Joe Satriani revisited
Joe Satriani
Surfing With The Alien: Legacy Edition
(Epic/Legacy)
How appropriate the week Van Halen announce their shaky reunion does another aging guitar hero come to town with the intent of revisiting his past.
Appearing: Thursday, August 16th at House Of Blues in Chicago
Joe Satriani has never worked the angle of surprise. Early on, students of his (including Steve Vai, Kirk Hammett, and Larry LaLonde) bagged some of his tricks and worked their way toward fame. He didn’t even unleash all his best work, as most debut artists do, on his first album. Instead, he waited a record before smacking the pop world across the kisser with 1987’s Surfing With The Alien.
Expanded with a Montreux Jazz Festival DVD for its 20th anniversary Epic/Legacy reissue, Surfing reached a shocking 29th on the Billboard album charts and vaulted him among the world’s top guitarists — leading Mick Jagger to nab him for a tour. “Satch” would reach greater heights on the charts with later releases Flying In A Blue Dream and The Extremist, but revisiting *Surfing* reminds you of just how wide-open instrumental rock guitar was in the mid 80s.
Blue Dream and Extremist each had their own mind-blowing runs, though were cleverly aimed at a pop audience, too. Surfing, while containing two of his most well-known skirmishes (“Satch Boogie” and “Always With Me, Always With You”), isn’t as pandering. “Midnight” mixed a six-fingered tapping technique with baroque and gothic slants; “Hill Of The Skull” predates Vai’s later epic fantasies; and “Echo” lays out acres of space for him to use — or leave alone.
When he does concentrate on rocking out, he does so in a way that almost mocks his peers. More than able to fly around the neck doing hammer-ons and pull-offs with the best of ’em, Satriani does heavy lifting by actually writing hummable melodies for the title track, “Ice 9,” and “Crushing Day.” “Satch Boogie” trusts its audience enough that it can leave its manic shuffle for a flanged tapping break that sounds like it was recorded backwards in a tube. But the bravest cut of all is the waltzing ballad “Always With You,” which not only turns one of the most basic tapping runs in history into an uplifting chorus, but ends as discreetly as Satch came into guitar lore.
— Steve Forstneger
