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For Joe Satriani,
the origins of his new 13th studio album, Professor
Satchifunkilus and the Musterion of Rock, started with
two strange piano chords and a cryptic line: It’s a
mystery… The legendary, multiple Grammy-nominated
guitarist played the chords over and over, transposing
them to the guitar, trying to divine their relation to
each other and bizarre hold they had on his senses. Still,
there was that line, It’s a mystery... Clearly,
Satriani was on to something. But what? “From the smallest
and weirdest things, a trip begins,“ Satriani says,
laughing. “I became obsessed both by the chords I was
playing and the line that I wrote. They came out of
nowhere, as if they were dropped from the sky, so I knew I
had to figure out what was going on.“
Satriani began
to research, and in his readings he discovered that the
word “mystery” had ancient origins. “The word first
appeared in ancient Greece as ‘musterion’ to describe some
of the false doctrines of Greek fraternities that were
popping up 2000 years ago. St. Paul, however, used the
word in a different way. He said that once you embrace the
’musterion’ that the truth will be revealed. Then the
subsequent English translations of the New Testament took
the word and changed it to ’mystery.’ The word mutated in
both spelling and meaning.“
For Satriani,
who was by now putting a memorable (and ultimately
surging) guitar melody to his beguiling two-chord
leitmotif, it was as enlightening moment. “Embrace the ‘musterion.‘”
he says. “As soon as I had that in my head, the song
‘Musterion’ just took flight. My guitar parts came rather
effortlessly.” More than that, Satriani’s mission became
clear, and he began his new record in earnest.
Okay, so he’s
not your average shredder. That much was clear in 1987,
when he stormed the gates with Surfing with the Alien,
his second album and the follow-up to his self-financed
debut, Not of This Earth. An action-packed record
of bracing, delirious guitar instrumentals, it was a
runaway success, cracking Billboard’s Top 20 and going
Gold (it has since gone multi-Platinum). Satriani (or “Satch,”
as he became popularly known from his song “Satch Boogie”)
had done the impossible, hitting a bulls-eye before anyone
knew a target existed. But for the former guitar teacher
turned pro, a David amongst the Goliaths of the music
industry, it was the culmination of a dream he had the day
he quit his high school football team (not coincidentally
on the day of Jimi Hendrix’s death) to devote his life to
the guitar: that six strings could rule the world.
It was an
ascendant notion then, and it remains so now. Over a
two-decade- long career, Satriani has released a dozen
critically acclaimed studio albums that have sold over ten
million copies worldwide. In the process, he has
established himself as a player whose emotional musical
dexterity equals that of his physical gifts. His solo
concerts are sell-out events, but in 1996, need a new
challenge (and perhaps a big of fun) he formed G3, a
concert tour of galvanizing guitar music featuring
Satriani with his close friend and former student(!) Steve
Vai, along with a floating third member (the notables have
included Eric Johnson, Yngwie Malmsteen, Robert Fripp,
among others). But for Joe Satriani, it is the creation of
music that is its own reward, and on Professor
Satchifunkilus and the Musterion of Rock, he embarks
on his most fascinating journey.
An album this
ambitious and filled with epic themes -- they range from
the deeply personal ballad “Revelation,“ originally
written about the death of a friend’s father until
Satriani realized he was writing about his own father’s
recent passing, to the heart-on-his-sleeve love note to
his wife, Rubina, “Come On Baby,“ to the all-out gonzo
sci-fi crunch of “I Just Wanna Rock,” about a giant robot
on the lam who encounters a rock concert -- would have one
easily expecting a double-CD to contain all of the grand
impulses and matchless music-making. Satriani, however,
set a goal for himself and stuck to it. “The album would
be 10 songs and no more,” he says.
“As is the case
with most of my albums, I started with between 30 and 40
songs, knowing full well that most of them were going to
bite the dust. I decided early on, even before we started
tracking, that this record was going to be 10 tight tracks
-- a clear, succinct statement. At the same time, they
weren’t all going to be just three-minute pop ditties; I
wanted to make sure they took you somewhere, that they
mattered. Plus, the songs had to be things that I wanted
to take on tour with me and explore night after night. So
a lot of thought went into whittling down the list.”
In limiting
himself to 10 songs, Satriani intentionally chose a
smaller canvas but one that would be filled with slashes
of bold colors, epic themes, and high emotions. But the
genius of Satch’s creativity is this: Most brief albums
feel just that: skimpy, short on substance, and lacking
any real linear dramatic flow. They narrow as they
proceed. This one, however, expands -- and, in doing so,
it becomes that rarity in music: an epic that was never
intended to be an epic. “That was always in the back of my
head,“ Satriani explains. “How can I use brevity to my
advantage? What I found was, 10 songs helped me focus my
energy on every aspect of my writing. Most of the time, I
try to do too much -- I have so many pieces of music
floating around, and my temptation is to want to give the
audience everything I have. This time, I tempered that
impulse. Instead of 18 or 19 songs that go off the rails
and leave you feeling scattered and fuzzy, I wanted to
give you a sharp shot to the senses.”
Satch wrote
quickly, recording elaborate demos in his home studio
during the summer months of 2007. (“Come on Baby” is a
notable exception: the guitarist began the song while
snowed in during a vacation in Lake Tahoe in 1993; it
wasn’t until last year that, upon the urging of his son,
ZZ, he realized it was strong enough to finish.) When
Satriani convened in the fall with longtime co-producer
and engineer John Cuniberti, drummer Jeff Campitelli, and
bassist Matt Bissonette at the Plant in Saulsalito,
California, he felt “more ready than I ever have to start
an album. I could literally see and hear the record before
me. It’s almost like it was already there. All I had to do
was wish it.”
There will
always be songwriters who aren’t great guitarists and
guitarists who aren’t great songwriters. Satch, however,
possesses both talents in equal and extreme measures. He’s
a storyteller, sketching tales and characters, as
concerned with mise en scene and mood as any master
filmmaker. Take “Out of the Sunrise,” for example, with
complex guitar lines as bewitching as they are anodynic.
“It’s about somebody, let’s say it’s me but it could just
as easily be you,” says Satriani. “He’s been up all night
and he’s looking out at the dawn. And suddenly everything
that he’s done wrong in his life becomes clear. But he
realizes that it’s a new day, a new start, that he still
has a chance. Ultimately, it’s a song of hope.”
A real-life
figure, Asik Vaysel, Turkey’s premier saz player
(it‘s an ancient four-stringed instrument), turns up in
two songs that amount to something of an extended tribute.
The first, the appropriately named “Asik Vaysel,” is an
enchanting and exhilarating tour de force that was
inspired during Satriani’s recent tour of Turkey. “Our
Turkish promoter was incredulous to learn that I’d never
heard Vaysel’s music,” says Satriani. “So he gave me two
Vaysel CDs and I and was completely overcome. The music
resonated within me as if I’d known it all my life. On
’Asik Vaysel,’ I tried to celebrate the experience of
hearing it for the first time.”
Satriani, who
can make music out of a doorknob if he had to, nixed the
idea of playing an actual saz (“too obvious”), so he tried
a different approach: “I thought, What if I barely
press down on the guitar strings and I barely pick the
strings? To my surprise, it allowed me to evoke the
spirit of Vaysel’s recordings in a very cool way. I wound
up playing in a way that I never played before. The guitar
really sounds different.”
Vaysel’s spirit
lives in the wondrous “Andalusia,” an elaborate feast for
the senses in which Satriani imagines himself as Vaysel
wandering through the Spanish countryside. “I didn’t start
out to channel Vaysel in such a way,” says Satriani, “but
during my last trip to Spain I was so struck by its
incredible beauty that upon returning home I thought,
What would Asik Vaysel feel if he saw these vistas?
And before you knew it, I was writing about him.”
Of course, a Joe
Satriani album wouldn’t be a Joe Satriani without the wild
and woolly, and on a handful of pulverizing cuts such as “Overdriver,”
about a pernicious Funny Car with a mind of its own,
“Professor Satchifunkilus,” concerning a cartoonish mack
daddy decked out in an explosion of “Soul Train” finery
(by the way, that sax you hear is courtesy of none other
than ZZ Satriani), “Diddle-y-a-doo-dat,” a mad dash of
jacked-up swing, and the soon-to-be-audience participation
classic “I Just Wanna Rock,“ Satch kicks out the jams six
ways to Sunday, unleashing fusillades of sound that rages
with fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell.
“It’s funny,”
says Satriani. “There’s part of me that still gets off on
playing wild, out-of-control guitar. I think I’ll always
stay in that state of arrested development. But another
part of me tried to do more with less on this album.
There’s less songs, for one. But there’s also less notes
on some of those songs. Still, I tried to make sure that
every second was filled with something -- a new sound, a
new riff, a new emotion. Every time I found myself doing
what I’d done on earlier albums, I stopped myself and
said, ‘What else do I have inside of me?’”
Distinguished,
hypnotic, brilliantly conceived and executed, and
positively electrifying, Professor Satchifunkilus and
the Musterion of Rock, despite its lighthearted title,
is filled with the kind of arty vigor and bratty fever
that has made Joe Satriani one of the greatest guitarists
of his day. But if the measure of a musician is the human
spirit he can coax out of a note, then Satch is doing
something quite worthwhile with his extraordinary gifts:
He’s letting you in on a feeling.
Or as he might
say, It’s a mystery. |
