up for me at the China Club in New York.

  I remember this clearly: The first time I met Barry Kobrin, he shook my hand and in front of everybody from the label, said, "You don't look like a rock star." He was sort of laughing when he said it, but I think he was nervous, because I think he was looking for someone that looked more like Steve Vai: somebody tall, handsome, with long hair, wearing leather and chains, doing what rock stars did during the mid-eighties. I was not that guy at all.

  I remember the afternoon before the show, I'd brought bassist Mark Egan and drummer Danny Gottlieb down and showed them the songs literally about an hour before we were going to play. They were really cramming. The executives at Relativity were basically checking me out to see if they wanted to go beyond the P&D deal that we had for Not of This Earth. So when everyone from the label got there, we played some of the new pieces, and I think it was "Satch Boogie" that convinced them of my direction and style. I'd told them I wanted to make a guitar record that celebrated all the aspects of rock guitar, from Chuck Berry to Hendrix and everything else. Relativity was primarily a thrash metal label at the time; that’s what they were really putting out, so this was a test, a showcase of sorts. When Barry heard "Satch Boogie" and saw me play it, he was completely knocked out and finally "got it." He shook my hand and said, "This idea you have"—which was going to become Surfing with the Alien, although it didn't have a title at the time—"I get it. I understand you now, and I want you to go do it. Let’s make a deal."

  CHAPTER 8 * *

  Surfing with the Alien — 1987

  "In 1987, with the release of his multi-Platinum album Surfing with the Alien, Joe Satriani rose from obscurity to worldwide prominence."

  —Guitar World magazine

  Surfing was an important album for me, partly because every single song on it contained elements of what collectively crystallized into my signature style. The writing process was different for each song as well. Sometimes I would start composing a melody and immediately have a full grasp of its primary inspiration and how I wanted its message to unfold. From there, I might ask myself, "What kind of band could play behind this?" Other times, it would just be a groove, along with a mental image, and I would write a musical story to go with that image. The inspiration for the compositions always came first, straight from the heart.

  When we started Surfing with the Alien, we were all excited because we felt we were going to make a record that hadn't yet been made by other guitarists in my field—we felt we were on our own cutting edge. At the same time, I also wanted the album to be a celebration of all the styles that made up my musical roots. There were things I really loved about the records that made up my foundation as a young musician: the guitar playing of the mid-sixties through the early seventies, that was my foundation and how I learned to play. The late-sixties guitar sound is really what woke me up to wanting to be a player, and I wanted to put a modernized celebration of that into the record. I didn't want to make a self-promotional shred record where it was just me playing fast and furious all over the place. The songs had to be "classic" high-quality compositions, not simply vehicles for improvisation. I wanted each song to be very different from the next, with variety not only in the way I played and composed them, but also in the way we recorded them. Equally, I didn't want to come in with such a preconceived idea of a song that I would shut myself off from the spirit of the moment.

  As a guitar player, I was excited to make the kind of record that showcased some of the new ideas I was working on, both compositionally and technically. For example, Surfing with the Alien's first solo is announced by an unexpected high-register trill. What’s different there is the way that I used it and how I did it. I used the edge of the pick instead of my fingers to execute the trill, which gave it a pronounced, almost glassy tone. Compositionally, I'm using it to announce the first solo section in its new key, using the root and flat 9th of the Phrygian dominant scale. It’s a very dramatic shift of key signatures and the pick-trill is a signature moment. It’s brought to life with a wah-wah, a Chandler Tube Driver, and a Marshall 100-watt half stack.

  Quite a few guitar players over the years have mentioned to me the opening phrase of the solo in "Echo" as another signature moment. It announces itself boldly and then has a way of just "tumbling down" and ending on a low tone, then taking a breath. Players would say, "I never thought that you could do that, build a guitar solo by making an opening statement, then waiting, using silence, then continuing on, and building the solo with a variety of phrases." I didn't even notice what I'd done while recording it. I was just following my muse, channeling the great saxophonist Lester Young, I think. But it opened other players' eyes up to the possibility of what you could do with an electric guitar solo. We used a DS-1 into a Roland JC-120 for the melodies and solos, miked with an AKG C-12A, I think.


  "Echo" turned out so cinematic-sounding partly because it had a traditional-style melody utilizing big intervals over lush chords, and it was in an odd time signature, too. The chorus’s chord sequence is very unusual, moving through a few different keys, but the way it resolves is quite traditional. I was really trying to subvert that sort of chord journey that you hear in almost every commercial song when they go into their B-section, or when they're leading into their chorus. My style of playing over multiple key changes and in odd time signatures focuses more on smoothing things out, making the listener feel more comfortable, and delivering the song’s resolution gracefully after a long melodic journey.

  On the whole record you hear me using feedback, using the whammy bar, picking a lot, or using legato. I'm throwing in about everything that you would consider the history of guitar techniques for the last 100 years, by players like Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Billy Gibbons, Eric Clapton, Brian May, Tony Iommi, Alan Holdsworth, and John McLaughlin—to name a few!

  From Left: Jeff, John, me, and Bongo Bob Smith at Bill Graham’s house in Mill Valley

  When I wrote Surfing with the Alien’s title track, I was inspired by the thought of being visited by an alien, but with a twist: The alien would want to do something fun while visiting Earth, and so we all go surfing. That was really it, just a little daydream that popped into my head.

  "Always with Me, Always with You" began as a love song for my wife, Rubina. I remember composing most of it in my Berkeley apartment one afternoon. The chord sequence uses suspended triads arpeggiated over a major-key bass line. On top of that, a lyrical melody in counterpoint with the arpeggios, and a little pitch axis B-section. There’s even some two-handed tapping in there as well! John, Jeff, and Bongo Bob Smith helped me keep the end result sweet and as light as a feather by adding the perfect accompaniment and a unique final mix. All the guitars were recorded using a Rockman, and then straight into mic pres on that song—no amps!