Strange Beautiful Music

by Joe Satriani

  Cliff Cultreri: The album was such a hit. Did I expect it to be a hit record? No, I was hoping it would get recognition and acclaim, and I think it outperformed everybody’s expectations, which I think turned out to be a tremendously pleasant surprise for everyone.

  It was a big deal. I believe we wound up selling more instrumental guitar records than anybody else has in history. That was cool, but personally, the audience knowing the material was the main thing for me—and they loved the material. That was the most striking thing, because before the album really took hold, I'd heard about people playing Surfing on the radio, but it didn't register with me until I was playing it before them live. I just couldn't believe that people knew every song on the album, and quite a few from the previous album, too! To me that was the greatest part. I knew you could win awards, you could get on the cover of magazines, you could be on TV—it didn't matter. Being famous was not the same as being embraced by your fans; it was very different. To actually connect with fans, and have them sing along, clap, and acknowledge full songs or even parts of songs . . . I was overwhelmed that this connection had been made. It was the same one that I had with artists I liked, and I thought, "Wow, that means it’s really happening. People really love the music on the album." This was the most important thing to me, the connection with the audience.

  Jonathan Mover, me, and Stuart Hamm after a San Francisco show in '88

  PHOTO BY PAT JOHNSON

  Postscript: Late in 1987, just before everything was about to "pop," Guitar Player magazine asked me to record an original piece of music for a Soundpage to be included in the February 1988 issue where I was to grace the cover—my first! I jumped into the studio with John and Jeff and recorded two pieces of music: "The Power Cosmic," a solo guitar piece, and what would become a hit for me, "The Crush of Love," a soul song with a lilting wah-wah melody over a funky bass and fat backbeat. With my new Ibanez 540 Radius guitar in hand, Rockman amp, and Casio CZ-101 keyboard, we recorded and mixed the new music in a few hours at Hyde Street Studios. It eventually was added to a live EP called Dreaming #11 that was released about a year later. The live performances, recorded at the California Theatre in San Diego, featured Stuart Hamm on bass and Jonathan Mover on drums, my touring band that year.

  CHAPTER 10 * *

  Flying in a Blue Dream —1989

  "One of Satriani’s most brilliant early strategies: to subvert, re-energize, and recast common blues-rock licks as catchy and memorable instrumental 'verse' melodies played over irresistible rhythmic grooves."

  —Guitar Player magazine

  By the end of 1988, Surfing was still on the charts, and I was on the covers of magazines around the world, and I had just finished two tours with Mick and a few of my own as a new solo artist. With the release of the live EP Dreaming #11 coming up, change was in the air. I had lived, celebrated, and survived that whole year, and come off the road thinking, "I've got to do something new and challenging, something to push me into a new artistic space."

  I never intended to go into this genre as though it were going to be my career. I was still a rock guitar player, and I sang in bands my whole life, so I kept thinking, "Don't fall into the trap that many artists do of thinking they have to cater to their past success, because it will kill you in the end." So I said, "Look, I'm going to take a big risk: I'm going to sing and I'm going to play a larger variety of music. Artistically, I'm going to take it more out and more in. This record is going to be big and sprawling." I wanted to take that risk.

  Because ultimately, the people who heard me on the radio only heard three songs at best: "Always with Me, Always with You," "Surfing with the Alien," and "Satch Boogie." They didn't hear "Midnight," they didn't hear "Hill of the Skull" or "Echo"—those things never got played on the radio, so they were thinking, "Joe Satriani is this boogie guy, who also has a fascination with aliens," but that was only a little part of me. So I had to bump it up and say, "No, it’s going to be 'Big Bad Moon,' 'The Mystical Potato Head Groove Thing,' and 'I Believe,' and it’s going to be 'The Forgotten (Parts 1 and 2)'—it’s going to be Flying in a Blue Dream!"

  I knew that John felt the same way—that we should just make a more adventurous, better-sounding album, and try to do things we'd never done before. We wanted to expand on what we'd accomplished with Surfing, and the good news was, in contrast to that record, when we started working on Flying in a Blue Dream my budget was something like $125,000! What that meant was lockout time! This was a gift for any recording artist, because now I could rent a studio for two weeks and no one was going to go in there, from the time I started renting it till the end of that two-week period. So all the amps and microphones, console settings, everything was left set up, which was a great time saver.

  John Cuniberti: When we got together for preproduction sessions on Flying, there was a pressure I could see mounting on Joe being newly successful. There was now an infrastructure relying on prosperity based on his record making.

  Initially, we moved to a new studio, Windham Hill’s Different Fur Studios, and ran into technical difficulties almost immediately, beginning when we went to lay down some chunky rhythm guitar for Flying in a Blue Dream. As we were trying to get this guitar sound in the control room, I noticed that every time I started to turn my volume control up, this radio or TV broadcast would come through. Well, we quickly discovered the studio had a problem with RF interference. We wound up recording and using the RF we were picking up as part of the intro to the title track!

  John Cuniberti: As a solution, we first tried a Faraday shield, which was basically chicken wire, which this expert said we needed to run around the entire building. This was a two-story building in the middle of San Francisco, so we couldn't do that. Then I tried to build a shield—basically a smaller chicken wire fence—around Joe, and that didn't work either, so we left after a couple days. Following our departure from Different Fur, my plan had been for us to set up shop at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, but it wasn't available right at that moment. So we wound up back at Hyde Street working out of Studio C, where we'd done Surfing, basically with our tail between our legs because they had been pissed that we weren't going to do the new record there. In those days, when a band decided not to do a record at a studio, that produced a lot of bad blood and a lot of hurt feelings.

  To try to alleviate getting bogged down, we picked a schedule that gave me breaks. So we didn't go in for two months straight and finish the record in one shot, with all those songs. We wound up going in for three weeks, and then we would stop and I would have a chance to do rewrites. So it wasn't unusual for me to be continually writing like that. But having the breaks really helped, because physically it was rough. I couldn't maintain a schedule of every day for two full months; I just wouldn't have been able to handle that kind of thing.

  John Cuniberti: Our work schedule was erratic. We'd work for four or five days, and then I wouldn't see him for two weeks. Then we'd get together, and he'd listen to everything and want to redo it all. He'd come up with new ideas, throw some old songs away, and get some new songs, and then we'd get together for a couple of days and record some more stuff. It went on like that for months, which made it difficult to book studios and try to get a momentum and feel for the album. There was a lot of things going on for Joe, and his life got very complicated very quickly.

  At the end of '88 two things happened to me that would drag me down physically for another year. To start, I contracted the intestinal parasite Giardia, which went undiagnosed for twelve months! I must have picked it up in Jakarta while playing a show there with Jagger. I'd have these incredibly painful attacks and have to go to the emergency room, where they would always fail to figure out what was wrong with me. Second, I decided to get a full compliment of dental braces to correct a TMJ problem. I told my orthodontist he had a little less than one year to get the job done. He could put me in as much pain as he needed to, but in eleven months he had to take all the braces off because I was going to be photographed an
d filmed. I was miserable continually for a year. I lost weight and felt uncomfortable in my own skin while trying to make this big artistic leap forward. And that wasn't all.

  As we started recording Flying, my father suffered a massive stroke. He had suffered a smaller stroke years before, but this one sent him into a coma from which he never recovered. I realized then that he was gone. In my heart I knew that if I stopped working on the record and traveled back to New York to be with him, I'd probably just stay until he passed. I knew that wasn't what he would have wanted, so I stayed in California to finish the record, hoping he would hold on until I was finished. It didn't turn out that way. "Into the Light" was about the situation my dad was in. The song is more a prayer, a spiritual message. That’s the best way to put it. He passed away as we were mixing "I Believe" in July that year.

  I wrote "I Believe" about that whole period. I poured a lot of emotion into the performance, which made it even more difficult for me to sing, because the song was about dealing with hardships in your life. I first had the idea for the song when walking past this painting in the hallway of the Berkeley apartment where Rubina and I were living. It was a large multimedia painting that a friend of my wife's, Nunu Skrimstead, had made, and Rubina was the subject of this painting. Rubina was my emotional rock and the inspiration for the song, so concentrating on her portrait helped me focus on writing a song about hardships in general and how I believe you can turn things around no matter how hard they get.

  Me at the mic in Studio C at Hyde Street, getting ready to sing "Strange" in '89

  PHOTO BY KEN FRIEDMAN

  "The Bells of Lal (Parts 1 and 2)" also came out of this period. My wife came home with these bells that were called Bells of Lal, and she told me they were put around camels' necks when they have a long journey through the desert. The sound distracts them from the hardships of the journey and keeps them moving forward. The bells were on this thin metal harness, almost like a necklace, and because they were very old and rusted, they had a very unique tone. I hadn't heard bells chime like this before. I realized I needed my own Bells of Lal to put around my neck to keep me going so I wouldn't stop and dwell on the harshness of the reality of what was happening in my life. I imagined I was in a vast desert. And I wondered, "If you could fly very close to the surface of the sand, over thousands of miles of desert, what would that sound like?" I thought the idea of a long journey should be represented not by a song that’s got short little parts—versus, bridges, and choruses—but rather one long part.

  John Cuniberti: We moved over to Fantasy Studios from Hyde Street around this period as well. Our feeling was that it was a better-run studio. It had very professional maintenance staff, it had a better microphone selection, the rooms were bigger, the quality of the assistant engineer was higher. I lived in Oakland, so it was very convenient for me. Most of all, it served our end of being a different venue—we just really needed a different atmosphere, a fresh start all around, and Fantasy definitely gave us that because it was a big step up. First off, when you walked into their huge, multi-story building, there were pictures of Creedence Clearwater Revival and just about everybody else that’s famous on the walls there. It was just a full-time studio that made you feel like you were moving up. That album was recorded in three different rooms, I think; we were definitely in D, where we mixed and did some drum recording; we were in B; and I remember doing something in Studio A. So I think we used almost every room except for the MIDI room.

  When Joe was at the studio recording, he didn't accept anything less than your very, very best from anybody. Throughout my career working with him, if you're not at your best, he can't tolerate it. He hates people fucking around in the studio, and in those days, he really saw himself as the star in the room, and that was true. Everybody else in the room really was working for him. And he was really starting to build an infrastructure of management, family, engineers, assistants, and a guitar tech. They were all relying on Joe and his talents to pay their bills. This was kind of a new thing for him. The pressures on him to make bigger and more successful records were really nearing a pinnacle at that point, so this time Joe basically couldn't suffer fools.

  When I'm playing and recording music like that, I'm not really hearing it the way other people do. I'm hearing the music coming a few bars ahead and I'm still listening to the music that I've played a few bars back. It’s just an emotional way that I experience the music, so when I'm sitting in a studio, listening back to something falling flat, it annoys me because it sounds nothing like what I've played. Of course, John will say, "That’s exactly what you played," but I can't get the exact feeling of the experience of how I'm playing onto the tape, so I'll look for effects like backward delays that represent that transcending of time I experience when I play music. I don't feel that I've ever fully been able to represent that properly, but things like backward reverbs and backward delays are my best attempts to convey how the music sounds to me as I'm playing it in my head and my heart.

  The album’s title track actually came to me while I was working on "Big Bad Moon" and was taking a break from trying to write lyrics. I played these two chords and thought, "This is about me having flying dreams as a kid. Wouldn't it be great if there was a melody that was so smooth it would 'fly' over these chords? What’s my guideline for the opposite of what I've been doing for 'Big Bad Moon'?" For some reason, I thought of Frank Sinatra singing these songs where he starts off mellow at a lower register before ramping it up. The lyrics would reveal more of the "story" while his vocal line rose in pitch, and the chorus was the last few lines of his story. I'd always thought that was a beautiful way of playing a melody, because it wasn't an obvious verse-bridge-chorus kind of thing. It was a very elegant, simple way of telling a story and putting it to a beautiful melody, then having it peak. From that flash of inspiration, recalling my flying dreams, I wrote the rest of the song right there in about two to three minutes, all while taking a break from writing another song!

  "The Mystical Potato Head Groove Thing" was another favorite from the Flying record that took a lot of work. I remember telling John I'd written this song and wanted it to be on the record, but it was going to take me two or three weeks to prepare for the recording. I'd come up with this idea to use arpeggios as the song’s chorus, but they were so hard for me to pull off. Up until that point, I don't think I'd ever really experienced any kind of arm pain before, but after three weeks of practicing those arpeggios almost eight hours a day, I had a pain in my left forearm and hand that was unbelievable! When I brought the song to John, I said, "When the chorus comes, it’s actually just this flurry of notes, but we have to create this beautiful tone, and it’s got to be perfect." I played them on my Ibanez "Black Dog" guitar using a DS-1 into a Roland JC-120. I tied a scarf around the neck of the guitar at the 5th fret to keep the string noise down, while muting the strings a bit with my right hand at the bridge. It’s all left-hand hammer-ons performing the arpeggios.

  John Cuniberti: The success of Surfing allowed Joe to broaden the palette and maybe have a little bit more fun. I think he wanted to branch out and do other types of music and presentations, and there’s a danger in that, of course— there always is. I wasn't surprised that he wanted to sing. I remember he was quite nervous about it, and I think Rubina and I were the only two people who thought he could pull it off! I thought it was great, and in fact, my favorite song is "I Believe," one of the numbers he sang on; it’s one of the highlights of the record for me. The way he sings it is just beautiful, the lyrics were heartfelt, and he really believed in what he was singing. And he really suffered in the studio singing that, and when he nailed it, I just thought it was great.

  I really had to follow John’s lead when I sang in the studio. John knew I was a background singer and that I had no knowledge of how to record a voice, nor what microphone was best suited for what kind of song. John had years of experience at this working with singers, so he would just say, "Oh, we're going to use this kind of mi
c today," and I wouldn't even know what it was. My world was in the headphones, and if it sounded comfortable to me there as I sang, then John could get a good performance out of me. I'm not a real singer, but I feel really good singers have this ability to communicate that supersedes their range or vocal quality. Bob Dylan and Neil Young have unusual voices but are great at being lead vocalists because they have that gift of communication.

  Each of my vocals on Flying is sung "in character," which made the album more interesting for me. The vocals for "Big Bad Moon" weren't working at first, but we figured out a way to make my voice sound more menacing by changing the song’s speed, singing to it at a faster speed, and then returning it to its normal speed—that did the trick. We'd heard a lot of other artists did this, including Prince. Once I heard it back, I thought, "Okay, that’s my character."

  Cliff Cultreri: Joe would always be sending cassettes and DATs—"What do you think of this?" and "Check that out"— and I remember hearing bits and pieces and knowing it already had become a very different writing process for him by his third LP. So on Flying in a Blue Dream, you can really start to hear tremendous stylistic variation in the makeup of the music and the songs. He always had that going on, but I think not to the degree of Flying, and he did it in a way where he took you along for the ride. It wasn't different for the sake of being different; it was more like a natural evolution where he really took you on a ride on a lot of those songs. In a way, it almost was more of a progressive style of writing on many of the songs on that album, but it still was very listener-friendly— I don't think it put off any of the Surfing audience. I think what it did was take them further out much in the way Hendrix did. Here Joe was doing it his own way.