by Joe Satriani
Andy Johns: I invited him to meet me at Eddie Van Halen’s house because I was producing a Van Halen record at the time, and so just for a joke, I said, "Why don't we meet there?" which was a little mean, because Joe was still a little bit starstruck. So he was very happy to meet Ed, and he played me some stuff. Up to that point, Joe was still into using drum machines and playing through boxes, not using proper amplification, and the way I work is very organic—I like to have people play off of each other and use real amps and all that. So that was sort of a condition, that we try doing work that way, and he was more than cool with it.
As excited as I was to be working with Andy, it wasn't the same as starting fresh with a new producer. I had no intention of starting fresh because I'd put so much work into quite a few of the tracks, and thought "New Blues," "Rubina’s Blue Sky Happiness," and "Why" were beautiful tracks that, if anything, just needed some touches on them. With "Summer Song," all we needed were new drum and bass performances, since John and I had finished all the guitars and keyboards earlier in San Francisco. Andy realized that we had a lot of it done, and he loved what John had recorded, so he thought, "How hard can it be?"
Once I was ready to start working on the album again, I started asking different people for opinions on players. Steve Vai suggested the Bissonette brothers, two guys he'd been playing with, and sure enough when I was down in L.A. actually auditioning a bunch of people, Matt and Gregg turned out to be the best team I played with out of four or five sets of players. No matter what I threw at them, they seemed to rise to the occasion. Since they had worked with Steve before, I knew that they would understand any odd directions they might get from me. They would understand how sometimes you've got to play it really straight. I think maybe some musicians, when they get famous for being themselves, they're rewarded for idiosyncratic behavior, and then that’s all they can play. Other players who naturally take direction well and are versatile develop an attitude and technique that furthers their abilities—and that makes sense. When I would ask Gregg, "Could you reverse that beat, and play it super loose?" he would do it. Then if I said, "Sorry, I changed my mind. Could you play that straight and forward?" he would do it, and he seemed to really relish taking direction and providing me with what I wanted. He never had a negative attitude about trying it again in a completely different manner, and I had never played with anybody like that.
Matt Bissonette was the same way. They both had this fantastic attitude in the studio of wanting to make the session work. And they were very creative and intuitive, so when I would say things like, "This part really needs to soar. I want it to fly," Gregg and Matt both understood what I wanted them to do, instead of needing concrete examples. I think that’s how we wound up getting keeper takes for "Summer Song," "War," "Motorcycle Driver," "The Extremist," and "Friends." What they did with "Friends" was just so amazing, and it was because they could take direction, not only from me but from Andy as well.
Matt Bissonette: We were at Mount Rushmore playing softball, looking at the presidents' heads, and just goofing off, and I'd heard Joe’s name because Steve was always talking about him. I remember all the roadies were listening to Surfing with the Alien on their headphones, and they were all way into it and kept telling me I had to hear it. So I finally heard the album, and of course figured out right away that he was an amazing guitar player. After that, I started listening to him more and more, and then when he called Gregg and me a few days later to come and audition for The Extremist, we showed up and just started jamming really well.
With my new producer and band now complete, we settled on legendary Ocean Way Studios in Los Angeles. Everyone from Ray Charles to the Rolling Stones had recorded there. The first day we got to the studio, I remember we were playing in the big scoring room, and it sounded so beautiful! It’s just one of the most beautiful-sounding rooms I've ever been in. It’s just a magical, magical room where music sounds wonderful, no matter where you put stuff, and just listening to the sound of the drums and bass coming from the room is amazing. Allan Sides had designed the control room’s speakers, and the control room itself was tuned beautifully. And here is this legendary, towering figure in Andy Johns—drinking, smoking, laughing, screaming at the top of his lungs—at the helm of it all. Andy was very rock-star, rock 'n' roll royalty: high energy, lots of emotion, lots of drama. When he was happy, it was infectious, and he got everybody up and the performances were great. It was a lot of fun, because when you did something right and he got it on tape, the experience in the control room with him playing it back at 120 decibels, hugging everybody, smiling and joking, leaning into the speakers, just thoroughly rocking out to the recording, was very inspiring! It was just one of many things that were exciting about that time.
Me and my favorite JS6 in '92
PHOTO BY NEIL ZLOZOWER
On top of that, when I arrived in L.A. to start the rehearsals for the record, I remember being pulled into the room with Matt and Gregg and getting a phone call from Rubina telling me the wonderful news that she was pregnant with our son. That was a huge motivator for me, because suddenly the album stuff was not nearly as important as it was before getting the news. All at once, everything was put in perspective, and I think I lightened up a little bit because the most important thing in the world now was that we were starting a family.
Andy Johns: My foremost focus heading into work on The Extremist was on getting drum sounds with Gregg to replace those blasted drum machine boxes, which have as much soul as a stamp, perhaps less than a stamp because I collect stamps. I did come up with a theory of using room mics, which in actual fact I had started with Blind Faith on the "Can't Find My Way Home" album [Blind Faith]—it's all done on just two mics. Then when I did "When the Levee Breaks" with Led Zeppelin, I got Bonzo out in the fucking lobby and used two mics, so I was trying to get the drums to sound like they actually sound in the room. Gregg Bissonette, being an experienced cat, had some very good stuff, and I fiddled around with his kit a little bit, and I remember thinking that we got a pretty good drum sound on that one. We had this big live room with that old, sort of '50s linoleum tile, which is just great for drums. I put a couple of room mics in behind the drums—for some reason that seems to work in that room. And I had a 1308 mic pre to run the toms through, so that they showed up in the room mics a little bit more. Then I just found the right drums and tuned them right, and that was the secret, you know—the source of the sound has to be recordable.
On Gregg’s kit, everything was miked up. When I'm getting a drum sound, what I do is, I listen to the room mics to see how the balance of the kit is in the room, because if one cymbal is really loud, or the toms are dead, you're fucked. So when I started, I added in the bass drum, then added in the snare, and built it up like that. Take "Summer Song," for example. What I did with the kick drum to get that sound is, I liked to have the front head off without a bloody hole in it, cut a piece of foam to size—so it’s just like a quarter of an inch—over the lip of the shell, and then where the air hole was, I got one of the techs to cut a cable and run it through the hole, then solder it back together, and had like a 421 on a mic box or something, so it was not resting on the foam inside. Then I put a FET 47 on the outside, and I tried to get the drummer to use a wooden beater (they always complain, "Man, this thing keeps bouncing back," because they're not used to playing with a proper front head). So I used coated Ambassador heads for the bass drum—none of that rubbish stuff with all the fucking foam going 'round the edge. Then I deadened that down myself so I could adjust it, and of course, you have to have the right drum. That’s the most important thing—because I knew where the mics go, fuck if I didn't know that by then. I had a snare drum that I've used on a couple of number ones, I think, and a bunch of other hits, that I'd tote around with me for insurance; I called it my "Black Beauty," and we used that on The Extremist.
Andy understood when I told him that the problem I had was "swinging versus straight," and that I wanted the album’s sound
to be big and heavy and to rock, that I did not want a fusion or jazz album. I didn't want an easy-listening record, and that was my struggle even before recording Surfing with the Alien, explaining that to people. We were not doing "easy-listening background music" or fusion. The songs were rock songs; they had verses and bridges and choruses and solo sections, and everyone had to play specific parts. I think Andy liked that and took the project on because he understood what I was trying to accomplish.
In a way, working with Andy was a return to the earlier way John had recorded me with the Squares, having me plug straight into my Marshalls and play live in the room with the band—the main difference being Andy was doing his "Andy Johns" thing, which was creating this huge foundation of drums and bass guitar with all this powerful ambience, which was entirely new to me. There was a bass going into an SVT and DI, and there’s drums miked up in a huge room, with the kick drum being put into its own PA and then being pushed out into the room and re-miked. And then with my guitars, I was plugging into a vintage Marshall 100-watt full stack turned up to 10!
Andy Johns: Joe had a bunch of Marshalls which sounded really good. He had a nice 100-watt combo that we used, too. Now, when we're doing the record, we had five different amp setups, and about fifteen guitars, so therefore you could find any fucking sound you wanted appropriate for the room. My miking would probably have been a couple of 57s and a 414, my standard setup of a 57 on the speaker, another 57 about 45 degrees so the phase is all cool, and the one that’s angled gives you the bottom end, and the one that’s straight up gives you the top end. The 414 you mount on another speaker on a 4x12 and you get a bit more woof. And now, in the end, it sounds like one of the best rehearsals any band ever did; I was quadruple-tracking rhythms, and doubling them through 4-tracks, but it meant he had to play in time, and he went for it.
A lot of the guitar work on that record was done using my original Black Dog JS and my new JS6 prototype Ibanez guitar. As far as the amps: I had a nice collection of old Marshall heads and cabinets, a Soldano 100-watt head, and a Boogie 4x12 bottom that had two different sets of speakers in it. Part of our aim once the record was in Andy’s hands was to make the guitars a little bit tighter, and to prepare for more overdubs that would complement each other. So, for instance, when you hear the rhythm guitars on "Friends," you're hearing one live electric guitar on the left side, my JS6 going into the Marshalls turned all the way up. On the right side, you're hearing a stack of six-stringed instruments—guitars, banjos, Nashville-tuned guitars, and dobros—all bounced down to one glorious mono track! In the center the main melody is played on my JS6. This was the way Andy would work. He would invent and innovate and tweak and have me play things over and over and over until he felt that we'd arrived at something magical. His studio technique was very unique, and together he and John Cuniberti created the sound that is the Extremist album.
Andy Johns: Joe is as close to a genius as [Cream founding member] Jack Bruce. He’s a very clever man, and centered— meaning when he makes his mind up to play, he just leads you from one moment to another, and that is more than admirable. But along with being very soulful, which he definitely is, no question, he also has this technique; his knowledge is bigger, and more than anyone I've ever worked with. And when you ask him, "Why did you play that?" he'll literally answer, "Well, the pentatonic scale leads me to believe this; therefore, when I bend this note I can go back into the fruition of the resolving F . . ." 'cause he actually really knows. With some people, it’s bullshit; with Joe, it’s a fact.
I remember being especially excited when "Summer Song" finally started to come together. Going back in time a bit, the writing of that song is actually a very interesting story. When I was out doing radio promotion with David Counter, a promotion rep from Relativity’s L.A. office, we used to have great conversations about songs and life. And as I was getting ready to start work on The Extremist, he said, "You know, the next record is gonna be huge. It’s gonna be fantastic"—he was talking like a radio guy—and he continued, "All I need is that one song . . . I need a summer song." And as soon as he said it, I thought, "'Summer Song' . . ." I loved the sound of it. I wrote it down on a slip of paper, and later on, sitting in my San Francisco apartment practicing, I'd just stare at that piece of paper as I played. I don't know why. I just thought that torn little piece of paper had some mojo on it, so I just never discarded it. I would go into my little studio room and I would just stare at that thing and play and play, and I kept thinking about all the good times I had over summer vacations growing up in New York.
Slowly the song started to emerge. When I sense inspiration coming on, I have learned over the years to do whatever I can to clear a path so I can get it written down or recorded as soon as possible before the glorious moment fades and it becomes only an intellectual memory. It’s always good to finish writing it, or at least get most of it down, while you're in the first throes of the inspiration. With "Summer Song," I started out by writing the first two chords, and I would sit there and play that pattern for like three hours a night and just imagine a soundtrack to my summertime memories. Making it a song was going to depend on that melody, and the melody was going to have to be very long because the chord pattern was very short. It’s just a little two chord/four bar pattern, so I'd ask myself, "How am I going to tell my summer story over these two chords? How am I going to make it compelling and have drama?" Slowly I got to the point where I thought, "Okay, here’s this nice, long melody, but I still need more," and I'd never really written a "guitar" song where I could play two verses back to back, and maybe take the second verse an octave higher. I was beginning to wonder, "Wow, how does a guitar instrumental get away with that?" It would be more common to just write one verse, one chorus, one set of solos—that kind of thing.
I decided "Summer Song" was going to feature one dominant guitar sound from beginning to end playing the melody and solo. This was a new approach for me, and it wasn't like "Surfing," where I'd had all these different guitar sounds trading off. When the song got into Andy’s hands he imagined something entirely different for the rhythm section, and as a result created a very unique canvas for my guitar. I have to say, it’s not pop rock and it’s not heavy metal, but the energy level is so high and sustained that that’s what he achieved. And even though the main guitar parts were recorded a year earlier by me and John in San Francisco, it all turned out great in the end, ultimately producing what became my biggest international radio hit to date.
Andy was really great at capturing energy, not only sonically, but I think in personal performance. So as we would go out and do takes, he would run out from the control room and tell Gregg, "Try 'boom, boom, bop bop boom' when you get to this part," and he'd say, "Hey, Matt, would you try using this other string when you go to that part?" Then later on, when we were overdubbing guitars, he'd have me play things over and over again until he thought it captured this thing he was after. When he was mixing "Summer Song," it was the same thing: He was trying to create this sound that was a very high-energy sound, which is NOT just turning things up louder or making them sound aggressive. It has to do with the ambience and bringing out the energy of each musician’s performance, which is a very difficult thing to do. We all struggled with it for a very long time, and when we started mixing it was driving Andy crazy, literally driving him crazy! I remember he was getting very frustrated, and a couple of times he'd leave the studio for hours just because he didn't think it was working.
The breakthrough came in a perfect example of his ability to be totally creative with something by starting from scratch, and he would do that all the time. He would sit there and pull all the faders down, then start from scratch and throw them back up. And it would freak me out to do that because it would be so hard for me to get back to where I was. But I think all good mix engineers, Andy and John included, have no fear of breaking down a mix and starting from scratch and looking at a mix from all different angles. I remember early one morning Andy called me at
my hotel to say, "When you get to the studio, press PLAY. I've got a mix up. I don't know if I've totally ruined your career or if this is the greatest mix ever? I've tried something radically different from what we've been trying for the last couple days." So when I got to the studio, I pushed PLAY and turned it up loud and couldn't believe how great it sounded!
First, the rhythm section was huge and rockin', and there was this delay effect he created for the harmonics in the beginning, which turned that little performance into a true hook and some delicious ear candy, too. He was looking for something more with those harmonics, and I had never heard it that way; I had always heard it just played straight without any of the delays on it. But Andy had made it work with this ping-pong delay effect. And then he got rid of one of the rhythm guitars, too, using only one of the original rhythms with one of the new rhythms, and split them left and right. This was a big deal because we were now in that age where people had started to double, triple, quadruple guitar tracks, playing the exact same thing left and right, and it was something Andy never liked. So he was always looking for smaller-sounding guitars that were playing differently. We had that double-track thing going on from the very beginning and he was just working with it for months until his breakthrough idea was to get rid of it! It made more room for the bass and drums and helped propel the natural rhythm of the track.