Joe Satriani, Godfather of Guitar Gods

The following is a lightly edited transcript of an interview between guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani and Newsweek Radio's Jesse Edwards. You can listen to the full, unedited conversation here:

Jesse: Human beings are funny creatures. We like to compare and contrast a lot of things. Rolling Stone came out with a list of the 250 greatest guitar players of all time recently, and it's something that I'd like to ask our next guest about. Look, there are good guitar players. I'm a pretty good guitar player, but there are good guitar players everywhere. Then there's great guitar players, and you could find them in any town large enough to have a tattoo parlor, right? And then there are guitar gods, a lot of them on this list. And then there are guitar gods who give birth, not literally, but almost quite literally, to other guitar gods. And one of those is with us now, a guitar god who gives birth to other guitar gods. Mr. Joe Satriani, thank you so much for being here!

Joe Satriani: Hey, that's great. Thank you. What a fantastic introduction. Thank you.

Jesse: It's a bit of a visual, but it's incredibly true. I mean, you are the wizard that many of us look up to as the GOAT of guitar players. How do you feel about this list and this incessant need for people out there to compare and contrast and list their favorites, and who's "best"? Do people of your caliber even pay attention to this kind of noise?

Joe Satriani: Well, I think there's definitely two ways to think about it. Maybe there's three, so we'll start from the back. The third way to look at it is that it's just fun. In other words, people are talking about guitar players, thank God. So, for us guitar players, we have to look at that and go like, OK, great. At least we're in the conversation, which is great. Sometimes we're not, and we are trying to get people to listen to our music, and so that's important. The other side of it is the fact that we don't really think that way. I think serious artists know that there's no way to really put artistic creation together with success in the marketplace and all the way on the other side to technical ability. It just really doesn't make any sense. The fastest player is not the most successful player necessarily, but they can be for a moment, but you can't use those elements to judge.

I think that that can be confusing for someone who's starting out. They want to know, what should I do? How should I practice? Should I concentrate on my haircut? Should I get a good lawyer? I think that that was Frank Zappa's advice, get a good haircut and a good lawyer, or should I just express myself on my instrument and not pay attention to anybody? And if I'm lucky, I'll be successful in spite of me not paying attention to the trends or whatever. And so, on that level, number two is a big one. It's a philosophical one that players that really do deliver new creative messages through their guitar to the audience, it's going to be an internal struggle, but that's OK. I think that's going to hit an architect and a scientist in the same way. They have to figure those things out for themselves.

The other thing is, I think the first one, which is the one that hits the average person who might see it come by on their social media feed, somebody that they never even listened to is in the top 100 and someone they listen to their whole life is somehow 199 or 249, and they go, where are these Rolling Stone editors at? It's like, how could they come up with that? I get that all the time. I won't pay attention to it, but my inbox gets flooded with people saying, "This is a travesty, can you believe it? You need to call somebody. This person's ahead of that person." But it's a joke. It doesn't mean anything. I think it's just Rolling Stone, having some fun, and they're pretty good at it, so I'm not going to get in their way.

Jesse: There's one thing I think a lot of us could agree on that they got right on the list is that Jimi Hendrix is at the top, and I know that he has a special place in your heart. Starting off at the very beginning of your story, and I'm sure it's one you've told a thousand times, but when you were a kid, you actually quit the football team in the middle of practice when you heard that Jimi Hendrix passed away?

Joe Satriani: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's funny. It rolls back like I'm 9, going on 10, I become a drummer, I'm taking lessons at home. A professional teacher came to my house once a week and taught me down in the basement. I tried really hard for about three years and started to phase out from being a drummer. I thought, "I don't think I can get these four limbs to truly behave like Mitch Mitchell or other drummers that I was listening to at the time." And I think I started to really be influenced by the playlist of my older siblings, my older sisters, my older brother. So, I just had this musical catalog in my head that was a little bit ahead of my years at the time. And by the time I was turning 14, I really had gotten into Hendrix. I just thought he was the greatest thing. Every time I heard his music stopped me in my tracks.

I didn't know what he was doing. I wasn't a guitar player. I just loved it. And it really, I think, changed my DNA that first moment that I heard his music coming through the radio. So, there I am though. I'm just a young kid and I'm on a football team. I've always loved being in sports. So it was a normal thing to be on the football team. And I was all suited up standing right outside the gym ready to walk out onto the field, and a teammate just came up and said, "Hey, that guy you like, Hendrix—I just heard he died." And then that changed my life right there. That was something that devastated me. So I just turned around and I walked into the coach's office. [The coach] was an ex-Marine, hardcore guy. And there must've been something on my face, the look on my face or something. I just said, "Look, Hendrix died. I'm quitting the football team." And he just said, "OK, go do what you want." And I was expecting a big argument and a threat.

I think there was a little extra thing going on there, which was, I wasn't a very good football player obviously because I wasn't big enough. And once you turn 14, the big guys start to grow big in your class, and so people start to separate. So that may have had something to do with it. He figured, I don't really need that kid, that long-haired kid who wants to play rock and roll. So yeah, I went home that night and at the dinner table I stood up and I said, "I have an announcement. I'm going to become a guitar player because Jimi Hendrix died." And it was a lot of yelling and screaming and confusion, but when everything settled, I got the go ahead, and it was my task then to not give up like I had given up on the drums, that if I was going to get cooperation from my parents and siblings that I was going to have to prove that I was going to really do it this time.

Jesse: How long did it take for you to realize that you're probably quite a bit more advanced than the other kids that might've been playing at your age?

Joe Satriani: I have never felt that way. Really. No, I've never felt that way. But I learned really early on to enjoy what I was and my position compared to other talented people because you have to imagine: I start out, I'm the only one in the family who's decided to try to become a musician. Everyone had far more good sense to look for a real job. And so I'm playing and I'm thinking, how come I don't sound like Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck and Pete Townshend and Keith Richards, there's all these great guitar players. I'm listening to it, but I can't figure out their finger positions. I can't find a teacher who's cool enough, who understands rock music, and there's no internet, no DVDs, video professors, none of that. You're kind of stuck with searching your community, your people close by to show you what to do. And I really had nobody.

So it seemed to me like I was struggling. And at the same time, I was getting a really fantastic education in music theory from a guy named Bill Westcott who was a young teacher right out of Juilliard. And he was teaching music at Carle Place High School, and I really got along with this guy and somehow he would look at me. You have to imagine I had hair down past my shoulders wearing motorcycle boots, black jeans, black T-shirt, denim jacket. I listened to Black Sabbath and Zeppelin and Hendrix, and he somehow decided that he would still spend a few extra moments with me to teach me music theory any way that he could.

So when I got home and I would pick up the guitar, I started to see music on the instrument, and this really was my ticket. And this was part of a lesson that he gave me once when he said, "It may turn out when you're 18 or 19 that you're not as good as a guitar player as you thought you were going to be, and you're going to reach a physical limit, but your musical mind can keep going forward until you're 80 years old," he said, "so that's what you should be concentrating on. Don't give up the practicing and learning songs and all that kind of stuff, but this is where all the really cool stuff is going to happen." And I took that to heart, and I started to realize that whatever sort of physical roadblocks that I was feeling, like if I was slow or I couldn't stretch or my fingers hurt or I couldn't pick the way I saw other people picking…that I would come up with a workaround using my brain.

And then around that same time, I start to meet these young kids who want to take lessons from me. They've seen me play at the high school gym or at the park or some backyard party or something like that. One of them was little Steve Vai, and he was 12 years old when I met him. He went to the same high school. So we kind of knew all the same people, got in trouble in all the same places, liked the same music, but I knew after a couple of weeks that he was uniquely talented. And I thought, oh my God, this guy is going to go so far past me physically with his technique as he just had it. And then as we kept moving forward the lessons, I realized that his brain also had that same hunger, that mind that we really wanted to know the secrets of music, all of it, not just rock guitar. And I think this is where that special bond between us was forged. It's also where I learned that lesson really early that I was not the guy in the group that could play the fastest, stretch his fingers the furthest, play the most complicated or any of that stuff. That was not me. And what really excited me was writing music that I don't think anyone else could write, and to push the boundaries of chord progressions and combining rhythms and melodies and these chord progressions into creating new music. And I love that. I love that more than sitting down practicing a particular run for eight hours day after day until it was faster than the way my friend could play it. I got no joy from that. So that was a turning point for me.

Jesse: This is so much different than traditional rock and roll where you have a singer, right? Because you are the singer, you're the voice with your notes in your hand. And can you talk about how different that is maybe than the traditional rockstar, not lifestyle, but how it's marketed and how it's received by the public preaching to a very specific audience of guitar players around the world. Are those audiences different from one another? Are they growing? What is that kind of world compared to, I guess, maybe the rest of the music industry?

Joe Satriani: Yeah, instrumental music has been around for centuries as we know, but there's nothing that communicates more directly, I think, than the human voice. And so I'm not competing. I'm not fighting against, I'm not trying to change the world. And if I could sing really well, I would, but I've been in bands where the singers are like, you recognize that they were born that way, that they have a special gift. So it never enters my mind. But I think that when I started listening to guitar players, mainly really paying attention, which was early Beatles and Stones, British invasion music that my older siblings were listening to that I would always gravitate toward the brooding, the moody, the instrumental part of the album for some reason. And when Hendrix came out, I remember listening to that first album and "Third Stone From the Sun" made such a big impact on me.

All my friends wanted me to play "Foxy Lady" and "Purple Haze," and I kept saying, we should be playing "Third Stone From the Sun." That's music to me. And in those early days, it was cathartic just to sit and listen to it, just to pay attention so closely to what he was doing. And so that connection to the guitar as an instrumental music generator was really important to me. Those early experiences, just sitting down and focusing on what was coming off of the albums was really important. I love that part of it. And I started to notice that players all over the spectrum of music were displaying that talent. I heard my parents playing Wes Montgomery, and I thought, that's perfect. That's beautiful. That's exactly what I would do if I was a jazz guitar player. That's just like the epitome of perfection on jazz guitar.

When I heard them playing Miles Davis records, and I heard the way Miles played, I thought, this is perfect. You don't hear somebody reciting or regurgitating all of their practice routines in front of you to try to get a rise, to try to get validated. It's just music. You know what I mean? It's like when you listen to Hendrix, you can't hear any exercises. You don't hear scales. The way that you would lift them off of an instruction manual about how to play a scale or how to play guitar, this I thought was really high art. They were creating music on their instruments, but they weren't simply showing you what they've practiced. And that really struck a chord within me, and I started to notice that with other players. So in my high school band, we'd go to play some Humble Pie and I'd listened to Peter Frampton play a solo, and I'd think, what is that? It's like, what are all those extra notes? And why does it sound so beautiful and melodic? And it was because Peter, it's just who he is. That's the way he played. He didn't really try to copy anybody.

So, I started to figure out that there was a difference between people who played and tried to get their music out to you and people who played to try to get famous for their technical accomplishments. And I started to see that this was an important line. You had to draw a line in your daily routine: Am I going to concentrate on writing original music and playing in an original way, or am I just going to try to get ahead with the physical attributes that I have? Again, I think I've mentioned this before to one of your other questions, but musicians, they have to make decisions every day because it's really hard to find time to practice. It's really hard to allocate minimal funds. You might have to decide, am I going to buy strings or another guitar or a pedal, or should I just stick with what I got? And so these decisions sometimes are more simple in the real world, and other times they're really philosophical, should I practice or should I figure out a way to tear open my heart and share my true feelings with my audience? I know that's a big one, but that's, I think, the real one.

Jesse: Let's fast forward to the mid-'90s: You're in the full swing of your career, and you decide to get Steve Vai and Eric Johnson together for G3. What gave you the idea to start a collaboration like this?

Joe Satriani: Well, it's an interesting period, because I'd survived the popularity of Surfing With the Alien. I went from obscurity to having a platinum album, and all of a sudden, I went from trying to be a solo artist for about three weeks, and I wound up in Mick Jagger's solo band. A lot happened. It might seem like it was an overnight success, but actually it was decades of super hard work. But there I was after a couple of years of riding high and Surfing With the Alien was out and Flying in a Blue Dream, and The Extremist, all really successful records and the tours were very successful. I'd come back from a really long tour in Europe, and I went into the Bill Graham Management offices, and I said to the guys, "Look, everything's great and thank you. Everything's been going great. However," I said, "I feel so isolated. Every time I'm in London, all my friends are in L.A. or New York or Sydney or Tokyo, and then when I finally get to Sydney or Tokyo or L.A. or New York, they're all in Paris or Frankfurt or something. When do we all get to hang out?"

Because when I was a kid, I always imagined sitting, listening to albums, and reading rock and roll magazines, that musicians hung out with each other all the time because you'd see pictures of Hendrix with Clapton and Jeff Beck, and you hear all these stories and you think, well, that's what I want to do. I just want to hang out with my fellow guitar players and do all this collaborating. But in fact, in my world of guitar slingers, we were kept separate. And you started to realize, even though at home when you play guitar, you didn't feel this competition, you would hear it from the person, from the press person that, well, you can't get the cover because that guy's getting the cover and that person doesn't want to be on the show because he doesn't like you. And his manager says he should never be anywhere near you. And the promoters are saying, "Well, I'd rather see this guy in March and that guy in April and the other guy in July—don't want them close to each other."

And all I saw was barriers, just like brick walls and fences. And my main complaint was, "I want to hang out with my fellow guitar players, so what can we do?" And I started to see a lot more festivals kick up like Lollapalooza, and I said, "I know it's a stretch, but what if we made our own festival of some kind where all of the guitar players would want to come and play with each other?" It's obvious there are fans out there who want to see the guitar players, why make them wait and never see us collaborate when they see other artists collaborating in different styles? I saw the Three Tenors album going platinum when I was growing up. My parents had lots of jazz records where the horn players would get together. They'd have three or four famous horn players putting together great live albums or studio albums. So, I didn't think it was that unusual, but it did take about three or four hours of us sort of hashing out these ideas, like what's possible.

We whittled it down to three because we realized that when you go out and you go to book the Beacon Theater, you're literally renting it. So, you rent it for a night, and they have rules. You can come in at this time to load in. The union says, you got to stop and do nothing during these periods. You have to take the stage here and you better be off the stage there, and by this time you're out of here. These are the rules. So that's just the reality of touring for all musicians. And so, we figured, well, how are we going to get all these guitar players?

We can't have 15. No one's going to show up on tour and play one song. When we realized if it's three guys, then everyone gets to play anywhere from 45 minutes to 55 minutes, which is enough time for them to play songs from their new album, songs that their fans really want them to play from their extensive catalog if they've got one. And that way they feel like they're doing the business they need to do because they'd be touring with G3 in lieu of touring on their own, so we had to work out that kind of detail. Then it literally took a year because I knew who I wanted. I really wanted Steve and Eric to be the first two guys that I brought out, and it just really did take a long time to convince their managers and record companies that, yes, these three gun slingers were going to stand right next to each other every night.

And it was inevitable someone was going to play better than the other one at some point night after night. But I kept telling them, "Forget about it. The audience doesn't care. They walk in the door. They know who their favorite is. You're not going to change their mind. That's not why they're there. They're there to enjoy all three of us, to love the one that's their favorite, and then to go, 'Oh my God, they're actually playing together. They're playing that song that I've never heard them play on their albums, and they're doing it together and they're improvising and they're having fun and they're getting us to join in.'" And it worked. I mean, the feeling I had was that me being in the audience, that's what I wanted to see.

And I felt like I was being deprived of that experience and that together with the fact that I felt that my success with isolating me from my fellow musicians, those two factors really drove me to make sure that we would accomplish this concert series.

Jesse: Do you still have fun playing guitar? I mean, do you still rock out by yourself and just still get goosebumps when you're flying in a blue dream?

Joe Satriani: Yeah, I do. I really do love it. And I think one of the things that's kind of important, when I started to play guitar, as I told you the story, the days following that decision I learned and had to really come to grips with the story that had ultimately resulted in Jimi Hendrix dying. He was haunted and haunted by what he had created, the entertainer, Jimi Hendrix, the entertainer. He was trying to be taken seriously and it was beginning to drive him crazy, the rock and roll antics, the show part, the entertainment part of it. And I remember thinking, well, I certainly don't want to die when I'm 27, so I need to avoid what all these people are doing, and there were quite a few people dying at that time.

Rock and roll stars were overdosing and whatnot. And I was just thinking like, well, I'm not this person. First of all, I'm shy. I don't really know how to walk out on stage. It terrifies me. I'm not that kind of a personality. And I thought, well, I'm, I'm going to keep it simple and keep it about the music as much as I can.

G3 Tour Featuring JOE SATRIANI, ERIC JOHNSON, STEVE VAI

January 23, 2024, Tucson, AZ - Rialto Theatre

January 25, 2024, Highland, CA - Yaamava Resort & Casino

January 26, 2024, Scottsdale, AZ - Talking Stick Resort Ballroom

January 27, 2024, Las Vegas, NV - Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino

January 29, 2024, Spokane, WA – First Interstate Center for the Arts

January 31, 2024, Seattle, WA - The Moore Theatre

February 1, 2024, Salem, OR - Historic Elsinore Theatre

February 2, 2024, Reno, NV - Grand Sierra Reno

February 3, 2024, Oakland, CA - Fox Theater

February 5, 2024, Fresno, CA – Saroyan Theatre

February 7, 2024, El Cajon, CA - The Magnolia

February 9, 2024, Los Angeles, CA - Orpheum Theatre

February 10, 2024, Los Angeles, CA - Orpheum Theatre

For more information on shows, ticketing and VIP packages, go HERE.