joe satriani surfing with the alien tour

JOE SATRIANI: 'Surfing With The Alien' 20th Anniversary Tour Dates Announced

Legendary guitarist Joe Satriani has announced the following dates for the "Surfing with the Alien" 20th anniversary tour (where he will be perform his classic 1988 LP in its entirety):

Aug. 15 - Gramercy Theater - New York, NY Aug. 16 - House Of Blues - Chicago, IL Aug. 17 - Roxy Theatre - Los Angeles, CA Aug. 18 - Exclusive in-studio San Francisco show where "Surfing with the Alien" was recorded

A new JOE SATRIANI EPK (Electronic Press Kit) in support of the 20th anniversary reissue of his "Surfing with the Alien" LP — due in stores August 7 — is available at this this location (Quicktime required).

"Surfing with the Alien" was the album that ignited Joe Satriani 's career as a solo performer. The acclaimed guitarist's second full-length release, "Surfing with the Alien" was originally issued in October 1987 on Relativity Records . It became a left-field bestseller that reached No. 29 on the Billboard Top 200 and was certified platinum for U.S. sales of over one million copies. It was the first rock guitar instrumental album to reach Billboard 's Top 200 Album Chart. It includes the charting hits "Satch Boogie" and "Surfing with the Alien" , plus the Grammy -nominated "Always With Me, Always With You" .

On August 7, 2007, Epic / Legacy Recordings will celebrate the 20th anniversary of this groundbreaking album with the release of a new expanded edition of "Surfing with the Alien" . This meticulously restored two-disc set includes the newly remastered album and a previously never-before-seen live show filmed at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1988. It will also feature new liner notes written by Joe and special deluxe packaging featuring photos, notes and other memorabilia from Joe 's personal archive.

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The secrets behind Joe Satriani's tone on Surfing With The Alien

How Satch got the sound for one of the ultimate shred guitar anthems

The incredible success of Joe Satriani’s second album, Surfing with the Alien, ushered in a renaissance period for instrumental electric guitar albums during the late-'80s/early '90s, paving the way for similar efforts like Steve Vai’s Passion and Warfare, Eric Johnson’s Ah Via Musicom and Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop, which also ascended to impressive chart positions.

While Satriani’s innovative new tricks and techniques caught guitarists’ attention, what really made him appeal to the masses and stand out from dozens of other shred guitarists preceding him were his memorable melodies and bold, assertive tone.

Surfing with the Alien still sounds as good today as it did more than 30 years ago, but surprisingly the rig Satriani used to record the album was rather modest, especially for its time.

His main guitars were a Kramer Pacer with two humbuckers, another Kramer Pacer with three single-coil pickups and a self-assembled Strat-style guitar made from a Boogie Bodies maple body and ESP ’59-style maple neck with ebony fretboard, with various pickup assemblies that he would swap as needed.

Joe Satriani reveals the secret to improving your legato technique

For the album’s title track, he used the hardtail Boogie Bodies for the rhythm track while playing the lead parts on the Kramer and making good use of its Floyd Rose.

The song’s aggressive lead tone comes from a combination of a Chandler Tube Driver, Cry Baby wah pedal and the studio’s Eventide H949. The Tube Driver provided distortion, sustain and upper-midrange punch, while the wah was employed to deliver a voice-like midrange honk.

The Eventide H949 is the “secret” weapon here, dialed in to a slightly detuned setting that further thickened the tone and added a distinctive, abrasive texture.

Get the sound, cheap!

• Ibanez S570AH
• Marshall DSL5CR
• TC Electronic Tube Pilot overdrive
• Dunlop GCB95 Cry Baby wah
• Electro-Harmonix Pitch Fork

TONE TIP: Use the Pitch Fork’s “detune” setting (D) and the Mode switch’s “pitch down” setting to mimic the warbling, chorus-like effect.

Original gear

GUITAR: 1983 Kramer Pacer with rosewood fretboard and Seymour Duncan ’59 (neck) and JB (bridge) humbuckers (bridge pickup), bridge volume: 10, master tone: 10

AMP: Early Seventies Marshall Model 1959 Super Lead 100-Watt head (Presence: 6, Bass: 3, Middle: 8, Treble: 6, Volume I: 7, Volume II: 0, Input I top left), Marshall 4x12 with Celestion G12T-75 speakers

EFFECTS: Cry Baby wah, Chandler Tube Driver (Out Level: 7, Hi: 8, Lo: 4, Tube Drive: 6), Eventide H949 (Main Level: 6, Low: 5, High: 5, Pitch Ratio: 0.989, Control Mode: Manual, Function Button: In, Function: Norm, Algorithm Select: 1)

STRINGS/TUNING: D’Addario XL120+ .0095-.044/Standard

PICK: Heavy (1mm) celluloid

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Chris is the co-author of Eruption - Conversations with Eddie Van Halen. He is a 40-year music industry veteran who started at Boardwalk Entertainment (Joan Jett, Night Ranger) and Roland US before becoming a guitar journalist in 1991. He has interviewed more than 600 artists, written more than 1,400 product reviews and contributed to Jeff Beck’s Beck 01: Hot Rods and Rock & Roll and Eric Clapton’s Six String Stories.

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Joe Satriani talks Surfing With The Alien track-by-track

The gear and technique secrets behind a shred guitar masterpiece

Still riding the wave

Joe Satriani is known for many things: his inimitable legato technique, formidable guitar tutelage legacy, uncompromising approach to composition, those shades. But most of all, it’s 10 tracks and four words that both defined Satriani and shred guitar as a whole: Surfing With The Alien.

Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, Surfing stands as a landmark release in instrumental guitar music, fusing Joe’s love of guitar players right across the spectrum with a sense of fun, technique and, crucially, melody - the resultant album spanned high-octane blues fusion (Satch Boogie), lyrical ballads (Always With Me, Always With You) and bombastic rock (Ice 9), with consistently thrilling results.

The idea for the album was to celebrate everything that I really liked about electric guitar

“Globally, the idea for the album was to celebrate everything that I really liked about electric guitar, my roots, and the players that I still really like,” Joe explains.

“And, so, for me, it went from Chuck Berry to Hendrix , from Wes Montgomery to Allan Holdsworth, I wanted to celebrate all of it. I was a kid that grew up listening to The Beatles , and The Stones, and Jimmy Page , and Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck , and I wanted all of that in there. But at the same time, a large part of my playing is Tony Iommi and Billy Gibbons. I'm just a sum total of all of the guitar players that I think were really cool. And I wanted to make an album that was about that.

“I pitched the album to Relativity Records' president, Barry Kobrin, in the exact same way. And he looked at me funny because it was such an untrendy thing to do, but he said, ‘Well, okay.’ He'd heard me play Satch Boogie at a club in New York City one night and so he said, ‘Okay, is the album going to be like that?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, pretty much, with a couple of left turns here and there.’”

Satriani’s second release on Relativity Records, Surfing was recorded on a miniscule-for-1987 budget of $13,000 at San Francisco’s Hyde Street Studios, which placed supreme pressures on Joe and producer John Cuniberti, but only served to stretch their creativity to the limit as they sought to make the record in Joe’s head using the limited resources available to them.

“It was made with a complete unselfconscious love of the things that I wanted to celebrate on guitar, and it was also made under enormous duress and the feeling that no-one would ever really listen to it and I would be run out of town as soon as I delivered the album,” Joe muses.

“It was under such a climate that it didn't seem that anyone was going to accept such an album. So it was such a wonderful surprise when it was embraced, because it wasn't a calculated record and much was sacrificed to get it done.”

Given the strained conditions in which the album was recorded, what’s perhaps most remarkable is just how much Joe remembers: his memory is as precise as his pentatonic runs, and the sheer amount of detail he’s able to divulge is more than most artists are able to share about an album recorded last month, let alone 30 years ago.

Kramer vs Kramer

This ability to recall is testament to a true labour of love, particularly with regard to gear. Long before he secured his JS signature models with Ibanez , Satriani armed himself with whatever guitars he could afford - even if that meant sacrificing tuning stability for the sake of functionality.

“For that particular record, I had two Kramer guitars. They were both Pacers and one was the white one that I had purchased in '84 or '82, and it was put together from parts at the Guitar Center,” he recalls.

I'm just grateful that companies make guitars and they sell them for cheap for people don't have a lot of money. That's who I was at the time, and, so, it helped me out at a time when I needed it

“I bought it only because it had a first-generation Floyd Rose with no fine-tuners, and I was shunning that whole idea during the early '80s: I was a no wah-wah, no-vibrato bar kind of thing. But I picked it up anyway and eventually I realised that the thing was really great if you wanted to play out of tune all the time. [laughs] The guitar itself was always falling apart and [guitar tech] Gary Brawer was continually trying to fix it.

“But I had a connection with it, and that became the guitar that I used for my first EP and Not Of This Earth, and then Surfing. And by then I had purchased a second version of that Pacer that had just three single-coil pickups; it was even worse than the two-humbucker version that I had.

“It got limited use in the studio, and after the record was finished, the guitar was never used again. I still have it, but I don't know what to do with it. It's such a poorly constructed guitar, but it was inexpensive and I'm just grateful that companies do that. They make guitars and they sell them for cheap for people don't have a lot of money. That's who I was at the time, and, so, it helped me out at a time when I needed it.”

Where he couldn’t afford more instruments, Joe also took some more innovative approaches to tone-seeking, using his so-called Boogie Body Strat.

“I also had a guitar that I had put together from parts. It was a Boogie Body Strat body made out of hard-rock maple. It was an ESP neck that was '59 vintage style, 7.5 radius, ebony fretboard neck.

I'd take the strings off, unscrew the pickguard, put in a new pickguard with the Strat pickups, screw it and string it up, and then do that part

“I worked at a vintage guitar store and the owner had ties with a lot of Japanese manufacturers and US manufacturers that were beginning to pop up. So I was ordering parts and screwing them together and contacting local luthiers to finish and do frets and things, and I had put together two guitars, a red one and a black one. The red one I eventually sold, but the black one is the guitar that I wound up using a lot.

“It was a hardtail, so if I didn't need the whammy bar I'd use that guitar: clean, funky, bluesy. I still have that guitar today. It's on every record doing something. It's an odd-sounding guitar because of the wood, and what I did was I had Gary Brawer make me two or three different pickguards that were preloaded with different kinds of pickups.

“So for the ‘humbuckers in the Strat body’ sound I had a black pickguard with two Seymour Duncan pickups in it. It was a ’59 in the neck and a JB in the bridge, and I would screw that one in when I needed that kind of a sound, and then when I needed to do really Stratty kind of sounds, I would tell John Cuniberti to take a break, I'd take the strings off, unscrew the pickguard, put in a new pickguard with the Strat pickups, screw it and string it up, and then do that part. That's basically because I couldn't afford to have all these different guitars; I just had three guitars and a bunch of pickguards. The poor man's guitar arsenal!”

It’s these details and more that Joe intends to expand upon at 2017’s G4 Experience held 24-28 July at Asilomar Center in Carmel, CA. The guitar camp celebrates Surfing’s 30th anniversary, bringing all the album’s major players back together to answer any possible question about any aspect of the recording - and judging from Joe’s recollections, we’re inclined to believe they’ll have the answers.

“The G4 Experience this time around is going to try to explain, as well as detail and celebrate, all those moving parts to the creation of the record,” Joe enthuses. “The recording of it, the fingertips, the picks, the strings, the amps, the performing of it, how it morphed, how it changed, and how each of the new people, players, that came along to help celebrate it elevated the songs even more each time we went out with them.

“The album wouldn't have broken through if it wasn't for these other these very important moving parts. Obviously, me and the guys, John Cuniberti, and the musicians, Jeff Campitelli and Bongo Bob Smith, making the record, but also Stuart Hamm and Jonathan Mover that came on after the record was done, became new friends and comrades, and actually championed the record in a totally different style on tour.”

For longtime Satch fans, the most exciting aspect of this year’s G4 Experience is that it reunites the original Satriani band line-up, bringing bassist Stu Hamm and drummer Jonathan Mover back to the fold.

While Hamm was onboard for Satriani’s 2008 Professor Satchafunkilus And The Musterion Of Rock tour, Joe hasn’t performed with Mover since the mid-’90s - their reconnection was a curious series of events…

“We ended on a bad note. There were some just touring business stuff that pissed the two of us off and so we decided to just call it quits,” Joe reflects. “And that goes way back: that tour ended the night of my 40th birthday.”

“Fast-forward to a few years ago and I'm doing a TV show, and a drummer, Robin DiMaggio, was the musical director, and we started an interesting collaboration where we wanted to create a song that would send a message of love and hope around the world and unite people. And that became a song called Music Without Words .

“Robin is the musical director for the UN, and one day when we were talking about musical things, he mentioned that he had spoken to Jonathan Mover, and I went, ‘Oh yeah, Jonathan, we had such great times, fantastic touring experiences,’ and everything. And I said, ‘I haven't talked to the guy in 20 years,’ and Robin just said, ‘You know, you should talk to that guy.’

“So, he sent me his number and I just called him and I said, ‘This is the weirdest thing, isn't it? I'm calling you out of the blue. I have nothing to talk about other than, ‘Hi, isn't it weird that we didn't talk for 20 years?’’”

The original power trio were famed for their energy and ferocity, which paired virtuosity with showmanship to unpredictable and virtuosic effect. But as Joe points out, their origins were anything but orthodox.

“In the summer of '87, Surfing With The Alien was about three months away from being released, and I flew out to Bensalem, Pennsylvania to go to the Hoshino USA factory to meet the Ibanez guys and talk about a JS model.

“On the way there I found out that Jeff Campitelli was not interested in going touring with this weird idea of me going on tour as an instrumentalist. So I arrived in Philadelphia, I know that the guys at Ibanez want me to play at the summer NAMM show that's happening in Chicago a week from then. So I've got seven days or six days and I've got to put a band together.

“So I'm sitting in the office just waiting to meet the guys from Ibanez and there's this other guy there and he looks pretty cool, looks like a young musician. So we're like, ‘Hi, how ya doing, I'm Joe.’ ‘I'm Jonathan.’ ‘What are you here for?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, I'm a drummer. I'm here just to talk to Tama.’

“I had a cassette of this new album called Surfing With The Alien, and I said, ‘Hey, what are you doing next week?’ And he said, ‘I don't know. I might go to the NAMM show.’ I said, ‘Would you play with me, if I gave you a tape, would you learn a couple of songs and we'll just play? There's this guy, Stuart Hamm, I've never played with him but my friend Steve Vai said he's a good bass player - would you do it?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, sure, I'll do it’.’

“So I gave him the cassette and I shook his hand, I said, ‘Okay, see you later, see you in Chicago.’ And a week later, for the very first time, Stu, Jonathan and I stood on stage at The Limelight in Chicago, and we tried to get to know each other during soundchecks. We pulled off the gig.”

The great beyond

Those unable to make it out to the Asilomar Center will be keen to know whether Joe intends to take the band out on tour, but his plans for 2017 are still very much TBC.

“I'm up in the air about that. I'm very focused on preparing for the last run of dates to support the Shockwave Supernova record. It has crossed my mind that I'm going to have to start thinking about the next touring band, but that's way in the future.

“Every year that I go out on tour I think about all the craziest ideas that would be great to go out with and I think, ‘I should see if Jeff Beck wants to join my band for a month or something.’ I always think of the craziest idea first and then work backwards, because you never know, that person that you think would never return your call might be sitting at home with nothing to do.”

I've never actually called Jeff Beck and asked him to join the band, but that doesn't mean I won't at some point

“But having said that, I've never actually called Jeff Beck and asked him to join the band, but that doesn't mean I won't at some point. I really don't think he's going to say yes ever, but, you know. It doesn't hurt in trying or dreaming, right?”

Of course, it was Surfing that introduced Satriani to the world and allows the guitarist to entertain such ideas today, but it was its strong sense of composition and melody that ensured it stood the test of time and influenced generations of guitar players to come.

Here, Joe takes us on a journey through the brainwaves that led to the composition of each of the album’s 10 tracks, the recording process that played such a crucial role in defining the sound and feel of the record and how his perception of the songs have changed over the three decades that have passed. Surf’s up…

Joe Satriani’s G4 Experience: Surfing With The Alien 30th Anniversary is held on 24-28 July at Asilomar Center in Carmel, CA. Packages are available from the camp’s official site .

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1. Surfing With The Alien

“First of all, the title track was not the title track; it was just a track on the record but it started off pretty innocently. And the song was a bit longer, actually: there was a second part. There was a part that was like a pre-chorus section that at the very last minute John and I decided to get rid of. It was a good decision because I think it focused more on the fun aspect of the song.

“I was using that Black Boogie Strat into a very early Chandler Tube Driver. I had three or four of them at the time, and I would go right into an early-'70s Marshall 100-watt head, into a 4x12, and that's how we pretty much did that particular song. And we just made adjustments to the amount of distortion that was generated from the Chandler Tube Driver.

I hadn't plugged in a wah-wah pedal in five or six years. And I'm leaving my apartment and I'm looking around like, ‘Shall I bring something else?’

“When we went to do the melody, there's a funny story with that. We were looking for a sound, and the day that I was leaving to go into the studio, I hadn't plugged in a wah-wah pedal in five or six years. And I'm leaving my apartment and I'm looking around like, ‘Shall I bring something else?’ And there's the dusty wah-wah pedal in the corner and I just looked at it and I thought, ‘Maybe I should bring that. Maybe that's what I need.’

“I got to the studio, I remember I said, ‘I've got this wah-wah pedal.’ And John looked at me like, ‘You haven't played a wah-wah pedal since I've known you.’ But I said, ‘Well, let's just try it.’ So I plugged that into the Tube Driver and that's going into the Marshall, and then we said, ‘We need something else.’ So he goes, ‘Well, we've got this Eventide 949 [Harmonizer] here.’ And John dials up that weird stereo sound where it was like a straight signal on the left and I think on the right it was like minus 11 cents or something like that.

“We had 20 minutes left of the session that afternoon at Studio C in Hyde Street, and we were so excited with the sound, we did this one big pass from the beginning all the way to the end while people were standing at the door, the client with their arms folded looking at us like, ‘Stop playing guitar and get out of our studio. We've got four o'clock.’

“Then we had to break down entirely, which means strip the amps, the microphones, everything. So the sound was lost. The next time we were in the studio a couple of days later, we bring it up and we go, ‘Wow, that's really good, but the guitar's not really in tune.’ And then we go, ‘Well, maybe we can just fix it.’ But we couldn't because there was no way to get the sound back. So that became that sound for the song.

“And then we just did the solos. The solos are all separate sounds for all the different keys, but we got really lucky there. I mean, it was just one of those moments where you just have to do it. There was no extra time, there were no do-overs, there was no auto-tune. That's what we recorded to tape that afternoon, and that's what we're going with. It had a lot of fun and a lot of drama, and we were so excited about how cool it sounded. And yes, you get to hear the Kramer with its shifting pitch centre in all its glory!”

“The song was about a little slice of an idea from a Kurt Vonnegut book called Cat's Cradle, and it was about a chemical that was devised by military scientists to turn water into ice so that armies could traverse muddy areas and, of course, it all goes wrong. So I was just thinking about something so insidious and cold and hoping of things tightening up and becoming ice. So this was my description to all of the players, when presenting the idea to John and to Bongo Bob who was doing the final [drum] programming for me.

“And I should say that the idea behind the record was let me record to a drum machine first so that I can get my ideas together and then bring in a drummer, which was Jeff Campitelli. But very quickly we realised that I had played in a very strange way: I was swinging around this metronomic drum machine and there was no way to go back and change it. We didn't have the money to go back and redo the parts once Jeff had played his part.

“But once Jeff went in and he started playing groovy drums, it only made sense with Satch Boogie, because it was a boogie and everyone thought he was swinging. But the other song, it appeared that the charm was that I was playing with machines; it was like Joe was the robot, you know what I mean? There was a characteristic to the music that was lost once all the machines were replaced, and John and I missed that awkward charm, I suppose you might say.

We were not only enamoured artistically with the idea of using drum machines, but we were also charmed with how much money it would save us, because we had so little to record the album

“Ice 9 was one of those songs that it really helped by being obviously a mechanical drum kit, and you have to remember that this is the '80s, so we were enamoured with the idea that the promise of what Kraftwerk was working on, in earlier times, was actually coming to fruition. And, so, we were not only enamoured artistically with the idea of using these machines with really loose guitar playing, but we were also charmed with how much money it would save us, because we had so little money to record the album.

“The budget was $13,000, that's what they gave me to record the entire record. It was ridiculous, and, so, there was no way to spend two weeks doing drums, even a week doing drums. So, we quickly shifted gears, and Jeff and Bongo worked out a thing where Bongo would program the drums and Jeff would go in and replace some of the cymbals or all of the cymbals, maybe he would do only the toms or only the snare. As a matter of fact, I think the only thing that's on here that's Jeff are the crash cymbals.

“On that one, I'm using a Boss DS-1 and the overdrive, OD-1, I think. I'm playing my ’60s P-Bass, but I think that's where the rhythm guitars are the DS-1, so they're a bit crunchier. For the solos, I believe it's a Rockman [headphone amp], and we just used one channel of the Rockman and put it up on the middle, flat and dry. I mean, that's about as dry as I've ever recorded. Simple legato technique and just crazy all over the place.

“There's a fun story about that backwards part. We were recording a solo on a Tuesday, and then two weeks later the next solo would be recorded in another room. A month-and-a-half later, the only thing left to do on that song was to record the backwards solo, and we got kicked out of Studio C because we had spent too much time there, but we needed to do the solos. So I asked, ‘Well, where can we go?’ And someone said, ‘You know, D down the hall is open for a half-hour. You guys go in there; you can have that.’

“So we packed up everything, we moved down the hall, we didn't have an amp, we didn't have microphones. I had this little Gorilla amp which was a practice amp and which no-one in their right mind would ever record with, but it was there. And I think I had it for just practising parts in the hallway. So we put that in the music room, and we didn't have a microphone, and so in Studio D there was this funky little talkback microphone that looked like it came from a radio studio 40 years earlier, so I said, ‘Can we use that?’

“So we took that, we unwired it, we hooked it up to my cable, we put it up against this little Gorilla amp which had a six-inch speaker in it, we turned everything up all the way, and then the Atari machine that we had had the ability to record in reverse without having to flip the tape over, which was a big deal back then. So that made it really easy for us because we didn't have a lot of time to be flipping tape back and forwards. I think it took 10 minutes just to get the sound and to record that thing, and we listened back to it and were like, ‘Okay, that's done!’”

3. Crushing Day

“I never should have written that solo! That was some alter-ego thing where I thought it would be a really cool thing to do. I mean, I loved the idea of sweep picking, and that was one of the very first things that I recorded for Relativity when I was trying to sell the idea to Barry Kobrin at the record label.

“This song definitely, out of all of them, echoed the time. It had that early-’80s metal sound to it and strictness. It had more Rockman on it than it should have had, and it had tuning issues because it was done as a demo. And then by the time we decided to put it on the album, we had run out of money and so we didn't have time to replace parts again.

“If we move on from all the issues - which is what I think about very often when I'm sitting here in the studio talking - the thing that I liked about the song was the fact that it was super-melodic and that was the point in creating the song itself. It was really about when we have days that really suck and you feel like the weight of the world is crashing down on you and, so, that's why the title was Crushing Day. You've been crushed down all day.

“But very often I notice that a lot of metal music is focused on riffs, and I thought, ‘Well, I've got a really cool riff, but I think, really, there's not enough wailing going on.’ And, so, because of the guitar instrumental, a lot of that weight that you're trying to describe has got to be turned into some kind of real screaming emotional melody. And, so, my writing approach was to create a super melody and then to have it be harmonised in a beautiful way. And, so, that was really the focus of the song.

We're just going to do what we want to do. There's nobody here to tell us we can't turn the guitar up or we can't have a 382-bar guitar solo!

“The solo section is really long, and I have to say that part of that is that I was so frustrated as a struggling session player that I was always told to stop playing, like, ‘No, don't use that. No, don't make those noises. No, you're playing too many notes. You can't use that technique. No sweep picking. Play more like that other thing, this guy.’ And going into the solo record both John and I were like, ‘Hey, we're just going to do what we want to do. There's nobody here to tell us we can't turn the guitar up or we can't have a 382-bar guitar solo!’

“So I think Crushing Day epitomises the idea that this guitar solo's going to be really long, and so I thought, ‘I'd better work some of this shit out.’ All the other ones are improvised, but this one was too long to just sit there and fiddle about. But, in retrospect, I regret it, because I've always found that when you're on stage and you're playing night after night, that sticking to the script is one of the things that will kill you in the end: it's a solo killer.

“But this particular song, what we found out touring through Jonathan and myself, was that this thing fell apart unless you played it exactly like the record. Of all the songs that I’ve recorded in my whole career, that is the one that is a nemesis, not really because of the technique involved, but it's just that there's something about the strictness of the recording that adds to the charm factor that when you try to redo it, upgrade it, modernise it, humanise it, that it loses its thing. And, so, it's been a nice challenge over the years.

“I have to tell you a funny story now. It was one of the G3 tours and we came through San Francisco, and I remember thinking that I really wanted to play that song. And, so, we had rehearsed it and we had played it, and I remember Jeff scratching his head with me every night going, ‘What is wrong with that song?’ We tried everything. We would liven it up, we would mess it up, we would play it perfectly, we just couldn't figure out what it was.

Steve Vai really loved the record, but I remember when it came to talking about that song, he just said, ‘Yes, it's a really cool song... solo's kind of worked out, though, isn't it?’

“Anyway, we're playing in San Francisco, we play that song, the show goes fine, but in my mind I know I've totally blown it. It's just something about it, I don't know what it is, I played all the notes and everything. I just remember getting a note from a fan, after that show, where he said, ‘What happened to Crushing Day? You messed up every part.’ And it illustrated to me that it wasn't just me that had a problem with the song, that even a fan felt that it was necessary to say, ‘Look, all due respect, Joe, I love you, but what's up with that song?’

“The other funny thing that should have tipped me off years ago was when I finished the record, I remember playing it to Steve Vai. Steve really loved the record, but I remember when it came to talking about that song, he just said, ‘Yes, it's a really cool song... solo's kind of worked out, though, isn't it?’ And it was that little comment between friends that was very telling, because I knew that out of everybody, he knows everything: when he listens to me play, he knows the backstory, just because he knows me. 

“We've been with each other since we were kids, but he canned it right away. He noticed that there was something fishy about it. And what I should have known when he said that was that was going to haunt me for the rest of my career! So I'm certain that if I have to play that song live again, that I'll have to come to grips with that.”

4. Always With Me, Always With You

“That song was a basic love song. I had a moment when I was writing in my apartment for the record where I was saying that I should not be afraid of the power and the beauty of major keys. And that year after year I hear people using I IV V progressions, I VI IV V progressions, and the musos will always roll their eyes because they're looking for cluster chords and unusual time signatures and challenging things.

They're not getting together 100,000 people at a time to sing something in 17/8 that traverses four different key signatures

“But if you walk around in the real world you think, ‘Wow’. I went to a stadium and there were 100,000 people singing the song that had three chords in it, and you go, ‘This is humanity. This is people coming together, being united by a simple melody over a simple chord, that hits to the core of their very being.’ They're not getting together 100,000 people at a time to sing something in 17/8 that traverses four different key signatures, you know what I mean?

“Part of me is just Chuck Berry, and I love the simplicity and the power behind getting three chords right and not throwing in 17 other chords when they're really unnecessary. So, these are ideas that germinate within inside of me for weeks, and then I get overwhelmed with a simple feeling and it propels me to be simple and direct and write just the essential notes.

“And then I'll spend weeks, months sometimes, just figuring out which notes to cut out, and that song is a good example of how I was thinking, ‘Well, how did Beethoven do it? How did he get these beautiful melodies to work on top of arpeggios? Can I have these cluster chords? Can I do the I IV V progression when every chord has a three and a four or a six and a seven in it?’

“So I did apply some muso stuff to it. Some late-1800s music ideas to some earlier classical structures and then just tried to play something that had a lot of love in it, just from the electric guitar point of view.

“One interesting thing about the recording of the song was that the arpeggios were done direct, but when I came in to record that day I played John the part and, of course, it had stereo chords and echoes everywhere. And he looked at me and said, ‘Well, I'm not recording that crap.’ He goes, ‘We'll never be able to mix that.’ He said, ‘Can we just plug you directly into the tape machine and get a dry take and then we'll worry about messing it up later?’

“And so we used that black Boogie Strat and we recorded the arpeggios totally dry, no amplifier, just into a mic pre into the tape machine. And then, of course, as we went to layer the track, I realised that he was completely right and he was looking ahead.

“Because that song was difficult; that song's got no drums in it, but there was a drum performance. Jeff Campitelli played drums all over it, but as we were mixing it, we slowly got rid of everything and it was really weird. It was just one of those things where we thought, ‘Wow, can we have a song where the only time there's a kick drum is during the bridge?’ But that's what's there: that was the extent of what we kept of Jeff and the rest of it was Bongo.”

5. Satch Boogie

“I got in a car accident, and I got some whiplash, and I was given a vial of drugs to recuperate, and I was sitting in my apartment in a neck brace, taking these pills. And it came to me that it would be funny if I could write music to the image of the drummer Gene Krupa, playing a drum kit at the top of a flight of stairs and then slowly falling down the stairs with the drum kit and playing.

“I remember playing the idea for Jeff against the drum machine that was just playing quarter-notes, and I said - I think the phrase was - ‘Can I do this? Can it be done?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, that's totally doable! I can do this.’ I was looking for that modernised Gene Krupa swing kind of thing and Jeff is really good at that. I mean, that's right up Jeff's alley.

“And so I recorded the whole thing against a drum machine pattern. The reason why the fade out of the song is so fast is that if we left it linger longer, you would hear the audio of the drum machine leaking into my pickups as I was holding the last chord. So we had to do a really quick fade so you wouldn't hear the ‘doom-dah, doom-dah, doom-dah’ that was pumping through the studio.

“That’s the Kramer into a DS-1 into the Marshall 100-watt. The main head of the song John used a shotgun mic, and then when the solos come in, we use a 57 right up against the grille cloth - that's why it becomes more in your face.

“For the middle pitch axis section, I wanted to take two-handed tapping to some different level, so with Midnight and with this section I was thinking, ‘What has Eddie [Van Halen] not done?’ I mean, Eddie is just a genius. He's the number one guitar player of my generation, but I thought, ‘I'm not going to step on his toes.’

“And so I applied things to the idea of tapping the ’board that I thought moved into an area that Eddie hadn't explored. And then using it as a bridge in a boogie song I thought was the weirdest thing. I just love that. I love it when you do a bridge that's so completely weird that when the song starts up again, you go, ‘Oh, that's right, it's the boogie!’”

6. Hill Of The Skull

“I was reading a poetry book of [Lebanese-American poet] Khalil Gibran, and in there there was a poem written based on eyewitness accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus. And the person refers to it as the hill of the skull. At the time, I'd never heard about that, which was weird because I went to Catholic school as a kid. So I just remember thinking how macabre the whole thing must have been.

“And I was moved to write something that would be so gruesome, like somebody dragging their own cross through the streets of a village only to allow himself to be nailed to it and slowly die. If there was a horror film, people would think it was truly horrible, right?

The first thing I thought was, ‘Get rid of all harmony: no 3rds, no 5ths’

“But sometimes when you're brought up with something from childhood it just becomes part of a story, and you don't really think of the human aspect of it so much. So I was thinking, ‘Well, if I was going to write music to that, it certainly wouldn't be all this glorious religious music I've heard where there's beautiful harmony and the music really alludes to the religious aspects of the event.’ I said, ‘What about the music for the human aspects of it?’ This is the horror of the whole thing. So the first thing I thought was, ‘Get rid of all harmony: no 3rds, no 5ths.’

“And I remember going into the studio thinking, ‘I don't know if I can pull this off,’ and I told John, ‘Look, I'm going to do lots of guitar; it's going to be just Marshalls turned up to 10 and the bass is going to be distorted, but don't be surprised if there's no real harmony. It's just the bassline and the melody, stark.’ And then I told Jeff, ‘I just want you to just hit that crash cymbal over and over again.’ I wish I had a movie of it, because Jeff was in there just going ‘bam, bam, bam’ all the way through the whole song.

“And we had the drum machine doing the kick and the snare. It was heavy in the studio doing it when we put it together, and we just wanted to make it sound scary for what it was. Again, if you remove the religion from it, it's humans being really bad to each other. It's gruesome.”

“I wrote that in the guitar shop where I was teaching; I just remember thinking simple: remove harmony, create riffs that are both melodic and rhythmic. And I think I was trying to imagine cyclical things in our lives, thoughts that go round and round in our head that we can't escape from, or things that we do in our life that we realise 10, 20 years later that we've been on some weird cycle of things. And, so, that got me to create that repetition.

“When I'm writing songs, the main thing is always the story or feeling and emotion, and then there's a part of me that's a musician that says, ‘You know, these are things that I've noticed that I think are unexplored or should be developed from a musical point of view.’ And I use those ideas to help interpret the emotional messages I'm getting about the story of the song.

“And, so, this is a prime example of how I get a feeling, a set of stories develop in my mind around emotions, and then that part, the musician part of me, kicks in and says, ‘Let's run with this.’ And, in this particular case, ‘Let's try and remove excess harmony, don't be afraid of repetition, don't be afraid of simple chords that are really gutsy.’

The great classical composers use complexity and simplicity like they were equal tools. And that's not often the case in modern music

“So that's what led me to the spacey beginning, and then telling Jeff, ‘Look, it's going to be spacey and reggae-sounding in the beginning, but then you come in and just do the most balls-to-the-wall, bonehead thing.’ And he totally got it. I mean, we were just making it up as we were going along.

“The chord progression for the solo is so simple. It's based on I IV V, and there's three chords. But it's the juxtaposition with the beginning and the end that makes it such a release, in a way. And that's what I think I've learned when listening to the great classical composers, that they use complexity and simplicity like they were equal tools. And that's not often the case in modern music. Usually, bands get stuck on one or the other. But classical and jazz music has always treated those two elements equally, as equal tools to send a message to the listener, so this was going through my mind for the whole album.”

8. Lords Of Karma

“Those two chords I wrote when I was still in high school. It must have been about 4.30 in the morning: I came back from a party and I wrote these two chords and I thought they were the most unusual chords. I'd never heard anyone ever put those two chords together in my entire life, and I couldn't write a song around it, they were so weird. And I knew it was a very weird pitch axis thing, and I just kept that in my pocket and I kept waiting to be shown that I lifted it from somebody.

“The record was halfway through its writing and recording, and I realised I really wanted to try to work these two chords into something and I thought, ‘Maybe now's the time: I'm ready, I'm old enough, I'm smart enough to write a song around these two chords that were so inspiring to me.’ And so I did eventually write - it was supposed to be the title of the album by the way - Lords Of Karma.

“That's a Coral sitar - a vintage one that I borrowed from a guy named Ratdog at Subway Guitars in Berkeley, California - playing those opening chords. We recorded it direct and then just applied a really cool mic pre and stuff like that to it.

“It was very strange but that shows how excited I was about the pitch axis concept and how, when I was made aware of it through my high school music teacher Bill Westcott, it was the opening of the heavens from a composing point of view.”

9. Midnight

“Like I said before, I was a big Eddie Van Halen fan, and I just loved playing his stuff, but I could sit back and if I was going to be analytical I could say, ‘Well, he's not doing this. He's taking it in that direction, but what about all this other stuff you could do with it?’

“And, so, again, I tried to be as respectful as I could - I thought, ‘Well, maybe the way to do it is to write a song first and then see if you can interpret it as a two-handed piece.’

I wrote a piece of music based on this baroque music that I'd been listening to and I literally wrote it out on manuscript… And then I thought, ‘Okay, now how can I turn this into a two-handed piece?’

“I wrote a piece of music based on this baroque music that I'd been listening to and I literally wrote it out on manuscript, and it was just chords and a looping melody. And then I thought, ‘Okay, now how can I turn this into a two-handed piece?’ And I spent months taking the thing apart and trying to figure out a way to play it like it was Beethoven or Chopin or something. And that's what I wound up with.

“Then I thought, ‘Okay, now I've got it, it's rather mechanical... how do I create a recording that's rather fantastical?’ Because that was the other thing. I mean, Eddie was all about rock and roll, like fun rock and roll band. Giant guitar hero playing loud, wearing striped clothes and jumping around and trying to avoid the crazy lead singer, that kind of thing. And I thought, ‘What about a pure fantastical thing, like music that is accompanying some weird ceremony in the middle of the night, in the middle of a forest?’ And this is how I would pitch this song to John Cuniberti and Bongo Bob. I'd say, ‘Can you imagine this?’ And they'd look at me like, ‘What?’ [laughs]

“But that's what I did. So I played my black Boogie Strat direct into a mic preamp, right to the tape machine and then we used some sort of stereo chorus and some beautiful reverb, and I recorded all the pieces. I used a little Casio CZ-101 to record the flute, if you can believe it.

“But Bongo Bob, he's such a creative guy, he totally got my whole imagery of a secret ceremony in the middle of the forest, in the middle of the night. And, so, he started to create all the funny percussion, and John was totally cool with trying to get that little CZ-101 Casio keyboard to sound like some sort of dream orchestra. It sounded very much like an old-school Moog synthesizer. It was the cheapest imitation you could ever get. I miss that keyboard. I played it until it broke.

“And the whole thing about the timing, moving, that was my nod to Chopin and the emotional playing and how the music was supposed to be very inspirational. It wasn't all about technique: the problem when you base a song on arpeggios, as soon as they hear [hums arpeggio], right away the listener's like, ‘I bet this is going to go on forever.’ And that's what kills the whole two-handed technique thing, that the audience just knows right away, ‘This is going to repeat, isn't it?’ And then they just check out.

“And, so, I was thinking, ‘Well, then I'm not going to stick to a time signature. There's going to be no click until we get to that middle part, and then that part's going to be metronomic.’ And then the beginning and the end statements are totally freeform, like Chopin sitting down and playing one of his beautiful freeform études.”

“I didn't have anything in mind when it came to sequencing, because there were two other songs that didn't make it to the album. One of the songs called Time that wound up on Crystal Planet that took forever to record, and then the other one was a song called Dweller On The Threshold that wound up on Time Machine, and that was just a very discordant thrash-metal thing.

“It was a good idea we left them off: sometimes you record a song with the best intentions and then you hit play and when it's over you all look at each other like, ‘What the fuck is that?’

“Echo was a song that was about a story I had heard from a relative about a friend of theirs whose first child had died in either childbirth or prior to being born. And when they had their second child, they named it Echo as a tribute to their first child. And the thought stuck with me about different human beings somehow being connected through time, as being part of each other. And, so, that's why the song has a very moody repetitive thing.

We worked random, all-too-human performances around things that were programmed and repetitive

“Now, I'll reach into themes about how I combine repetitiveness with total randomness, and this is the perfect example, because the song is based on metronomic repeating arpeggios in 5/4. Very clever, right, maybe too clever, so when I brought it in I was like, ‘Okay, get this, guys. The drum machine pattern never changes and the rhythm guitar part keeps going for the whole damn song, even though it goes through several different key signatures. However, the melody will be very loose, and then we need to put something on top of it that is randomised somehow.’

“And, so, we would put on guitars playing harmonics, we'd go out and we put on cymbals and stuff that would be very random, never repeating, and they'd just be total one-takes from top to bottom. Jeff would go out there and he would just play cymbals around something that was repeating.

“And this is how we worked random, all-too-human performances around things that were programmed and repetitive. And in my mind I was trying to use the repetitive nature of parts of the recording to tie into the thought that humans are somehow repeats or new attempts at the same energy each time a new person is born. It's a weird science fiction, I guess, that our personalities are unknown. What we do with that, what we do with our lives is something that is randomised, free will, whatever you want to call it.

“Anyway, so it did wind up being the last song on the album just because it seemed so perfect. You know, it's now that I think about it I can swear that Cuniberti came up with the sequence of the record. I think that by the time we got to the end of the record, we were in agreement with how things were going to go in terms of sequencing. But I think I was so distraught over some other elements of the album and how I didn't have any more money to fix things that I hadn't really finalised the sequence. And I remember having a conversation with John and he was just saying, ‘This has to be the sequence, I think. Don't you agree?’ And I was like, ‘That looks great to me!’

“We used a [Roland] JC-120 for almost all of Echo. John had a very clever way of recording the JC-120 with six different microphones, an [AKG] C12A and this and that, and using the DS-1. It was just really interesting how we got a lot of mileage out of that amp. It was the perfect antidote to the Marshall stack or the little Silverface Pro Reverb or Princeton that was there that we used for a lot of the album, too.

“I have to say I'm so happy that people liked [the album], not for the obvious reasons, but because beforehand, when Jeff and I were in a band called The Squares, we realised after a while that it wasn't really the band that we wanted to be in, but if we had huge success in that band that it would have ruined our careers because it was a pop band. It was like the band that has a hit single and then it kills them after the hit single has its run. It just destroys their career.

“But, Surfing With The Alien was the totally opposite. It was a quirky record, out of time with what was happening; it was a weird collection. I wasn't the fastest guitar player, wasn't the most outrageous guitar player, there wasn't anything on it that was right for the time. And yet it did embody a very honest snapshot of who I was as a player, where I'd come from and where I wanted to go.

“And, so, it was the perfect album to become a multi-platinum success, because it actually gave life to my career; it didn't kill it. It wasn't the one-hit wonder thing; it was the opposite of that. It was the opening to a whole career that I wasn't even planning on, and it allowed me these decades of artistic licence, so I'm forever grateful to the fans for liking that record.”

Mike is Editor-in-Chief of GuitarWorld.com , in addition to being an offset fiend and recovering pedal addict. He has a master's degree in journalism, and has spent the past decade writing and editing for guitar publications including MusicRadar , Total Guitar and Guitarist, as well as a decade-and-a-half performing in bands of variable genre (and quality). In his free time, you'll find him making progressive instrumental rock under the nom de plume Maebe .

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Joe Satriani: Surfing With The Alien - Album Of The Week Club review

Joe satriani's surfing with the alien was the album that made his name and took shredding to the masses.

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Surfing with the Alien Ice 9 Crushing Day Always with Me, Always with You Satch Boogie Hill of the Skull Circles Lords of Karma Midnight Echo

You couldn’t move for guitar instrumental albums in the mid-to-late 80s. There was the  serious shred stuff  coming out on  Shrapnel Records , such as Racer X, Vinnie Moore and  Marty Friedman . 

But as talented as all these guys were, it all seemed so niche and unlikely to trouble the mainstream charts. Then  Joe Satriani  scored a monster hit with  Surfing With The Alien . 

Combining jazz fusion with visceral rock’n’roll,  Surfing made great guitar technique cool again and showed that an instrumental album could be a commercial possibility for the first time since the surf craze in the early 60s. Even Satriani was taken aback by its success. With over two million units shifted, it’s his  Led Zeppelin IV , his  Electric Ladyland , his Wired , and it lays out most of his trademark moves early. 

Listen to the chunky phrasing on  the title track , and its speedy, beautifully executed ‘solo’. The crunchy Ice 9 might be even better, showing off his chops and use of tonal colour, and he’d never leave a venue alive if he didn’t knock out upbeat signature rocker  Satch Boogie  or the Grammy-nominated  Always With Me, Always With You , whose finger-tapped sequence is a highlight of every show.

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Every week, Album of the Week Club listens to and discusses the album in question, votes on how good it is, and publishes our findings, with the aim of giving people reliable reviews and the wider rock community the chance to contribute. 

Join the group now .

Other albums released in October 1987 

• Pleasures of the Flesh - Exodus
• Tunnel of Love - Bruce Springsteen
• Perfect Timing - McAuley Schenker Group
• Free as a Bird - Supertramp
• Masque - Manfred Mann's Earth Band
• Kick - INXS
• Abigail - King Diamond
• Robbie Robertson - Robbie Robertson
• Got Any Gum? - Joe Walsh
• Schizophrenia - Sepultura
• Blues for Salvador - Carlos Santana
• Screaming Life - Soundgarden
• Unchain My Heart - Joe Cocker

What they said...

" Surfing With The Alien belongs to its era like Are You Experienced? belongs to its own -- perhaps it doesn't transcend its time the way the Jimi Hendrix Experience's 1967 debut does, but Joe Satriani's 1987 breakthrough can be seen as the gold standard for guitar playing of the mid- to late '80s, an album that captures everything that was good about the glory days of shred." ( AllMusic )

"Recorded with equal parts drum programming and real drums, Satriani served up his guitar and bass on a silver platter. Witness the twisted, horizon-pushing Ice 9 , the fiery solo flights on Surfing with the Alien , the straight-ahead, slamming rhythms of Crushing Day , and the soulful beauty of Always with Me, Always with You, Surfing With The Alien remains a true instrumental guitar classic. ( Guitar Nine )

"The latest guitar god calls up keywords like "taste" and "musicality" rather than "flash" and "heavy" – not only does he write melodies (and countermelodies), he fuckin' edits them. Thus he delivers both the prowess cultists demand and the comfort they secretly crave. That it surprises him to hear the result behind insurance commercials only goes to show how little guitar gods know of the world." ( Robert Christgau )

What you said...

Brian Anderson: I remember this album being released, rushing out and buying it, and getting the 'wow' moment playing it. The wow moment has never gone away, I’ve lived with the album for 35 years and it remains a masterpiece of song writing. It’s the song writing that sets this album aside from its peers. 

The late 80s saw a plethora of virtuoso guitarists releasing instrumental albums, but Surfing With The Alien set the bar so high that all the others could do was look up in wonder. Joe shows off his technical ability in abundance throughout the album, but it was never just for the sake of it, always to enhance the song. The only downside is that the album sounds dated, its sound is very much of the late 80s with the drum machine and final production. Still, an easy 10/10.

Chris Elliott: It's marmite. It's awful, self indulgent tosh to my ears, with the odd interesting bit before we get more tortured pointless guitar heroics. Play a song, for fuck's sake.

Brian Carr : I learned long ago that for many music fans, no vocals equates to no interest. I’ve never been wired that way - good music is good music, with or without vocals dominating our attention. In addition, I’ve always appreciated musical virtuosity, particularly in the guitar realm. But there is definitely a line between shredding because you can and well-crafted music.

Joe Satriani’s masterpiece Surfing With the Alien has always fallen into the second category to me. Yes, the album contains loads of virtuosic moments, but it is also packed with singable melodies. Each track moves through musical moments, sometimes resembling verse-chorus patterns and sometimes not as much, but the music always flows (surfs?) naturally from part to part. 

The draw here is Satriani’s other-worldly guitar chops, on full display throughout. I can’t help but note the melodic moments, not only in the ballad Always With Me, Always With You , but in the melodic theme to Crushing Day , the bombastic Hill Of The Skull and Lords of Karma , and the moody Circles and the album closer Echo . Just because Joe didn’t write lyrics didn’t mean he couldn’t compose beautiful melodies. Maybe Surfing isn’t one’s choice of musical recreation, but dismissing it as mindless wanking is missing out on one blast of a ride.

Gary Claydon : Joe Satriani has never been one to sacrifice melody to the twin alters of speed & flash technique (not that he's lacking in either of those respects) and if proof were needed of this then you need look no further than Surfing With The Alien .

The opening trio of the title track, Ice 9 and Crushing Day feature some driving hard rock. Skip past the cheesy Always With Me, Always With You to arrive at the brilliant, breakneck Texas blues of Satch Boogie . The two most interesting tracks are the slow burn of Circles followed by Lords of Karma . Midnight is a neat vehicle for Joe's tapping technique but comes across as filler to me before the album closes with another highlight in Echo (which has a mid-section that reminds me, briefly, of La Villa Strangiato ).

There are plenty of opportunities to marvel at Satch's virtuosity on Surfing With The Alien but also ample demonstration of his ear for melody & composition.

There's one more thing I like about Joe Satriani. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he doesn't seem to take himself too seriously and that comes across in his music because, whatever else Surfing With The Alien might be, it's also a heap of fun.

Bill Griffin: While I like this album (and all albums in the genre that I've heard), I prefer ensemble playing to just a guitarist wanking off song after song. There is no doubt that Joe is an excellent guitarist but I would, for instance, much rather listen to a Steve Morse album because he lets the entire band shine as much or more than himself through every project he's been involved in. I can't see a reason to buy any other guitar instrumental album if you have one already but if you don't, you can't go wrong with this one.

Evan Sanders : Quite a nice album, and it's another one that I missed when it first came out, although many of the compositions are familiar. I'll keep this in frequent rotation on my playlists. 8/10

Alex Hayes : At the dawn of the 1990s, like a lot of other young, impressionable rockers, I found myself tentatively dipping my toes into the occasionally shark-infested waters of the guitar instrumental, or 'shredder', genre. I didn't linger there long, but found that there was actually some genuinely great music to be found there, amidst the crashing waves of feverish fretboard masturbation.

It was actually Steve Vai's Passion And Warfare album that kick-started it all for me. Bloody hell, the teenage me absolutely adored that record. I was slightly less enamoured with it when I caught up with it again about a year ago though. Although the quality of Vai's playing on there is still stunning, the music was lacking in certain areas, and I found myself scratching my head at my younger self and his fervour. As I've gotten older, I've found myself increasingly drawn to Joe Satriani's work, both from that period and beyond.

I've still got Surfing With The Alien on vinyl (with it's original, and far, FAR, cooler cover art). It remains a classic of the genre, but I do prefer Satriani's successive Flying In A Blue Dream and The Extremist albums, which feel more rounded to me. Satriani succeeds as a solo artist, where so many of his contemporaries fail, through his ability to actually write songs, as opposed to what are often uncharitably referred to as wank-fests. So, although there's plenty of guitar wizardry on offer here, you will often find it balanced out with thoughtfully crafted, intelligent, and, occasionally beautiful material. Always With Me, Always With You and Circles are both good examples of this.

The album is let down a little by it's drum sound though. Satriani recorded Surfing With The Alien on a budget of just $13,000, a very wise investment that will have been recouped many, many times over as the years have gone by. Unfortunately, to keep costs down, Satriani dispensed with the services of a studio drummer, and utilised various drum machines instead, which haven't aged well. The 'robotic' drumming on display here is a big factor in explaining my preference for Satriani's subsequent work.

There are no drums present at all on Midnight though, the album's penultimate track. Man, that is some hugely impressive guitar playing. He's a class act, Joe Satriani, and my favourite artist of this particular type by a country mile. Although elements of it do sound dated, Surfing With The Alien is still a superb listen, and head and shoulders above the majority of albums by similar artists. Recommended, with a caveat that this won't be to everyone's taste.

Uli Hassinger : A good instrumental album is one where you don't miss the vocals. This one belongs to the very few of this category.

Joe resisted the temptation to show only his technical skills. Instead of this he laid back and created quite a melodic album with enough space were his virtuoso guitar playing shines through. The iconic title song alone is worth buying the album. The wah-wah leads were pioneering in 87 and are legendary today. But it's not possible to pick out some tracks. To me this album has to be considered as a musical unit. Great album. 9/10

James Southard : Have to be in the mood for it now but when I was learning to play it was an amazement. An easy 7/10.

Darren Burris : Great album. I’m not usually wild about these guitar instrumental albums but this one is an exception.

Tony Fuerte : Awesome record. Like many, the album that introduced me to Satch. The singles naturally are great. My favourite song, and the track that introduced me to the album, is Circles .

Brett Deighton: I was one of those people that had never bought an instrumental album until this came out. I still love listening to Joe play. To me there is more variety in his style. I don’t just hear endless noodling, or shredding.

Richard Cardenas : I like it but that’s it. Saw him on this tour and he kicked ass but this record never did it for me other than it was the first CD I ever played.

Philip Qvist : I normally do not actively look out for instrumental LPs, especially in the rock field; and that is the reason why today was the first time that I listened to Surfing With The Alien in full - even though it was released nearly 35 years ago. That said, I was familiar with the title track and the slow number Always With Me, Always With You .

There isn't anything wrong with the album; all the songs are good, with Circles my other standout track. All the tracks have enough variety in them so that they don't all end up sounding the same - while there is no denying that Joe Satriani is an excellent guitarist.

So what is the "but" that you are keep on hearing? The production and the endless drum machines were big downsides for me - it definitely sounds like a recording from the 80s. Yes, I know the artist was on a tight budget (and boy oh boy, did he recoup that modest outlay in spades - and them some), but Satch Boogie , another great song, showed the difference real drums could have made on all the other songs.

So all in all, it's a more than decent album, and there isn't anything resembling a dud on it, but it's not one for my "Must Buy" list.

Greg Schwep : So, instrumental guitar albums were not a new thing when Joe Satriani released Surfing With The Alien in 1987. There were a few masterpieces out there before called Blow By Blow and Wired . But what Satriani seemed to do was introduce his incredible technique and style to the masses… and non-guitar playing listeners. This album got a lot of airplay on the FM station I listened to and after hearing Satch Boogie multiple times, I had to go buy the cassette!

And that cassette got played, and played, and played. Which led me to buying pretty much everything Satriani released after that. Joe always seemed to be more of a “cerebral” player than Eddie Van Halen or Yngwie Malmsteen.

You get the shredding of the title track and Satch Boogie , along with the slower masterpiece Always with Me, Always with You . And then you get the cool moods of Hill of the Skull and Circles .

Back to the concept of attracting a non-guitar playing audience, Satriani structures the songs so that one guitar track is the “vocal”, so you think you’re hearing a vocal, but you're not. But that keeps your attention. Again, probably not the first instrumental guitar album to do that. Your mind hears or expects a vocal when there is none. 

I remember listening to this in the car and my son was in the back, about 5 or 6 at the time. Listening to this he goes “when is he going to start singing?” I laughed because I thought it was funny that even he picked that out: the song structure was leading you up to where you expected a vocal to kick in.

And like every good shredder, Satch does let it rip in a few places along the way, but it fits the song and not some 10 minute wank-fest on his Ibanez. But then again, none of would complain if that was the case.

Great album to introduce himself to the masses!

Final score: 8.56 (92 votes cast, total score 788)

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Joe Satriani Reflects on 20 Years of Surfing With the Alien

“I didn’t want my follow-up album to be a weird, quirky record”

“I didn't want my follow-up album to be a weird, quirky record... like my proper debut,  Not of This Earth, ” says Joe Satriani, settling into a chair inside his San Francisco home studio.

“I wanted my next record to be blown up to its full potential. I mean, why couldn’t an instrumental guitar record rock like Queen or the Pretenders, and have the energy of Van Halen? So once I got the go-ahead to make  Surfing with the Alien , I felt like the luckiest guy in town.”

Satriani then proceeded to drop the 6-string equivalent of an atomic bomb.  Surfing with the Alien  became the first rock guitar instrumental album to reach Billboard’s Top 200 Album Chart, topping out at number 29. It also spawned three hit singles, and the album was ultimately certified platinum.

All this from a guy who a year earlier was arguably more popular for giving lessons to Steve Vai and Kirk Hammett than he was for his own playing.

Soon enough, the masses learned that Satriani was an amazing guitarist—more than worthy of all the effusive praise his star pupils heaped upon him. What they may not have known is that he was poised to rewrite the book when it came to modern instrumental rock guitar, as he brought a pop sensibility along with good old-fashioned chops, and an ear for the exotic.

It has been 20 years since  Surfing with the Alien  was released, and Epic/Legacy is commemorating the anniversary with a remastered and expanded CD/DVD set that also contains Satriani’s performance at the 1988 Montreux Jazz Festival.

“We went into the  Surfing  sessions knowing we wanted to keep the album bright and upbeat,” explains Satriani, as we sit amongst a slew of prototype signature gear. (He was burning-in an upcoming Peavey JSX amp design and tweaking a Vox signature wah.) “But when we got serious, we decided to make the album truly cinematic, and I think this is why it’s still inviting to listeners.

We didn’t just hit them over the head with ‘Listen to what I can play.’”

By 1987, there were quite a few instrumental guitar albums out, but  Surfing was nothing like them.

Instrumental guitar/shred records at that time struck me as very serious, and not very inclusive propositions. I always got the vibe that you had to buy into a certain style of music and reject everything else in order to really appreciate what was going on. Whether it was death metal, shred, or pure fusion, it seemed like each guy was thumbing his nose at the other. I wanted to celebrate all aspects of the guitar. I wanted to be able to play like Chuck Berry or Hendrix, make weird noises, and also play traditionally. I wanted to play a ton of notes, and then play too few.

Did the desire to create a more inclusive, inviting record affect the songwriting process for  Surfing ? I think it gave me a bit more courage to be simple. Take “Always With Me, Always With You.” It’s a simple I, IV, V progression, but I subverted it a bit by giving every chord a suspended tonality. I would add, say a 4 to one chord, and a 13 to another. Then, I composed a section using pitch axis theory [ a compositional technique most notably used on the title track of Satriani’s  Not of This Earth  where different modal harmonies revolve around one tonal center ] to take the song even further out of the I, IV, V arrangement. I wanted to do the same thing with “Satch Boogie.” I started out taking a ZZ Top/Van Halen-style-boogie, and injecting this warped two-handed tapping thing in the middle. But the devil on my shoulder urged me to do more, so I used pitch axis theory again. As a result, the notes that make up the two-handed arpeggios in that section create some very odd tonalities that you wouldn’t hear on a ZZ Top album. I suppose I was negotiating artistic licenses in my twisted brain at the time, thinking if I put one foot in the mainstream, I could stick the other in the avant-garde.

How did the solo two-hand tapping piece “Midnight” come about? “Midnight” was totally written in musical notation. It was all in my head—I didn’t even have a guitar in my hands, so there was no regard to playing it with two-hand tapping. Once I felt it was a nice piece of music, I decided I didn’t want to strum chords and play the melody over the top. So I figured out a way to play both parts using two-hand tapping. That took a long time. I had been experimenting with tapping, but I really wanted to go a different direction than Van Halen, who typically tapped single-note lines. I didn’t want to step into his territory. Thankfully, working that tune up to speed got me going in a totally different direction. It’s interesting that, by not approaching it from a technical point of view originally, I was actually pushed into expanding my technique, because I didn’t have the ability to two-hand tap it when I first wrote it. The track “Hill of the Skull” was written on manuscript, as well.

Did you have a game plan for the album’s guitar tones? By the time I started making solo records, I had developed some pretty bad attitudes towards vintage gear and the vintage cognoscenti. I think it stemmed from the fact I was working at a vintage guitar store—Second Hand Guitars in Berkeley—and I was broke. But back then, I only thought about music. So, in a way, I became “Mr. Contrarian” when it came to tone. With Surfing, I went in with a Roland JC-120 and a ’68 Marshall half-stack that was modded with a master volume. I also used original Chandler Tube Drivers, a Boss DS-1 and an SD-1, a Scholz Rockman, a Nomad amplifier, and a borrowed bass amp. For vintage tone guys, this was blasphemy. You don’t get big guitar sounds from Boss pedals and a Rockman! People always asked me if I wanted to borrow their Hiwatts and Les Paul Juniors, and I’d always say “no.” As long as the material you’re presenting asks for an interesting take, then you can go cheap or expensive. It doesn’t matter whether you use a ’55 Strat or a Kramer Pacer.

Did the Rockman tones make you play differently? Oh, yeah. Take the solo on “Crushing Day,” for example. That was the only worked-out solo on the record, and it sports a very obvious Rockman tone. But I like the way the Rockman just emasculates the tone. I could never have played the solo the way I did with natural tube distortion through a 4x12 cabinet, because there would be too much sonic information. The low strings would be huge and boomy, and the high-end would be screaming. But the Rockman creates a “tunnel vision” of sound that evens everything out. The low notes and high notes were all equal volume. So for legato technique, it was great. It kind of makes you feel like Allan Holdsworth!

Do those sounds still hold up for you? Most of them do. There are some Rockman tones from  Not of This Earth  that I don’t feel were the best application, but by the time I did  Surfing , I had refined my Rockman use to the point of feeling emboldened. You have to remember—we didn’t have the budget to spend a week getting guitar sounds. There weren’t six different speaker cabs and a bunch of exotic amplifiers lying around. We had a modest studio with a small amount of time and a tight schedule.

Is it possible that time and budget constraints actually affected the record in a positive way? Without a doubt!  Surfing  was made without any lockout time—meaning that we didn’t have the studio completely to ourselves throughout the recording process. We’d have, say, four hours on Wednesday, then we’d only be able to get back in, say, for six hours the next Thursday—but in a different studio room down the hall from where we recorded on the other days. In addition, the studio owner was an avid gear collector, so pieces of outboard gear would be coming and going at such a rate that you never knew if the same reverb or flanger would be there when you came back! We were also renting a lot of gear.

This is why we always printed our effects to tape when we tracked. One particular instance where printing saved us was on the album’s title track. We stumbled onto this sound, which was the Kramer through the Tube Driver, a Vox wah, and the Marshall. But we also ran through an Eventide H949 Harmonizer for a slight pitch modulation. However, this particular unit was on the fritz. It was acting very finicky, and its pitch settings would jump around randomly. We really dug the way it sounded, but not only was the Eventide not long for this world, our time was up, and there were people outside the studio door waiting to start their session. Well, 20 minutes later, the Eventide died, but we had our take, and we had printed the effect. We had actually forgotten about it, but when we brought those faders up later during the mixdown, it was like found art.

After you finished  Surfing , the label wanted you to hit the road to support the album. Was the prospect of not only leading your own band, but fronting it a bit daunting? Very much so. When the record company called and said I had to hit the road, my response was, “You’ve got to be kidding—do I just walk up there and play without a singer?” I mean, I’d seen Jeff Beck and Mahavishnu Orchestra live in the ’70s, but that was a long time ago. People just didn’t do that anymore! I’d been playing clubs for five years, and I didn’t see one instrumental act. There was no market for it. Who was going to hire us? So I had to dig deep, and figure out how I was going to stand in front of a crowd and just play. So we booked a two-week tour, and I assembled a trio with Stu Hamm on bass and Jonathan Mover on drums, and we got to it.

How were those first shows? They were difficult, because I went into them a bit stressed from just finishing  Surfing , and getting a good reaction from it, yet still being another struggling musician teaching guitar. I never thought I would be the guy who had to set the tone for an organization. Playing with John and Stu was great. They’re amazing musicians, but they’re not rock and roll guys at all. I think when they listened to  Surfing , they thought to themselves, “C’mon, this is so simple.” So when we hit the stage, they were very interested in subverting the tunes—in a good way, of course—but they had their way with the music nightly, and that was a struggle at times. I kept telling them, “Think Chuck Berry and Led Zeppelin. This isn’t a fusion festival!” In fairness to them, however, I was figuring out the whole bandleader/solo artist trip, as well. There were definitely times we were at each other’s throats.

Before we finished those shows, I received a call from Bill Graham’s people that Mick Jagger needed a guitarist for his solo tour. Jagger’s bassist—Doug Wimbish—referred me. Thankfully, I got the gig, and that solved the fiscal problems my own tour was causing. Because even though  Surfing  was in the early stages of blowing up, I wasn’t seeing any money. It can take up to 18 months for the royalties to start coming in. But thanks to Mick, I’m in Rolling Stone, and playing in front of a lot of people. It was a big relief, because I felt like I didn’t have to lift my solo career up off the ground all by myself. By the time the Jagger tour was over,  Surfing  had really hit. Suddenly, promoters and venues were calling for my band. The next thing I know, we’re doing two shows a night, six nights a week, for two months solid. We worked ourselves to death.

Did Jagger impart any nuggets of wisdom in regards to performing? Oh, yeah. I’ll never forget how I would just be noodling around on the guitar in the rehearsal room, and he’d come right up next to me and just start singing. That made me relax, and say to myself, “Man, I shouldn’t be so guarded about my creativity. Mick Jagger isn’t guarded. So why am I?” That allowed me to get on stage and really open up to the audience. And when he hit the stage, you learned the meaning of “projection” real quick. The joke was that you could stand next to him, light yourself on fire, and the audience would still be watching Mick. He has that power.

Surfing  undoubtedly put you atop the instrumental rock guitar heap. As a predominantly instrumental artist, what instrumental works do you hold in high regard? I’ve always said that Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” is quite possibly the quintessential instrumental arrangement. It’s such a beautiful, simplistic statement. Conversely, dig into “Frankenstein” by Edgar Winter. It’s a lot different than “Sleepwalk,” yet it still has a pop sensibility—even though it took extraordinary musicianship to arrange it, write it, and play it. But at the end of the day—even for the instrumental stuff—I’m all about Hendrix. He has always been the guitarist who has reached me the most. When I think about instrumentals, I think about “Third Stone from the Sun.” I mean, there’s so much going on, yet it’s loose and devastatingly intense. It was played with great spirit, and it wasn’t pored-over to death. His studio version of “The Star Spangled Banner” and “1983 … (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” are unreal. I would listen to that stuff for hours, and it would unlock these desires in me to try and create—with my own music—the experience of being a listener and getting off.

Surfing  also highlighted your legato technique—particularly with the lyricism of “Always with Me, Always with You.” Is there a reason why you went the more legato route, as opposed to alternate picking? I never liked the strict alternate-picked style. My favorite players were Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page—guys who I thought made great music. There were other impressive guitar players with more chops, but when the technical guys played, I had visions of upstrokes and downstrokes and sixteenth-and thirty-second-notes in my head. When Hendrix played, that stuff never entered my mind. It’s the same with Brian May and Jeff Beck. I was more into the purely musical side of the instrument, so I struggled with how to get good without having a “method.” If someone wants to play really fast up and down the neck, you can get the learning material, practice six hours a day, and, in two years, you’ll probably see some amazing results. But there’s no method to playing like Hendrix. There’s no creative method to Page’s studio wizardry. So I would just play along with their records—playing as freely as I could—in an effort to encourage and embrace my own quirkiness as a player.

The screaming and squawking artificial harmonics have always been a big part of your sound. On “Ice 9” you even use them to elicit some cool, barky overtones from chords. Who was the first player you heard that used them? Billy Gibbons. I’ve always loved the way he plays, and I’m floored by the way he writes. His approach in the studio over the years is outstanding, and it’s always surprising, as well. Have you heard the song “Loaded” from Rhythmeen? That is one of the coolest things I’ve heard a guitarist do ever—an actual broken guitar sound. And no matter what he plays, it always swings. I’d also heard Roy Buchanan use pinch harmonics, but, although I could appreciate it, I couldn’t relate to his style of music or his look. I was a long-haired rock guy. Jimmy Page and Tony Iommi used pinch harmonics to great effect, as well.

Surfing  also sports a ton of outro solos—what inspired that arrangement decision? Oh, yeah. On “Surfing with the Alien,” the outro is almost as long as the song! It’s funny, because even though my sensibilities were driving me to be very succinct on the record—with very obvious chorus, bridge, and verse sections—after I tracked the outro to “Surfing,” I dug it so much that it set the template for the rest of the record. As a result, the outros turned into the spots where I could relax a little bit and go nuts.

What is the longest break you’ve taken from the instrument? Probably three weeks. There are two things I like to do when I come off the road. One is to not play at all, and lose my chops. The other is to get into something entirely different—like only play acoustic for two months. But, typically, I stop playing all together. I have to. If we’re on the road for two months, and we’ve been doing two to three hours a night, six nights a week, at the end of the tour, my arms are pretty tired. Not only that, but I’ve been playing the same 19 songs. So there’s always the risk that—without your even noticing—you’re repeating yourself a lot. Then, you have a tendency to develop a shtick. I hate to admit it, but I think that stains my technique a bit. So it’s best to stop playing. It’s a bit of a struggle when I try to start the engine again, but, at least, all of that baggage is gone.

How has your playing changed from the  Surfing  days? Watching our set at the ’88 Montreux festival, I was struck by how all of my lines had more embellishment—funny little whammy-bar flutters, pick scrapes, and harmonics. I actually found myself wanting to hear some more soulful, meat-and-potatoes-type stuff, because that’s where I feel I’m at now with my playing. Back then, I tended to jump around more with my phrasing. Now, I think I make it a point to go the distance with my lines.

You were teaching guitar all the way through the making of Surfing, up to when you hit the road. What did teaching do for your playing? Well, it doesn’t matter if your student is Kirk Hammett or an eight-year-old kid with an action figure sitting on the amp—teaching makes you get your sh*t together. As a teacher, your job is to—using the fewest possible words, and with the most musical economy you can muster—give the student what they need to go forward. You learn to be succinct, and to put forth ideas without alienating the student. You also learn to remove any of your stylistic tendencies or qualities from the information so as not to adversely affect them.

During one of the first lessons I ever had, I asked the teacher to show me “Purple Haze.” He was a jazz player, and he not only hated rock, he hated the entire rock generation. What he played sounded so bad—it was one of the most disgusting things I’d ever heard done on a guitar! After that, I always told myself, “Do not be like that guy. When a student brings in Mercyful Fate, don’t tell them they need to listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan!”

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Joe Satriani talks Surfing With The Alien track-by-track

Last Updated on January 29th, 2020

Still riding the wave

Joe Satriani is known for many things: his inimitable legato technique, formidable guitar tutelage legacy, uncompromising approach to composition, those shades. But most of all, it’s 10 tracks and four words that both defined Satriani and shred guitar as a whole: Surfing With The Alien.

Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, Surfing stands as a landmark release in instrumental guitar music, fusing Joe’s love of guitar players right across the spectrum with a sense of fun, technique and, crucially, melody – the resultant album spanned high-octane blues fusion (Satch Boogie), lyrical ballads (Always With Me, Always With You) and bombastic rock (Ice 9), with consistently thrilling results.

“Globally, the idea for the album was to celebrate everything that I really liked about electric guitar, my roots, and the players that I still really like,” Joe explains.

“And, so, for me, it went from Chuck Berry to Hendrix, from Wes Montgomery to Allan Holdsworth, I wanted to celebrate all of it. I was a kid that grew up listening to The Beatles, and The Stones, and Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, and I wanted all of that in there. But at the same time, a large part of my playing is Tony Iommi and Billy Gibbons. I’m just a sum total of all of the guitar players that I think were really cool. And I wanted to make an album that was about that.

“I pitched the album to Relativity Records’ president, Barry Kobrin, in the exact same way. And he looked at me funny because it was such an untrendy thing to do, but he said, ‘Well, okay.’ He’d heard me play Satch Boogie at a club in New York City one night and so he said, ‘Okay, is the album going to be like that?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, pretty much, with a couple of left turns here and there.’”

Satriani’s second release on Relativity Records, Surfing was recorded on a miniscule-for-1987 budget of $13,000 at San Francisco’s Hyde Street Studios, which placed supreme pressures on Joe and producer John Cuniberti, but only served to stretch their creativity to the limit as they sought to make the record in Joe’s head using the limited resources available to them.

“It was made with a complete unselfconscious love of the things that I wanted to celebrate on guitar, and it was also made under enormous duress and the feeling that no-one would ever really listen to it and I would be run out of town as soon as I delivered the album,” Joe muses.

“It was under such a climate that it didn’t seem that anyone was going to accept such an album. So it was such a wonderful surprise when it was embraced, because it wasn’t a calculated record and much was sacrificed to get it done.”

Given the strained conditions in which the album was recorded, what’s perhaps most remarkable is just how much Joe remembers: his memory is as precise as his pentatonic runs, and the sheer amount of detail he’s able to divulge is more than most artists are able to share about an album recorded last month, let alone 30 years ago.

Kramer vs Kramer

This ability to recall is testament to a true labour of love, particularly with regard to gear. Long before he secured his JS signature models with Ibanez, Satriani armed himself with whatever guitars he could afford – even if that meant sacrificing tuning stability for the sake of functionality.

“For that particular record, I had two Kramer guitars. They were both Pacers and one was the white one that I had purchased in ’84 or ’82, and it was put together from parts at the Guitar Center,” he recalls.

“I bought it only because it had a first-generation Floyd Rose with no fine-tuners, and I was shunning that whole idea during the early ’80s: I was a no wah-wah, no-vibrato bar kind of thing. But I picked it up anyway and eventually I realised that the thing was really great if you wanted to play out of tune all the time. [laughs] The guitar itself was always falling apart and [guitar tech] Gary Brawer was continually trying to fix it.

“But I had a connection with it, and that became the guitar that I used for my first EP and Not Of This Earth, and then Surfing. And by then I had purchased a second version of that Pacer that had just three single-coil pickups; it was even worse than the two-humbucker version that I had.

“It got limited use in the studio, and after the record was finished, the guitar was never used again. I still have it, but I don’t know what to do with it. It’s such a poorly constructed guitar, but it was inexpensive and I’m just grateful that companies do that. They make guitars and they sell them for cheap for people don’t have a lot of money. That’s who I was at the time, and, so, it helped me out at a time when I needed it.”

Where he couldn’t afford more instruments, Joe also took some more innovative approaches to tone-seeking, using his so-called Boogie Body Strat.

“I also had a guitar that I had put together from parts. It was a Boogie Body Strat body made out of hard-rock maple. It was an ESP neck that was ’59 vintage style, 7.5 radius, ebony fretboard neck.

“I worked at a vintage guitar store and the owner had ties with a lot of Japanese manufacturers and US manufacturers that were beginning to pop up. So I was ordering parts and screwing them together and contacting local luthiers to finish and do frets and things, and I had put together two guitars, a red one and a black one. The red one I eventually sold, but the black one is the guitar that I wound up using a lot.

“It was a hardtail, so if I didn’t need the whammy bar I’d use that guitar: clean, funky, bluesy. I still have that guitar today. It’s on every record doing something. It’s an odd-sounding guitar because of the wood, and what I did was I had Gary Brawer make me two or three different pickguards that were preloaded with different kinds of pickups.

“So for the ‘humbuckers in the Strat body’ sound I had a black pickguard with two Seymour Duncan pickups in it. It was a ’59 in the neck and a JB in the bridge, and I would screw that one in when I needed that kind of a sound, and then when I needed to do really Stratty kind of sounds, I would tell John Cuniberti to take a break, I’d take the strings off, unscrew the pickguard, put in a new pickguard with the Strat pickups, screw it and string it up, and then do that part. That’s basically because I couldn’t afford to have all these different guitars; I just had three guitars and a bunch of pickguards. The poor man’s guitar arsenal!”

It’s these details and more that Joe intends to expand upon at 2017’s G4 Experience held 24-28 July at Asilomar Center in Carmel, CA. The guitar camp celebrates Surfing’s 30th anniversary, bringing all the album’s major players back together to answer any possible question about any aspect of the recording – and judging from Joe’s recollections, we’re inclined to believe they’ll have the answers.

“The G4 Experience this time around is going to try to explain, as well as detail and celebrate, all those moving parts to the creation of the record,” Joe enthuses. “The recording of it, the fingertips, the picks, the strings, the amps, the performing of it, how it morphed, how it changed, and how each of the new people, players, that came along to help celebrate it elevated the songs even more each time we went out with them.

“The album wouldn’t have broken through if it wasn’t for these other these very important moving parts. Obviously, me and the guys, John Cuniberti, and the musicians, Jeff Campitelli and Bongo Bob Smith, making the record, but also Stuart Hamm and Jonathan Mover that came on after the record was done, became new friends and comrades, and actually championed the record in a totally different style on tour.”

For longtime Satch fans, th e most exciting aspect of this year’s G4 Experience is that it reunites the original Satriani band line-up, bringing bassist Stu Hamm and drummer Jonathan Mover back to the fold.

While Hamm was onboard for Satriani’s 2008 Professor Satchafunkilus And The Musterion Of Rock tour, Joe hasn’t performed with Mover since the mid-’90s – their reconnection was a curious series of events…

“We ended on a bad note. There were some just touring business stuff that pissed the two of us off and so we decided to just call it quits,” Joe reflects. “And that goes way back: that tour ended the night of my 40th birthday.”

“Fast-forward to a few years ago and I’m doing a TV show, and a drummer, Robin DiMaggio, was the musical director, and we started an interesting collaboration where we wanted to create a song that would send a message of love and hope around the world and unite people. And that became a song called Music Without Words .

“Robin is the musical director for the UN, and one day when we were talking about musical things, he mentioned that he had spoken to Jonathan Mover, and I went, ‘Oh yeah, Jonathan, we had such great times, fantastic touring experiences,’ and everything. And I said, ‘I haven’t talked to the guy in 20 years,’ and Robin just said, ‘You know, you should talk to that guy.’

“So, he sent me his number and I just called him and I said, ‘This is the weirdest thing, isn’t it? I’m calling you out of the blue. I have nothing to talk about other than, ‘Hi, isn’t it weird that we didn’t talk for 20 years?’’”

The original power trio were famed for their energy and ferocity, which paired virtuosity with showmanship to unpredictable and virtuosic effect. But as Joe points out, their origins were anything but orthodox.

“In the summer of ’87, Surfing With The Alien was about three months away from being released, and I flew out to Bensalem, Pennsylvania to go to the Hoshino USA factory to meet the Ibanez guys and talk about a JS model.

“On the way there I found out that Jeff Campitelli was not interested in going touring with this weird idea of me going on tour as an instrumentalist. So I arrived in Philadelphia, I know that the guys at Ibanez want me to play at the summer NAMM show that’s happening in Chicago a week from then. So I’ve got seven days or six days and I’ve got to put a band together.

“So I’m sitting in the office just waiting to meet the guys from Ibanez and there’s this other guy there and he looks pretty cool, looks like a young musician. So we’re like, ‘Hi, how ya doing, I’m Joe.’ ‘I’m Jonathan.’ ‘What are you here for?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, I’m a drummer. I’m here just to talk to Tama.’

“I had a cassette of this new album called Surfing With The Alien, and I said, ‘Hey, what are you doing next week?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. I might go to the NAMM show.’ I said, ‘Would you play with me, if I gave you a tape, would you learn a couple of songs and we’ll just play? There’s this guy, Stuart Hamm, I’ve never played with him but my friend Steve Vai said he’s a good bass player – would you do it?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll do it’.’

“So I gave him the cassette and I shook his hand, I said, ‘Okay, see you later, see you in Chicago.’ And a week later, for the very first time, Stu, Jonathan and I stood on stage at The Limelight in Chicago, and we tried to get to know each other during soundchecks. We pulled off the gig.”

The great beyond

Those unable to make it out to the Asilomar Center will be keen to know whether Joe intends to take the band out on tour, but his plans for 2017 are still very much TBC.

“I’m up in the air about that. I’m very focused on preparing for the last run of dates to support the Shockwave Supernova record. It has crossed my mind that I’m going to have to start thinking about the next touring band, but that’s way in the future.

“Every year that I go out on tour I think about all the craziest ideas that would be great to go out with and I think, ‘I should see if Jeff Beck wants to join my band for a month or something.’ I always think of the craziest idea first and then work backwards, because you never know, that person that you think would never return your call might be sitting at home with nothing to do.”

“But having said that, I’ve never actually called Jeff Beck and asked him to join the band, but that doesn’t mean I won’t at some point. I really don’t think he’s going to say yes ever, but, you know. It doesn’t hurt in trying or dreaming, right?”

Of course, it was Surfing that introduced Satriani to the world and allows the guitarist to entertain such ideas today, but it was its strong sense of composition and melody that ensured it stood the test of time and influenced generations of guitar players to come.

Here, Joe takes us on a journey through the brainwaves that led to the composition of each of the album’s 10 tracks, the recording process that played such a crucial role in defining the sound and feel of the record and how his perception of the songs have changed over the three decades that have passed. Surf’s up…

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Surfing With The Alien

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Joe Satriani ‘Forced’ to Change ‘Surfing With the Alien’ Cover

Joe Satriani says he was “forced” to come up with an alternative version of the cover for his classic 1987 album Surfing With the Alien as a result of licensing costs.

In addition to the regular album, a newly-released deluxe edition of Surfing with the Alien also includes a  “stripped” version of the LP, with the original backing tracks from his 1987 release, but all his solos and melodies have been removed. It was launched as a limited-edition run of 3,500 copies for Record Store Day’s Black Friday on Nov. 29.

It also features new artwork, with Satriani's guitar replacing the comic book world's Silver Surfer on the cover. “Due to the ever increasing costs of licensing the Silver Surfer artwork from Marvel we were forced to come up with a new cover,” Satriani explained in a statement accompanying the release. “Seeing my chrome guitar bursting through a multicolor wormhole seems quite fitting. It’s as if it always belonged there.”

He also explained that he’d resisted the idea of the “stripped” album because he “didn’t want to reveal what I always thought should stay a secret.” He continued: “When I build a track from scratch it’s a kind of musical alchemy, a mixture of voodoo, mojo, blood, sweat, tears, prayers… and a lot of hard work.” Each track, he said, had to inspire and challenge him. “I cherish them because of this. So, it’s no wonder I’ve been reluctant to release them.”

However, Satriani described himself as “excited about pulling back the curtain on these magical sessions,” and emphasized that nothing had been added although “some instrument levels were adjusted in the mix to compensate for the missing melody and solo performance.” He concluded: “You can play along with these tracks or just sit back and enjoy the mixes as they are.”

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