Strange Beautiful Music

by Joe Satriani

  With "Echo," I was looking for a very emotional sound out of the melody and solo guitars, and John thought he could record the guitar coming out of the JC-120 and limit it "before" it went to tape. I was getting really into the tone he was getting by limiting the guitar this way, but it was a dangerous thing to do because we had delays running through the amp as well. Once recorded, we'd be stuck with those repeats, so if we'd wanted to do a punch-in or something, it might get problematic. But that’s a good example of me reacting to how the sound was evolving, and to what John was suggesting as he listened to me play.

  Prior to working with John on these records, I just assumed you put a microphone in front of an amp and its cable went into the wall and then it made its way to the desk and the tape machine. John would flat-out say, "Let’s NOT put your guitar through the desk. I want people to hear your guitar just like it sounds when I stand in front of your amp." I gave him carte blanche to figure out the most direct way to get my guitar onto the tape. He had these Neve mic pres, and other ones from old recording desks that were used on classic records, and we would use them religiously. Since we were doing single tracks, one at a time, we could use the same mic pres for all the guitars, all the bass guitars, and so forth. I really loved the sound I heard coming out of the speakers so much that it helped with my performance.

  John Cuniberti: When we'd started Surfing, I had gotten a hold of a pair of Neve 1073 mic pres, which at the time was unheard of. I wanted to record a record on a Neve console, but we didn't have one—in fact, there wasn't one in the Bay Area, particularly not an old one. My friend who owned Hyde Street Studios had gotten a hold of an old Neve and had pulled out all the modules, and when I saw them, I asked him, "Can we put these in a box, so I can use all these mic pres and EQs?" I went to a woodworker right here in town, said, "See these modules? I want these in a box and upright, and an aluminum back panel, etc. . . ." and the guy built me a box, and I had those for years after that. Relative to Joe’s sound, we primarily used that one on every track. Because we were recording one track at a time, I got to record the album on a Neve. So my plan was to record it on a Neve and mix it on an API. That was my game plan for Surfing.

  I recorded the album on just a few guitars: my home-built black Boogie Bodies "Strat" thing, another similar guitar that my wife had painted for me, my two Kramer Pacers, a borrowed Coral Sitar, and a Fender P-Bass. I was very comfortable using the Kramer’s Floyd Rose bar, which by now was a tunable Floyd Rose. I had one on my white Kramer Pacer, but the body’s wood was so soft the bar would eventually fall right out of the guitar. Back then, luthier Gary Brawer had to put hard wood dowels into the guitar body so we could screw the Floyd Rose unit in again and again. My Boogie Bodies Strat from way back in the Squares days had two different pick guards: one with humbuckers, one with the three single-coil Stratocaster-type pickups. So sometimes, like with "Circles," I took the humbuckers out, put in the single coils, and recorded the song’s main melody, and then did the same thing for all of "Midnight." When I wanted a crunchier sound, I'd put in the humbucking pick guard configuration.

  John Cuniberti: Even as we were making all this amazing progress, it was definitely difficult for us to complete that record, both because of the timing and the money. I think the mix process produces high anxiety, because as long as you're recording, there’s hope. There’s always this sense of, "Well, the rough mixes don't sound right, or the song isn't really working yet, but when we mix it will be fine." When you start mixing is when you realize what you have or in some cases don't have. It can be devastating. You can spend a lot time of recording, thinking that you've really got something, but when it’s done and you push up the faders you say, "What happened?" By then it’s too late because the money’s gone.

  It was difficult for me to complete the record because of scheduling and budget issues. Sometimes I'd wind up with three hours at one studio and four hours in another studio but only between eight and midnight or midnight and four in the morning. I couldn't always get John when I needed him, so the recording schedule dragged a bit. We couldn't afford lockout time, so I had to just book hours here and there that were sometimes separated by days, weeks, things like that. We were also working on different equipment, so we literally would finish two hours of recording in Studio C at the Hyde Street building, pack everything up and move to Studio D, set up all over again, and record some other part of some other song. It was crazy.

  Relativity originally set the recording fund at $13,000, which was ridiculously low. We reached that $13,000 limit pretty fast, so I kept having conversations with Cliff Cultreri, my A&R guy, asking for a doubling of the fund. Cliff was an inspirational guy who really believed in me and argued my case every time I called the label asking for more money. We eventually spent $29,000, which is still a tiny amount to make a record.

  What was never reflected in the budget, however, was that I was trading studio work, hour for hour, for studio time to finish the album. John did everything he could to find a way for me to get free time or trade my services at any studio that was functioning at the Hyde Street building. I was working with Sandy Pearlman, the producer who was working on the Blue Öyster Cult album Imaginos, and instead of getting cash, I said, "Just give me studio time." So I'd do a session midnight to 4 A.M., then show up the next day at noon and use those "earned" hours myself! I did other sessions in the building for the Hyde Street studio co-owner, Michael Ward, and some other clients that John had arranged. With Surfing we really needed a lot of extra studio time because it was just a few guys making the record, one small step at a time. It wasn't a rehearsed band where you could go in and play your whole set in a couple of days. Every once in a while we'd have Jeff come in to do percussion, or Bongo Bob, and even John got in on the action sometimes, but I was doing 99 percent of the playing.

  The biggest stress of that final schedule was going back to Hyde Street, working hard hours, day after day. Having a home studio in later years helped me tremendously because I could put a song to bed, then two days later, come back to exactly the same spot on my Pro Tools session, capture better performances, and get a better handle on what I was really recording.

  But back then, my schedule had me teaching, playing, and performing ten hours a day, and it took a heavy toll. Good things can come of it if you've got a good team with you, but you can wear your hands out that way, too! I would be playing a lot of different instruments as well, going from guitar to bass to keyboards. On top of that, if the song wasn't working out, I'd have to rewrite that part right there in the moment, which was definitely stressful. Remember, we recorded the album on only three reels of 2-inch tape! The only performances saved were the final ones. No outtakes left behind.

  By the time we were finally ready to mix Surfing, I remember not liking anything I'd done! I really felt I needed another ten years to work on the album. Mixing meant you were finished playing, so I came into the process with a lot of anxiety. Of course, John, having mixed so many records before, thankfully knew what mixing was really about. I was using it as an extension of making the record, but John had other, more practical things to get to first. Balancing in the days before automated recall, for instance, took a long time, and engineers need to be given the space and time to get that balance right, and that's before you'd start to get crazy with mixes and things like that. John was meticulous in making sure the album sounded gorgeous, and he somehow always found a way to make cool ideas we came up with work.

  John Cuniberti: Some of the songs were easier to mix than others—as always. In those days, I would start a mix, and then Joe would come in and sit down and we would finish it together. That was pretty much how we did it. Sometimes Joe had working titles for his songs that stuck, but often-times the titles came much later, after the songs were finished. He would come up with an order during mixing and run it by me, and I might like it or make suggestions, but the track order and the song titles usually evolved after the mixes. For Surfing, I think we'd gotten $25,000
to do that record, and by the end of recording, we did wind up going a little over budget, because after the first round of mastering, we decided to remix at least one or two songs, and then had to go back and remaster again. But $30,000, even in those days, wasn't a lot of money for making a record. So oftentimes, by the point where we'd gotten to the mix stage, we were either almost out of money or damn near, so it wasn't a situation where if we didn't like a mix, we could come back the next day and do it again.

  One morning, returning to the studio to finish mixing "Lords of Karma," we found that the cleaning staff had removed our "magical" mix of the song’s bridge, which was hanging on the coat rack, and thrown it in the Dumpster! It couldn't be saved, so we had to mix it again, using more precious mix tape, which was getting harder to pay for. And the drama didn't end there.

  When we first heard the final album mixes at Bernie Grundman’s mastering studio, it was a shock. Side one had a noticeable left/right balance discrepancy. It turned out to be a recording-desk issue back at Studio C where it was mixed. After a few angry phone calls to the studio manager, we packed up and returned to S.F. to remix side one. The label thought I was nuts, but I insisted. We had to get this right. We returned a week later with properly balanced new mixes and mastered the record using the new Dolby SR system. It sounded beautiful, and Bernie did a wonderful job cutting the album to disc and preparing it for CD.

  I should have been overjoyed. I wasn't. I was so emotionally distraught after the album was finished that I could only listen to it—I kid you not—slowed down and distorted. I'd put a cassette of the mastering on my 4-track and slow it down and turn it up. It was the only way I could get through it without having a heart attack. I thought it wasn't good enough. I'd put everything I had into it and thought it was the last record anyone would ever let me make. I loved Not of this Earth, but I knew it was a little weird, so I didn't think it had too much broad appeal. Surfing was the first record that was sanctioned by and paid for by Relativity Records, and they were expecting something great. Surfing really crystallized a moment for me. Why wasn't I satisfied with it? It summed up all the different styles that I related to musically and everything I'd been working on as a guitar player since I was a kid. Yet despite all the trials and tribulations in making it, Surfing turned out to be a real gem after all.

  CHAPTER 9 * *

  Launching the Silver Surfer

  "Joe Satriani’s 1987 breakthrough can be seen as the gold standard for guitar playing of the mid-to-late '80s, an album that captures everything that was good about the glory days of shred."

  —Billboard magazine

  Steve Vai: I always knew Joe would be recognized as a musical guitar giant, and it’s easy to say that now, but the truth is that I always saw him that way from when I was twelve years old. But I did not know how things worked in real life, if real talent could be recognized or if it was just luck when someone became successful. In looking back and knowing what I know now, it is unequivocally clear that there was no other way for Joe’s career to have gone but up, up, and up. It’s very comforting to know that true talent can be recognized.

  Lords of Karma was the original title of the album before its release, but after a journalist expressed his displeasure about it I started to have second thoughts. I scanned the record’s songs for a new title and thought how could anyone object to Surfing with the Alien? It’s so obviously a title with a sense of humor. So I called the Relativity office in New York and told production manager Jim Kozlowski my new title. He responded with, "Let’s put the Silver Surfer on the cover. It’s my nickname!" I replied, "What’s a Silver Surfer?" Jim sent me a few issues of the comic straightaway and I was blown away. The Silver Surfer was the perfect image for the cover. It was bold, iconic, and positive. I could identify with the Surfer, even though I had never been on a surfboard!

  Cliff Cultreri: Now that the record was done, we needed a cover concept that was as exciting and original as the music and the record’s new title. We approached Marvel Comics and got the license for using the Silver Surfer art for the cover.

  Our next move made sense because I knew that the odds were definitely against us in terms of, "Can he become a crossover artist to any degree? Can we get MTV? Can these types of things happen for him?" I knew in my gut there was a possibility of it, because there was really nobody like him happening at the time, and again, I felt if anybody had the music to do it, Joe was the one. But in the end, his first big break didn't actually come from radio or TV or any of those traditional venues that record companies use to break new artists and get the momentum behind an artist.

  What happened was the music committee for the Winter Olympics approached us wanting to license the rights to use some of Joe’s songs during some of the winter sporting competitions, and so naturally we said, "Great, what’s the deal?" They said, "We'll give you X amount of dollars and you supply us with a master," and I started sort of kicking and fussing, asking, "Well, is there any way we can turn this into something bigger?" So what we came up with was instead of taking the up-front money that was being offered, we asked if in exchange they would show Joe’s name and the album’s title somewhere at the bottom of the TV screen while the music was being played so viewers would actually know who he was. That was the problem when you had these sporting events that used an artist’s music: Unless you're on a stage playing at halftime and being announced, most people don't know who the artist is performing the music. So they agreed to that, and now we had—just like when an MTV video is playing—in the bottom left corner of the screen, every time one of Joe’s songs came on, something that read to the effect of "Joe Satriani, Surfing with the Alien," the name of the specific song, and "Available on Relativity Records," et cetera.

  It wound up being a boon for us promotionally, because they ended up using a gang of songs from the record. I remember we were getting such great promotion during those Olympic Games that sales started picking up, and pretty soon radio started to come on board. So all the bits and pieces of promotion we were doing culminated in what proved to be a pretty big piece of the puzzle, and I remember feeling Joe’s music was a perfect fit for it. With so many millions of people watching the Olympics, it was better than having a video in rotation on MTV!

  Mick Brigden, Manager: The day Joe came down to S.I.R. Rehearsal Studios to audition for the Mick Jagger gig, we had background singers, all the moving parts of a big stadium show set up that day. When Joe walked in the door, I remember being instantly impressed by the fact that he was not intimidated at all. He still was exactly the way he is to this day, and didn't change from that moment to this moment as the guy I know. He had his guitar in his hands and was comfortable playing whatever anyone threw at him, and they were throwing a bunch of material at him—not just Stones songs, but everything they were going to play onstage. They were just grooving and jamming, so there was a bit of blues going on, and some riffs going on, and Joe was just feeding off people, and Jagger was staying out of sight deliberately, because he didn't want to make it about who was onstage.

  I was watching this all, and Mick just waited, and then at one point came out from behind the amps, blowing a harp on a blues jam, and just fell in with the groove, and Joe didn't bat an eye! There was no change in his state of being, and Joe’s obvious talent came to the fore, and Mick looked around and gave me a thumbs-up, like "We've found him, haven't we?" So that’s all it took—Joe just had to show up and play, and Mick was blown away and everyone in the band thought, "This guy can do anything we want to do," and they didn't even know how much Joe could do at that moment. They'd just had a two-hour taste, but it felt like Joe was born for this moment.

  I had managed to get on the covers of a couple of magazines, but the success of the record hadn't really kicked in yet. It was that first Jagger tour of Japan and the following spring and summer solo tours of '88 that made things start to happen. I did two Jagger tours that year, separated by about five months of my own touring. Touring with Mick and the gu
ys was so much fun and very intense, playing the Stones catalog and Mick’s solo music. I was influenced by this historical rock 'n' roll library that I was playing every night, the lifestyle, and Mick’s professionalism in general. I started to understand that it was okay to have fun and do whatever you wanted to do musically—in other words, "Don't be afraid, don't hold back, just do what you want, put your heart into it. If things don't turn out, be a man about it. Take your lumps if people don't like it, but you definitely don't wanna hold back, and you definitely don't want to do it because you think it’s going to make you popular. You've got to love it and live it."

  Cliff Cultreri: Once Surfing with the Alien really started to click, I knew Joe was definitely writing a new chapter: he was that next great, great musician to take the guitar and bring it to the forefront and really just push the boundaries. There were a lot of great rock-metal players doing their thing, from Eddie Van Halen to Angus Young, and they created a sound, a rhythm, and a feel, but Joe took the instrument and pushed it in every direction. He really just pushed the boundaries like nobody before, and it was a remarkable thing to watch young players listen and start learning from it—that was a tremendously important thing. Not only was Joe entertaining people, but really anybody who was listening to him was getting an education in playing.

  The thing is, it’s easy to say—especially with Surfing because the record was a multiplatinum success—that "Everything that happened in the studio was good." But had the record not been a success, it would have been just as easy for us to say that everything that happened was bad. Ultimately, you can only rate the record on its artistic success and how fans embraced it. Playing live onstage and hearing people shout in excitement when you start to play a song, like "Always" or "Memories"—even the first few notes—that’s pretty amazing. I remember when there was none of that, and now all of a sudden, there are millions of fans and they know my music. They put it on at all times during their life—that to me is the most important thing ever, because it’s the thing I've used to connect myself with other artists, too. That’s how we all use music: We put it on when we need it, and it’s extremely important in our lives. You put on a jacket when you're cold, and you put on music when your soul is in need. And when millions of people choose you and your music, nothing gets more profound than that.