Strange Beautiful Music

by Joe Satriani

  Wrapping up the first Chickenfoot record had been rather traumatic, because toward the end, our producer, Andy Johns, had to be hospitalized and ultimately couldn't finish the production. So we decided for the second album that Mike Fraser, who mixed the first record for us, was the perfect choice for engineer/coproducer. I wanted someone who knew me and how I worked. That decision not to have any other outside influence turned out to be the best thing because we really clicked on this second record. It turned out to be a remarkable group of sessions.

  Sammy Hagar: I loved working with Mike Fraser on Chickenfoot III. When you're tracking, he doesn't necessarily interrupt you, but rather he gives you all the space you need and allows you to get your thing together. Then he tries to get the best take from you that he can. That’s a beautiful thing. It’s more comfortable working with a guy like that, but I can't say Andy Johns didn't do a genius job with the first record. It turned out working with Fraser on the second record really did save our ass. We wouldn't have gotten Chickenfoot III made without Mike. Our comanager, John Carter, died in the two months it took us to make that record. That put a dark cloud over the thing, but a producer like Mike kept it together, kept it clean, kept it simple, didn't bring any extra drama. Whatever drama we had was coming from the four of us, which really wasn't any, so it was great, and having Mike really helped matters. He’s a real pro.

  We were looking to cut ten really tight songs and to be a heavier band. I think Mike was the right producer for the job. He’s got a great personality that I thought fit in very well with the four of us nutcases. He was the perfect producer to keep us on track, and he’s an awesome engineer.

  Mike Fraser: One of my main ambitions with III was really wanting to get Michael’s harmonies in there because that was the special part of the Van Halen vibe, having the high harmonies right up front.

  Michael Anthony: In this band, Sammy and I talked about us having this really cool background stuff in Van Halen and how we really wanted to get into that a lot deeper in Chickenfoot. For instance, on the first album, the song "Turnin' Left," the lead vocal is actually a harmony where we're both singing lead and harmony. On Chickenfoot III, Sam and I worked a lot with Joe on structure for some of the vocal harmonies that we did, what notes we're going to sing. Sometimes, you'll just do the basic thing that works all the time, and Joe will go, "Hey, why don't we try this?" and spin a different note in there, which is really cool and really expanded our sound a lot more.

  My guitar had never sounded so good. I just couldn't believe the sound Mike captured. It was very thick and full of energy and soul, and so "rock 'n' roll band" sounding. I thought Chickenfoot III was the best I'd ever played and the best I'd ever been recorded. I couldn't wait for people to hear it.

  Chad Smith: Really the best song that Sammy didn't want to sing because he said it was too fast is a song called "FRYDAY." It’s never been released. Joe, Mike, and I knocked it out one morning. We cut it in two takes and it was done. Sammy didn't want to sing it, so sometimes the best shit is left on the floor. That happens with the Chili Peppers all the time, where we come up with this great music, and Anthony’s like, "Naw, I don't really hear anything for it," and you're like, "Nooo." If you can't get a vocal and melody to it, it just gets left in the bin. I was excited about the new album but I wasn't able to tour.

  Kenny Aronoff: I was up playing with John Fogerty at a winery and Mick Brigden came up to me. He told me John Carter, who managed Sammy Hagar, sadly had died the week before. The news caught me off guard and I was devastated. He said, "Chickenfoot have finished a record and they're going on tour, but Chad has to go out on tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers for a year and a half. Would you be interested in getting together and jamming to see if it’s a fit?" It’s a hard thing to replace Chad. He’s an integral member and personality, but I jumped at the chance just to go up and play with the guys! The next thing I knew I got a phone call from Sammy, who was the nicest guy in the world. He’s so direct and so present. "Everybody says you're the guy. Chad says you're the guy. I don't want to do it without Chad, but you will be able to keep this thing going. You hit hard and you've got the crazy energy of Chad." I headed up to jam with them for the first time. I had five projects going on at the time but I said, "I'll cancel them to play in this band!" This was the supergroup I'd always dreamed about being in.

  Michael Anthony: I was excited to play with Kenny because he’s played with everybody under the sun! At first, when he came to jam with us in the studio when we were thinking about going out and touring, he'd come in and written out all the drum parts. That’s what he does when he comes in for a session. I remember him and me sitting there before Joe and Sam came in, and I was looking at him, and he had his music stand and was putting all the charts up, and I said, "Kenny, you know as soon as you know all that, you're tearing all that shit up and throwing it out, right? Because that isn't what this band’s about. We want Kenny Aronoff; we don't want a Chad clone. You gotta be you. That’s why we wanted you to come in and jam with us." So as he became more comfortable with us three and hanging out. We made him feel like we wanted him to be part of the band instead of a hired gun on drums. Once he got really comfortable with that, he probably got almost as close to being as crazy as Chad as you can get. It was great then, because it was like, "Alright, Kenny, do your own thing!"

  Kenny Aronoff: We must have sounded pretty good by the end of that first jam because the next day we did the "Big Foot" video and it all just worked. They made me feel so comfortable and they were all the easiest guys to get along with. Sammy decided, "Yeah, let’s go for it," and we hit the road. I've played in great bands, but every single player in Chickenfoot is a virtuoso. Chickenfoot is one of the top three bands I've ever played live with in my life. With Joe, what shocked me when he started playing was his rhythmic feel, which was un-fucking-real! To me, one of the greatest assets of a guitar player is how they play rhythm guitar, and a lot of them don't get it. He gets it. The placement of his 8th notes is so outstanding to me because I try to line my hi-hat up with the rhythm guitar player. If the rhythm guitar player is sitting in the pocket, I put my hi-hat right where his guitar rhythm is and decide then where to put my kick and snare. In that band, Michael was the perfect bass player, but it was Joe who I focused on. It’s not the most typical approach.

  I loved the fact that Kenny was a great drummer with super energy. Like Chad, he loves to pick up on the energy of a band and just drive it into the stratosphere, which is a really important part of what Chickenfoot is. Kenny’s a bit different from Chad when it comes to where he places his groove. Kenny lays the snare and propels the band with his hi-hat like nobody else. That’s different from Chad, who propels the band with his kick and brings the band back with the snare, but sort of dances around with the hat. Kenny’s style of drumming is quite unique, actually, and he definitely goes a little bit crazy with us. When he’s playing with John Fogerty, he’s got a very strict set of guidelines that he’s got to stick to, but with us, we've told him, "Go crazy!"

  With Chickenfoot, I'd like to think that we'll be doing the exact same thing ten years from now. I know Sam’s always going to write and record music because that’s just part of who he is. He’s so creative, he’s always writing, he always has energy to sing, and he likes communicating with people.

  Michael Anthony: We need to keep Chickenfoot on more of the front burner or close to the front of one of the rear burners. When I practice at home, I'll put on old Van Halen songs and jam to a lot of the songs. The other day, I actually put the first Chickenfoot record on and jammed to a couple of the songs. I put my bass down and just cranked it up and sat there listening to it, thinking, "Fuck, what a great album!" As long as everybody in the band does that every once in a while, listens to the music, and then remembers just how great it is, and how much fun we have together, I'm sure they'll remember what a great time we all have when we're all jamming together and we'll do another album.

  Chad Smith: Chickenf
oot is something I would love to keep doing. I know I'm the guy who’s been holding it up doing the Chili Peppers the last couple of years. The band started out as me having a break and wanting to go play—then all of a sudden, everybody liked it and we made a second record, and I had to go back out on the road with the Chilis. I'm not going to have another window where I have two years off and can go do another Chickenfoot tour like we did for that first record, but I know we really enjoy playing music with each other, and really love creating music together. To me, even if it was just for that—just to make records, even if I couldn't tour—I would just love to get together and have fun and make new music. I would love to. We are friends and we have a good time together. At this late stage in the game of rock 'n' roll, if you can put that together and have people enjoy each other—not only musically but personally—then I'll look forward to hanging out with them. It’s fun, and if you keep it fun it stays that way!

  CHAPTER 23 * *

  Unstoppable Momentum —2013

  "When it comes to giving every last drop of blood, sweat, tears and soul to your music, Satriani has few equals. He is relentlessly hardworking. . . His 14th studio album to date, it is also one of his most wildly imaginative and stylistically diverse."

  —Guitar World magazine

  My musical life has been like a huge snowball rolling down a hill— it just keeps getting bigger and going faster as time goes on, and the more records I put out and the more live performances I do, the more exciting the whole experience becomes. That’s what the song "Unstoppable Momentum" is really about: It’s the soundtrack to that realization. When I start to write a new song, it’s as if time stands still. It’s a uniquely private moment, when I'm alone in my studio and all of a sudden this feeling inside me blossoms and I express it musically. At that point there’s no responsibility to turn it into a full song or a recording, to create an arrangement, to play it in front of anybody, or to see how it does on the radio. The music is still mine— it’s free. It’s pure art, and nothing beats that feeling. As soon as that music leaves the studio, there are expectations.

  With those expectations come hard choices. If you are going to record that music, who’s going to play it? What gear will you use? Which studio are you going to use for tracking? Who is going to help you produce it? How will it do on the radio? Will it be suitable for live performance? How will critics review it? You're no longer in that moment where you've just written something for yourself. During those moments, I sometimes imagine I'm engaging in a pure, solitary pursuit, much like surfing, where it’s just you and Mother Nature. You're not really sharing what you do with anybody. It’s not being diluted by market concerns or any professional expectations. It’s a pure moment in life. I can identify with what painters feel when they finish that last stroke and stand back to look at their painting before anyone else has seen it. It’s a fantastic moment. I feel the same way when I've written something that captures exactly what I'm feeling and crystallizes that moment in musical form.

  In the old days, when I was getting ready to make a new record, I would listen to the demos endlessly. This time around, I kept telling myself I had to get away from that approach. So when I toured with Chickenfoot and then went on the subsequent G3 tours in 2012, I never brought any demos with me. There was a good month or two where I didn't listen to any demos at all. I just kept that music in my head and if I wanted to hear it, I would play it on the guitar. It would be a skeletal version of the song, without any set arrangement. It didn't have the trappings of a demo. This is an important point, because eventually you like what you keep hearing over and over again. They call it "demo-itis"!

  After I got back from the last G3 tour at the end of October 2012, I knew I had to get things together. I didn't know who was going to play on the record, or which songs I was going to record, and I also hadn't yet decided on what kind of album it would be. This was a very different way for me to work, but in the end, it all came together. I wound up using quite a lot of guitar and synth tracks recorded at my home studio from the year’s writing sessions.

  I'm happily blessed with being prolific, so I write constantly. Sometimes they're full pieces, sometimes just little bits. I've got lots of those bits on my phone, on my laptop and my desktop, on scraps of paper, and in my notebooks. At the start of every recording project, the task is to assemble all these bits, see where I'm heading creatively, and make sure there isn't a diamond in the rough that I've forgotten about. Sometimes you come across a complete song, like "Jumpin' Out," or sometimes it’s a little piece of something, like with "Can't Go Back." That was just a little riff I'd recorded on my phone. It came to me one day when there were a bunch of guys doing construction in the house, and the kitchen was the only place for me to hang out. I was sitting there with an acoustic guitar and I wrote that song while thinking about a friend of mine. I wrote maybe six to ten songs that day just sitting in the kitchen, exiled with my guitar. A week later when all the construction was finished, I brought all my notes down to the studio and came across that song. I'd forgotten what it was, but when I played it I instantly remembered the feeling I had when I wrote it, and the rest of the song just flowed. It seems like there’s a constant flow of music in my head.

  When I started writing "A Door into Summer," it had that wonderful feel-good vibe, like summer’s coming and school is ending. It was that same kind of vibe that inspired me to write "Summer Song" back in late 1990. When someone hears a song that resonates with them and some part of their life, that song then becomes a key that unlocks their emotions and memories. I started to think about a new kind of summer song, twenty years later. This time around, I went deeper.

  I brought the first demo into the Chickenfoot III sessions and told Sam, "You don't have to sing the verse. You can talk it." I thought it would be cool to do a song where Sam talked the verses, then sang the choruses. We played it for about fifteen minutes and the band looked at me like I was crazy! I said to myself, "All right, wrong time, wrong band for this song," but I remember going home that day thinking that song had a future with me. I just didn't know how to play it yet. Over the next two years, I would listen to the song over and over again and would sing a kind of guitar melody that I thought would work really well. I kept the melody in my head, vibing on it internally, so that when I finally was ready to record it, the melody would sound natural and relaxed. Ultimately, I wanted it to be about my memories, growing up on the East Coast when winter was over and spring was giving way to summer. School was ending and there were going to be the sort of crazy adventures and new experiences that are so important when you're a young kid. I was celebrating all of those memories.

  I went through a similar experience, on a different emotional level, while writing "Shine On American Dreamer." The imagery I had in my head was that of a battered Cadillac, which is quintessentially American, driving down a road. I could see it just being a great rock 'n' roll rally song, but the song was truthfully about me coming to grips with the economic turmoil that had culminated in market crashes and economic devastation for millions of people around the world in 2008. That really was part of the failure of the American Dream. My grandparents came from Italy, believed in that American Dream, and worked so hard to accomplish it. It wasn't lost on me after reading several books about that economic collapse that a small group of people driven totally by greed would misuse the American Dream and completely destroy the lives of so many people, not only in the U.S.A. but all around the world. In part, what they did was taint that dream for future generations. What I hope the song inspires is a feeling that what we need to do is to keep working and tweaking and fixing our own individual goals and actions to make the American Dream a reality again.

  That’s a really tough subject to write a rock song about, and it’s even tougher without lyrics, but that subject is what got me to play with the emotion I put into it. That’s why the guitar solo is so expressive. It’s not just a straight-electric, hyper-Chuck Berry solo; it’s got a wild
, emotional, yet classical sound to it. I wanted to express something heartbreaking during this solo. I also used elements of repetition in the arrangement. It’s the only song on the record that has that kind of intense repetition, the playing of a melodic riff over and over again, and that represented to me how difficult it is to keep a country on course. If you look at the history of the world, nothing lasts. Every country just dissolves and civilizations crumble.

  Keeping the American Dream going will require effort from every American. I asked myself at one point, "Are you crazy, Joe? Can you actually represent this in a song? Will people get it?" Eventually, I get to a point where I just do whatever I have to do to get the music to sound truthful to me. If someone decides later they want to play that song while they're working out, snowboarding, or driving in their car, that’s cool. It’s not my job to force people to think of the song the way I thought of it. Eventually, the artist has to give it away and move on and create more art.

  "Jumpin' In" and "Jumpin' Out" were two songs I wrote and recorded on the same day and then stored in my "Possible Recording Project" folder on my computer. Apparently, after I recorded the demo to "Jumpin' In," I had written an alternate version, "Jumpin' Out." I'd recorded the whole song and totally forgotten about it. I'd even forgotten how to play it! It was in A Hungarian minor and had this kind of swinging guitar-as-tenor-sax kind of thing with the band playing as an ensemble behind me. Upon rediscovering it, I realized that it was a really cool song and that both of these pieces could go together in a yin and yang kind of way—one song about not being afraid to take chances, the other about knowing when not to take chances.