by Joe Satriani
"My Kinda Girl" was one of those kinds of songs. I had a riff, and when I first played it for everybody, it had more of a metal/heavy rock crunch to it. As Chad, Mike, and I worked on the arrangement, it started to get more Stones-y sounding and we liked it better. Chad is not a fan of metal music at all, so anytime I brought something in that had hints of metal, he would slowly veer in the other direction. Where we wound up was with something we all really liked, so then we just had to come up with another little section where I had to write a solo and riff kind of thing. Then the three of us arranged the whole song as we were going along!
Sammy Hagar: "Future in the Past" was something we wrote as the last song for the album, and it is one of the greatest things I've ever been involved in writing in my life. That song in concert has just turned into this special thing. I brought in the first riff for it—believe it or not, that was a musical piece I was working on. Joe took it and made it the greatest thing ever. When that song was done we went in and listened to that vocal. I always let the band pick which track to use, so out of twenty takes, they said, "We like take seventeen." I sang it live every time because I was working out my lyrics and my phrasing. I took that take home, listened to it, and came back the next day and said, "I don't want to re-sing this. I don't want to fix anything or do anything to it. This is the one." Everybody had goose bumps on their arms. That’s a magical thing that only happens once in a while. It happened with "Love Walks In" and "Cabo Wabo" with Van Halen—one take, reading the lyrics, boom, it’s done. No reason to sing that again!
Sammy had this idea of what "Future in the Past" would sound like in the beginning, and then how we would use that chorus at the end to be this big crescendo and big ending. I took those chords and his two verses and shortened them to about a quarter of their length. I then combined the two verses into one, to make it a bit stronger, and presented it to him with the idea being that we would start very quietly with what had been his chorus thing, but then go into my miniaturized version of his original two verses. Then at the end of the song we could bring back his opening thing and play it loud and combine guitar and vocals with it. We needed another part, though, so I came up with this little funky piece with drop-D-tuning on the spot. I asked Mike, "Does that sound cool? Do you want to do that?" Then Chad came in the room, and as a band we arranged it and recorded it. It was that fast. We went from Sammy just strumming the chords to having a finished take in maybe three hours!
Chad Smith: I didn't really know how the other guys had worked, but for me, with rock 'n' roll, if everyone can play— and everyone can play in this band—we just get in a room and play off each other. Sam would sing, but a lot of times he didn't have all the words yet, so the vocals weren't kept. He was in there for the vibe, though, which is really important, and we'd keep what was on the bass and guitars. It wasn't like we ever said, "We need to completely redo the bass," or "We need to completely redo a guitar." All the basics were kept.
I remember Glyn Johns used to tell me, "You can never go back to a party that’s over." Back when we were doing the Joe Satriani record in 1995, he wanted me to play all my parts live. I told him I was an overdub guy. He replied, "Now’s the time to change. Once the party’s over, good luck trying to overdub the main parts on this stuff." He was right. It’s very difficult with a live band because it’s not a matter of just being in time. It’s that the swing of the moment is almost impossible to get back to.
The basis for all Chickenfoot records is the band playing live. Then we add stuff to it. Everything recorded was always with the group, either at Sam’s studio or at Skywalker. The performances are always slightly ragged because they're not layered perfectly with computers. Everything’s done without a click so it’s just raw performances, with overdub bits applied later. We do it this way because those live sessions always pull us in some new direction from where we thought the song was going or where the demo was heading.
Sammy Hagar: The sound Joe gets is always WAY beyond me. I would have accepted the first sound he had plugging his guitar directly into the amp. I would have said, "Wow, that sounds great," but he'd always say, "No, no," and then he changes it and changes amps and changes guitars and ends up with this AMAZING sound. THEN he starts playing his parts. His first solo on the live take always sounds incredible. I ask him, "You're gonna keep that, right?" He says, "Oh, I don't know." I come back a few days later and he’s changed it and it’s better, and he says, "I want to do a couple more little things." I mean, he just thinks SO FAR beyond my satisfaction range. That’s why I'm not the lead guitar player in Chickenfoot, because Joe can take it so much further. Why eat a hamburger when there’s a steak sitting there? Joe’s also one of the greatest rhythm guitar players ever. You don't think of Joe Satriani as a rhythm guitar player. When I'm singing a song and he’s playing a rhythm part behind me, oh my God, you don't even need a drummer. I know right where the pocket is. Joe is in the pocket, and I REALLY noticed it right out of the box because I'm a guitar player! He’s so clever and it’s something that people would never know unless they played with him.
When I started playing guitar, along with trying to play like Hendrix, I was intrigued by the blues. My older brother John played blues harp, so I was exposed to John Lee Hooker and players like that during that whole period. I knew Jimi Hendrix was into Buddy Guy and that they all listened to Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed. I remember as a young player sitting down and playing the blues very slowly, trying to get to that space, and realizing it was something special that I wanted to make part of my playing. When I became a successful solo artist, people defined me by songs like "Surfing with the Alien," "Always with Me, Always with You," "Summer Song," and "Flying in a Blue Dream." They didn't associate me with my blues playing, although it was a big part of my style and background. Chickenfoot was the first band where I had a natural place for all my blues influences, and I think that drew out similar elements from Sammy as well.
Andy Johns: I think Joe in Chickenfoot was more confident in his own ability, not that he'd lacked confidence before. He was just a little more experienced and a little more relaxed about stuff. He laughs a lot more than he used to. Joe’s quite aware of how good he is—there’s only one Joe Satriani, like I said before. He can play anything he hears in his head and can fucking do it perfectly. If you ask him to do a certain kind of thing, boom, there it is. He’s very easy to work with. Joe and I got very involved on the overdubs. That’s the fun part because you never quite know what Joe’s going to come up with. Joe had pedals and I got him to use the wah-wah a few times. Joe is just all-around fucking unbelievable and I'm very lucky to have been able to work with him. I'm not just saying that. I really believe that. I'm very lucky to have worked with that man!
Michael Anthony: Andy would always have a great story at the end of the day. We'd all be sitting around bullshitting and us guys in the band would look like little kids sitting around the campfire. Andy would be telling us stories about Zeppelin or someone else that he'd worked with. He always had a great story about his past that would have us captivated.
Sammy Hagar: When the album was done we all loved it a lot and were very proud of it. We couldn't WAIT till our generation of rockers and people who like this kind of music heard it. They were gonna freak out! I expected it to be successful because of the name value, because our backgrounds professionally are pretty steady—we'd always delivered something good for our fans, so none of us were trying to make a comeback here, but we weren't expecting to sell out arenas. As it happens, Chickenfoot was one of twelve records to go gold that year. Fuck!
Michael Anthony: In this day and age, you have people who put together these so-called supergroups, and fans don't really take the supergroup type of thing too seriously. It’s like, "Okay, these guys are getting together to make a bunch of money and get a bunch of publicity, go out and tour, shake hands, say good-bye and that’s it." By contrast, our approach to everything that was happening was rooted around the reason we first got toge
ther, which was that we wanted to do something that wasn't ego or money driven. We all had money and had done what we'd done in the past, and so we wanted to do this purely for the sake of playing music and having fun. In Chickenfoot, we knew we had something there, that we all had a connection. And the songs, I thought, were fucking great! But you never know what to expect when you're getting ready to release it. I know going top five was a big surprise to all of us. It was like, "Crack the Champagne," because after Van Halen, you've been in one big band, you realize something like that rarely ever happens again in someone’s career. And here it was happening to us! So all this stuff was happening while we were on the tour. All of a sudden, we're getting gold albums. What a trip!
Chad Smith: Our decision to go with the Best Buy label was smart of us because they really promoted it a lot at their stores. Gary Arnold loved our band, was out on the road with us, was passionate about the album, and that really made a difference. Also, we're not competing with the Lady Gagas and Rihannas of the world. We're, like, old fucking rock dudes. We did have a certain amount of hype, "supergroup" this and that, and I thought our first record was strong and a good record. Going gold with no hit singles and with MTV gone, I was impressed.
Sammy Hagar: Once we got out there and started playing in front of people, Joe got really loose playing on the road. I'm telling you, this band’s been so good for Joe, because he plays so different in this band than he does as an instrumentalist.
Just a few months before my mother passed away, Chickenfoot was playing at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. She was a great supporter of mine. Growing up during the Depression in New York, she understood how hard you had to work to get anything out of life. She had a great work ethic and understood why I practiced like crazy and never gave up. When I was a young kid, she never tried to stop me from playing and always encouraged me to keep going.
My mother had seen me perform at the Beacon at least ten times, but for some reason that night she decided to sit on the side of the stage. She had never done that before. During "Future in the Past," where Sammy and I are doing a very long intro together, Chad walked her out onstage. I knew she was having a hard time walking so I told him, "You cannot let go of her." She LOVED being onstage. My mother and Sammy had a good conversation with the audience for about a minute while I repeated the song’s intro, then Chad came over and very gently led my mother offstage. It was very much a part of my mother’s personality to feel totally comfortable walking out in front of three thousand people and saying, "Hello, I'm Joe’s mother!"
CHAPTER 21 * *
Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards — 2010
"Apparently his time in Chickenfoot made Joe Satriani want to get back to where he once belonged, so he goes retro on 2010’s Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards. About as far away from the heavy-footed party rock of Chickenfoot as possible, Black Swans is pure guitar prog, filled with compressed boogies, sci-fi synths, exotic flourishes, and all of Satch’s phasers and flangers in full-tilt overdrive."
—Billboard magazine
Between the Chickenfoot record and tour and then the Experience Hendrix tour—where I was playing with quite a few other musicians in a kind of revue—I'd racked up a lot of live and studio experience that was very different from playing solo. I wanted to isolate what was good about those experiences, what would bring me forward artistically, and use it as a positive influence for the next solo record.
Mike Fraser: Joe wanted a "band feel" on this record as opposed to a studio-manufactured record. His intent wasn't to make a live record, but he wanted a band-feel record, and that’s done by everybody playing together. Our focus this time around was on getting the takes where we could keep most of the performances without having to come back and redo them. We didn't want to sort of chop it all up, put it on a grid, and make it all proper. He just wanted a little bit more of that ebb and flow that a real band playing gets.
Tracking at Skywalker Sound in '10
PHOTO BY ARTHUR ROSATO
When I was writing for this record, one of my favorite memories of that process is of "Littleworth Lane," which is an actual street in Sea Cliff, Long Island, where my mother owned a house up until she passed away. The house had been built in the late 1600s and was very unique by American standards. I wanted to start that cathartic process of writing about my mother’s life and her influence on me and the rest of the family. I thought I needed to write something that reflected the kind of music she would relate to. She was into jazz and soulful music and had expressed to me many times over the years the kind of music she wanted at her funeral. One night, driving away from the house, I wrote this song in my head and I kept it there until one afternoon, backstage after a sound check. There was a piano in the dressing room and I realized I was ready to play this thing, so I took out my iPhone and did a quick recording of it. That wound up being the demo of "Littleworth Lane" that I sent to the band.
With "Solitude," I was thinking about how I often require time to be alone, much as my parents did, and I coupled that with my mother’s absence from her house once she passed. It was so profound, I couldn't put it into words. I was working on a song called "Heartbeats" at my home studio one afternoon when the inspiration came. I was thinking "Heartbeats" needed some kind of introduction, but instead I started writing a piece that was much bigger. It was a song about my moments of solitude, and the lonely feeling in my mother’s house now that her spirit had moved on. It eventually found a home on the record right before "Littleworth Lane." I played my JS1000 direct into my STT-1 for that recording.
The idea for the title "Pyrrhic Victoria" came from a story about King Pyrrhus, who defeated the Romans in battle but lost 99 percent of his army doing so. He is quoted as proclaiming, "If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined." That’s where we get the term Pyrrhic victory. This is a tune where the flexibility that I had at home working with Pro Tools and software synthesizers allowed the song to grow. It started in the most organic way: I was in my studio, plugged into a JS customized Two-Rock amplifier, just having fun improvising. My studio room is relatively small, which can overemphasize the low end, but it makes the guitar sound and feel 100 feet tall. I recorded the improv using QuickTime Pro on my laptop before going out to dinner. When I returned home and listened to it, I thought, "That is REALLY cool! Now let’s add an orchestra!"
"Dream Song" was a song that literally came to me in a dream. When I woke up I had the entire song in my head. I thought for sure I'd been listening to music until I realized I'd been asleep and it was dead quiet in the room. I spent the next three hours recording what I remembered from my dream before the memory of it faded. The organ arpeggios and all the wah-wah guitars were done in my home studio—as a matter of fact, all the guitars on that particular song are from home. They just seemed to tell the story the way it needed to be told.
With "Wormhole Wizards," I had been reading about black holes and theories about parallel universes and people traveling faster than the speed of light. Around that time I was speaking to Jeff Campitelli about the number of songs that I had finished, their tempos and time signatures, and I mentioned that I had a fast song inside of me ready to come out. Sure enough, that night I got inspired to put something together. Instead of using BFD to start my drum track, I wanted to use another program for the drums that had more of a drum-machine feel to it. I created the bass line on keyboards using a cool Fender Rhodes plug-in, and then I could see where the song was going. It turned into a spacey but driving soundtrack about traveling through wormholes in space.
I didn't want this record to be a radical departure from the last one because I'd done that before. The Extremist, Joe Satriani, and Engines of Creation were all radical shifts, but I didn't want to rock the boat that much this time. A lot of the record was already tracked, and I was learning how to record myself in a more transparent manner. Ultimately, the vibe of the album would depend on the personality of the musicians and coproducer, so
I took a chance that Mike Fraser would click with the other band members: Mike Keneally, Allen Whitman, and Jeff Campitelli.
Black Swans was all about unique band performances— interactions between Allen, Mike, Jeff, and myself. We needed a studio like Skywalker Sound because I felt both Allen and Mike needed lots of space. Allen’s a big guy with a big personality and I thought he would blossom if he was given not only musical space but physical space. Mike is a super-talented multi-instrumentalist and it was great to offer him two grand pianos, a B3, and a Wurlitzer that we were allowed to keep set up, so he could freely experiment. I wanted the guitar, bass, and drums close enough but not too close, so we could interact with one another while not being bombarded with one another’s sound.
For this album, the process wasn't about working out every arrangement detail and forcing people to play it. Sometimes that works, but other times you have to throw the music at the musicians, let them explore it on their own, and then capture that exploration.
Mike Fraser: For the Black Swans record, I remember I set the drums up in the middle of the room and baffled them off a little bit because it was almost a little bit too roomy. I had Joe’s cabinets off in another little iso booth and Allen Whitman’s bass off in a nice little room, and then Mike Keneally came in and played keyboards on the basic tracking. That’s something new that I've done with Joe, to have the full band tracking. It’s usually just bass and drums. That added a lot to this record, as did the input of keyboardist Mike Keneally. He'd say, "Hey, let’s put a Rhodes in this part" or "Let’s distort this Rhodes and put it through this pedal." He was cool with that kind of stuff, and Joe was open to those suggestions.