He’s released 23 critically acclaimed albums in 22 years. He was nominated for a Grammy in 2008 for Best Instrumental Rock Performance. The Ibanez JS Series was made for him. He has toured with Mick Jagger, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, and Blue Oyster Cult, but is fundamentally a solo artist. He’s the Master of Face Melting Guitar, and he’s coming to Cardiff.

Joe Satriani will be playing St. David’s Hall on Monday, 19 May. Although Satriani has played Cardiff in the past, hectic tour schedules have prevented him from spending time in the city. “I’ve never actually walked around or spent the night, but the hotels are great, the venues are great, and the audiences are fantastic.”

The current tour is to promote his new album, Professor Satchafunkilus and the Musterion of Rock, released on the 1st of April of this year. As for the unusual title, Satriani explains: 'Professor Satchafunkilus is just my alter ego. I grew up playing a lot of Funk and R & B, so it’s just about that funky side of me.'

As for the musterion, 'The Apostle Paul says to understand the writings about the Saviour, you have to be touched by the musterion, and that sort of divine grace allows you to understand the true message behind all these unusual Bible stories. I thought this could apply to me, my fans, and my music. Some people definitely don’t get Joe Satriani music, but the fans are touched by the musterion.'

Whether or not you’ve been touched by the musterion, the show at St. David’s Hall promises to be a fantastic night out. Rock and Metal fans won’t want to miss the chance to see this living legend in the flesh, and people of other musical tastes are sure to be impressed by the considerable skill of one of the world’s greatest living guitarists.

'It’s fun.' He says. 'You know, I love what I do, and it is cathartic and gut-wrenching at times, but I think that’s what it’s supposed to be. I mean, if it was easy, it wouldn’t be worth it, right?'

Jessica Ramthun

As printed in Buzz Magazine, May 2008

April 11, 2008

Jess: Hi Joe, How’s it goin’?

Joe: Pretty good.

Jess: So, where are you at the moment?

Joe: I’m in Portland, Oregon.

Jess: What’s the time difference? Is it like 10 in the morning over there?

Joe: Yeah, it’s just about ten. You guys are a little early, you surprised me.

Jess: Yeah, sorry about that, it’s like 6 here.

Joe: Okay.

Jess: So I understand you’re coming to Cardiff to play in May.

Joe: Yeah, we, uh, we decided to get into Europe a bit early this time after the release of the record on April 1st. We’ve been heading to Europe more when it’s really hot, and I think we got so burnt out the last couple years. We’d get into Europe and it would be a 100 degrees over there, so this time we thought, why don’t we head over the Atlantic as quickly as we can, we’ll be in Cardiff, I guess, the first or second week of the tour, so I hope the weather will be perfect in Cardiff.

Jess: Oh yeah, surely! It never gets to be a hundred degrees over here. It’ll probably be raining when you’re over here.

Joe: Fabulous! (laughs)

Jess: Yeah! As long as that’s alright with you! So have you ever played Cardiff before?

Joe: Yeah, probably four or five times.

Jess: So what do you think of it?

Joe: Well, you know, the funny thing is we get in late in the afternoon, check into the hotel, do a couple of interviews and go to the show, back to the hotel, and then it’s time to get on the tour bus and drive away, so every time I go to Cardiff that’s about it, I think we’ve stayed 16 hours, tops.

Jess: Oh no!

Joe: Yeah, I’ve never actually walked around or spent the night, but I can tell the hotels are great, the venues are great, and the audiences are fantastic.

Jess: Well, that’s good. I’ve only been to Cardiff a few times myself, I live in Swansea. I suppose you’ve never been out here?

Joe: No, I’ve never - where is that, exactly?

Jess: Swansea, it’s about 30 miles west of Cardiff.

Joe: Oh, okay, west of Cardiff?

Jess: Yeah, towards west Wales. It’s smaller, but it’s got good ice cream.

Joe: (laughs)

Jess: Good surfing as well. Do you surf?

Joe: No, no, the funny thing is, once I really started getting into guitar playing, one thing I noticed was being in the water for long periods of time really started to take my calluses off on my fretting hand. I grew up on an island, and as a kid I spent 3 months of every year in the water, and I loved it, but then guitar playing kicked in and I realized I had to spend more time out of the water than I’d like. Then my career really kicked off, and managing my calluses is like a full time job, you know.

Jess: Yeah, I can imagine!

Joe: Like being a harp player in an orchestra, you’re always worried about your hands, you know! So I haven’t been on a board in ages.

Jess: So when was the last time you saw your fingerprints?

Joe: You know the weird thing is about the body is that the fingerprints are always there on your calluses, I don’t know how it does it. The skin gets pushed to the top somehow; you know the layers stay there, so the traces of who you are are always there, even in your calluses.

Jess: Just big and rough.

Joe: Yeah.

Jess: Well, that’s alright then! So speaking of surfing, I’ve noticed the Silver Surfer has been on a couple of your album covers, so what’s the deal with your fascination with sci-fi and comics and things?

Joe: Well, you know, that part was really by accident. As a kid I was never allowed to read comic books. Our parents were really concerned about our education, so it was all, you know, literature for us kids, and my friends could read comic books, but they were never allowed in our house. So years and years later, when I was recording my third solo record, it was going to be called Lords of Karma, and I was doing some pre-press back in the day when you could spend months sending your record around before it was officially released. So I was doing press before the album was made available, and there was a British journalist who after a normal interview told me how much he disliked the album title. So after the interview I worried about it; I didn’t want people to dismiss the music on the album just because of the title, so I looked at all the rest of the songs and I picked the one with the funniest sound to it that I thought people wouldn’t object to it so it would be like it had a sense of humour to it, you know, and that one was Surfing with the Alien. So I called the record label, and I said ‘let’s change the title to Surfing with the Alien’. And just by coincidence, the guy I was talking to, Jim, the production manager at Relativity Records, told me that his nickname when he used to work in radio was the Silver Surfer and that we should put the Silver Surfer on the cover, just as a joke to him! Of course I said, ‘What’s a Silver Surfer? And he said ‘I can’t believe you don’t know what that is!’

Jess: Right, Fantastic Four!

Joe: Right, so he sent me these comic books, and I thought, this an amazing image, and I had this deal with my contract that they weren’t allowed to put any negative, violent, or disgusting images on my album artwork, because they were kind of famous for that -- thrash bands with ugly looking covers -- and I said I wouldn’t allow that, and so I saw this and I said, ‘Oh great, this is some kind of super hero who doesn’t have any blood or fangs or weapons and stuff!’ and(Jim)just happened to know a guy from Marvel Comics in Manhattan, and his offices were very close to where he lives, so he actually just walked down there with a cassette, and he said “We’ve got this nice, sweet guy with an instrumental record and he’d love to use this comic book artwork”, and we got the license, you know, we paid for the license for a certain amount of time to be able to use that image for what was then album inserts, cassettes, and eventually CDs, and the rest is history. People thought I was creating a record, that I was an alien or a surfer or something, and that’s the story – one of those unusual series of accidents that tied me to the character.

Jess: Yeah! It works! Have you seen the new Fantastic Four film?

Joe: I saw the first one, yeah, little bits of it, yeah.

Jess: Well, the second one is about the Silver Surfer, and it’s really cool.

Joe: Oh, really? Okay.

Jess: Yeah, that’s the one I always think of, anyway. So, right! I was going to ask you, what’s the deal with the Little Kids Rock program? You started that in 2006, was it?

Joe: Yeah, I didn’t start it, no, Little Kids Rock and another foundation called Music in Schools Today, they’re both extremely important in this unusual environment in the United States where the schools, public schools, are losing funding because of management, they’re having to drop a lot of courses in the arts, so these charitable organizations have sprung up to fill the need of these schools that have no more music or art classes, or have music classes that are under severe stress, you know, no funding, so they don’t have instruments, they don’t have anything that you would need to teach kids music, and even teachers. So I started to get involved in trying to raise money to help these organizations that go into schools across the country and actually start the programs for them, or they can fund the ones that are already in place. They’re both fantastic organizations.

Jess: I really admire that. When I was in school in the states, they were already dropping language and art classes, and they’re so important to development. So can you tell me what the deal is with your new album title, Professor Satchifunkilus and the Musterion of Rock?

Joe: It’s a tongue-twisting kind of title. You know, I had a problem picking one song from the album for the title track, because each song seems to go off into a different stylistic direction, so I realized I couldn’t call the album Come on, Baby, or Andalusia, Professor Satchifunkilus, or Musterion, which would just make people think the album was just going off in some weird direction, so I thought maybe we could pick a title that really doesn’t have much of a title at all, and album titles don’t matter very much anyway, to the fans. They just use it for the first couple of weeks, then they refer to it as ‘the new record’, or simply reduce it to a number of letters, so I started playing around with the song titles until I thought, you know, with a little work you could almost believe there was serious meaning behind the title! But Professor Satchifunkilus is just my alter ego. I grew up playing a lot of Funk and R & B and when I was a kid, a lot of James Brown and Sly Stone songs, so it’s just a song about that funky side of me. Musterion, it’s a word I came across when I was writing a song that I thought was about a mysterious, lurking feeling inside of me, then I researched the word and I stumbled upon an ancient Greek work, musterion, and then the controversy of how that word was used, misused, and mistranslated from ancient Greece through the period where the Old Testament and the New Testament combine to create the Bible that the Catholics know about now. When it was translated, how the writings of the Apostle Paul were translated into English, they mistranslated the word mustereon into mystery, and I grew up a Roman Catholic Italian American and I went to Catholic School, so I was never told about this, and when I realized there had been this word and this controversy, and even me, growing up in that environment was shielded from it, I thought, ’this is a very controversial word’. And in a long sort of stretch, I thought this can apply to me, my fans, and my music, so I thought some people definitely don’t get Joe Satriani music, but the fans really love it and the original meaning of the word musterion was actually used by the Greeks to cast dispersion on false claims or unusual spiritual claims by false prophets, and apparently the Apostle Paul when he gets to Greece, he takes that word and he uses it in its opposite meaning: he says to understand the writings about the Saviour, you have to be touched by the musterion, and that sort of divine grace allows you to understand that true message behind all these unusual Bible stores. So I thought, how great of a guy to do that, to go to a foreign land and take a word that means something negative and turn it into something positive, then it was turned into the word mystery, which you know, to anyone growing up speaking the English language, it means something that can’t be solved, so that’s obviously not what St Paul was writing about! (laughs) So someone like me, 2000 years later, is being asked to understand these writings when it’s actually mistranslated! So the controversy was just fantastic, I thought. So I thought in a way, you can say to people, if you don’t understand Joe’s music it’s because you haven’t been touched by the musterion! And I thought that was kind of funny in a way. But the music itself on that song is unusual, because it uses a Hungarian minor scale, which I’m sure your readers aren’t interested in that (laughs) so I won’t go into it!

Jess: I didn’t realize that was what it was. I listened to the album earlier today and I especially liked that track, but I couldn’t quite figure out what made it different.

Joe: That’s what it is! Yeah, it’s an unusual scale I’m using in that one.

Jess: I had no idea! So do you still consider yourself a devout Catholic?

Joe: Not really, uh, I have a respectful distrust for religious institutions.

Jess: Fair enough!

Joe: And, uh, I’m one of those strange people who believes in God, but has an ongoing argument with God because I can’t understand how all the horrible things in the world can exist while there is a god, so I’m probably going to have that argument right up until the end!

Jess: Yeah, that’s completely understandable. On to something a little different now – I’ve noticed you’ve worked with a lot of really amazing people: Alice Cooper, Mick Jagger, Blue Oyster Cult... Is there anybody you haven’t worked with who you’d like to?

Joe: Well, you know years ago I put together this G3 concert series and we’ve been going for 11 or 12 years now, and it was really because I just wanted to share the stage with guitar players , especially the ones I thought were much better than myself, so we could just hang out, learn, and have fun onstage, and I’m still hoping – we’ve done, I’m guessing – 8,9,11, or 12 of these concerts with a generous handful of amazing players from Robert Fripp to John Petrucci and Steve Vai and on and on. I’d love to – I’m still hoping that one day Jeff Beck will agree to go on tour with us because he’s one of my favourite players.

Jess: That would be amazing. So you’ve had 23 albums in the past 22 years. That must be really difficult to keep up with!

Joe: It’s fun, you know, I love what I do, and it is cathartic and gut wrenching at times, but I think that’s what it’s supposed to be. I mean, if it was easy, it wouldn’t be worth it, right?

Jess: No, I agree! So tell me a little bit about Andalusia. Where does that come from, what made you want to try that specific style?

Joe: Well, you know we had an interesting summer tour last year in southern Spain, you know I talked about the temperature. Well, we had to do a lot of our shows after midnight because it was just too hot. Come 2:30 in the afternoon, no one would come out because it was just too burning hot. So we spent a lot of time – the band, myself, my family – walking around these beautiful cities in southern Spain when there was no one around because they had more sense to stay in, but of course, we crawl off a tour bus in the early afternoon and we’re dying to walk around, and uh, so we have these great experiences, albeit extremely hot, just sort of soaking in the culture. The music, the food, the beautiful people down there, and I started to log in my creative mind some experiences that I thought would turn into music. We ended the tour in Istanbul, and it was great, we had 4 days there and we saw all this great stuff and we had a great show and I was introduced to the music of this Turkish jazz player, a guy called Asik Veysel, and when I came back home I decided to write a song, like a tribute song to him and his music, and I thought, what if he had travelled to southern Spain and what would his reaction be? So those two songs were one big song until I realised that was too much guitar for people to take in at once -- 15 or 16 minutes -- so I thought, ‘I’ll just cut them in half, and one I called Asik Veysel and the other will just be called Andalusia, about the region of Spain’, and that’s how that song came to be a separate song, and how those two are tied together.

Jess: So are your tours quite long, then?

Joe: Not really, I don’t think they are. We’ve all been touring for a very long time and we all have families, so we don’t tend to go out for more than 2 months at a time, so the touring season, I guess, when we put out a record to when we stop touring is about 18 months. So we go out for two weeks, then we come back for four, then we go back out for 6... and that goes on and on because we have to get to greater Europe, south and central America, Australia, Asia, and the longer tours have to be broken up because it gets to be so long and you start to get kinda weird. You’ve gotta get home and touch base with reality after a few weeks or a few months.

Jess: Do you spend a long time away from your family then?

Joe: Not too much, when my son was younger he came with us on all our tours, and we try to book the longer tours during the summer so the family can come along, but he’s 15 now and school work is so intense for him he can’t really be pulled out of school just to go on a rock and roll tour like the old days, so, every once in a while, every two years or so, there’s always gonna be one tour when I have to go without them. Which I don’t really enjoy, and is just weird for me after all this time, and it would have different if I was 21, and I was just looking to lose myself in that world, but I’ve been around the world so many times, I’ve been touring for two decades, so the isolation and loneliness of success can be suffocating at times. We try not to keep those tours very long. It was nice talking to you.

Jess: It was nice talking to you. I’ll look forward to your show in May.

Joe: Thank you.