There probably weren`t a lot of people who expected success for Joe Satriani`s album, ”Surfing With the Alien,” when it was released last October. The album is on an independent rather than a major label, and it is an all-instrumental, rock-guitar outing, a type of LP that generally doesn`t do well on the charts.
But if you checked the Billboard album chart a few days ago, there was Satriani`s album in the 30s, tagged with a bullet that indicates the potential for a further rise in the chart listings. A lot of people, obviously, have been buying ”Surfing With the Alien,” confounding the expectations of some of the folks at Satriani`s label, not to mention those of Satriani himself.
”I didn`t really think it was going to enter the charts at all,” says the California guitarist. ”When it did, it was cause for immense celebration around here. I assumed people like me-guitar players and people connected with recording-would like the record. John (Cuniberti) and I produced the record so we could just have as much fun as possible. We didn`t bother trying to make it sound like a record that would have a chance of moving up the charts.
”People always told us you can forget about having a lot of success with an instrumental guitar record, especially if it`s rock. So we said, `Well, let`s just record each song the way we want it, create our own little sound, and that way we`ll always enjoy it.` ”
While a 1985 Satriani album, ”Not of This Earth,” did well with a
”core audience” of guitar players and musicians, says Satriani, its commercial performance came nowhere near matching that of ”Surfing With the Alien.”
”With `Surfing,` I really put more of my roots into the record,” he says. ”It has my musical ideas from age 14, maybe even earlier, all the way up to the present. All thrown in there with no shame. I just put it all in there and didn`t worry about what people would think from a guitar standpoint. ”Every musician has influences and roots. There was a lot of music from every period being played where I grew up, and I absorbed it. I listened to Chuck Berry, who was considered an oldies musician when I started playing. Chuck sort of comes out through me in the album`s title track and a little in `Satch Boogie.` It`s hard to play rock `n` roll guitar and not have Chuck Berry in the back of your head.
”I really learned from a generation of players who had learned from a previous generation. I learned from listening to Hendrix records, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Johnny Winter. But they were sort of reacting to early American blues. It`s odd how we learn, language or anything. We all sort of adopt what`s been done before, then twist it about.”
Understandably, some people think Satriani-whose public-recognition factor has shot up lately thanks to numerous print and broadcast interviews-suddenly has appeared out of nowhere, the proverbial ”overnight
sensation.”
”Yeah, it`s funny,” says Satriani, 31. ”A lot of people ask about being an overnight sensation, what it feels like. But I`ve been a guitar player for a very long time. I was always sort of confident that eventually it would all come into focus like this. So all the stuff that`s going on now seems quite natural.”
Raised on Long Island, N.Y., Satriani began playing guitar in his teens. In high school, he gave lessons to a fellow student, Steve Vai, who now is guitarist for David Lee Roth`s band. The tutoring continued with other pupils when Satriani moved to Berkeley, Calif., in the late `70s. Besides forming a band called the Squares, Satriani regularly taught aspiring guitarists, who received their lessons-in styles that ranged from blues to thrash metal to jazz-in a local music store.
”It would be a bargain between us,” Satriani recalls. ”They learned scales and theory, then I`d teach them whatever song they brought in on cassette. Most of the teachers in the area had set ways. They taught only standards or only `70s rock or whatever. But there was this enormous amount of talented people out there, 13-year-olds through 30-year-olds, and it seemed ridiculous to restrict them to some form or style.”
Besides Vai, Satriani has tutored Kirk Hammett of Metallica and Phil Kentner of Laaz Rockit. As a session musician, he has done work for PBS, Dole Pineapple and other concerns. He added guitar tracks to Greg Kihn`s ”Love & Rock & Roll” album and toured with Kihn. Just recently, he finished a three-week tour of Japan as guitarist for Mick Jagger.
At the moment, Satriani is once again on the road in the States with his
”Surfing With the Alien” tour (arriving Thursday at Cabaret Metro). Joined by a bassist and drummer-and an electronic sampler that produces a variety of effects-Satriani is performing material from both his albums. Some of the songs are completely faithful to the versions on vinyl, he says, but audiences can also expect some departures.
How radical are the departures? Satriani refers to them as ”wild fantasias.”