Sometimes inspiration comes from unlikely places.
Take, for example, Joe Satriani, the renowned guitar virtuoso, who found it in his mouth.
Satriani's new record, "Shockwave Supernova," out July 24, is a concept album about a struggle between two characters, the showy rock star album title namesake and Little Joe, who convinces Shockwave that he needs to evolve.
"It had a lot to do with playing with my teeth a lot more while I was on tour," Satriani tells HNGN from Cambria, Calif., where he was leading the G4 Experience guitar retreat. "I started to say my teeth are beginning to feel funny, I've been playing with my teeth way too much instead of like once every two weeks it's like six times during a show now. So I walked out of the last show in Singapore thinking I don't want to do that anymore, I've got to somehow rise above a cheap showbiz trick.
"And then it was dawning on me that it's almost like you've got someone else inside of you, and when you step on stage that other person takes over. Certainly that's happened a lot to me where people that know me as a shy, retiring, serious musician have to come to grips with who I become when I walk out on stage, and so I thought that's my concept. My concept is there's an internal struggle between this character, Shockwave Supernova, who'll do anything to keep his rock 'n' roll going onstage, and Little Joe, so they can find each other, and in the end Joe convinces Shockwave that he has to evolve into something better, and the album represents all of the sort of artistic arguments that Shockwave uses as defense, like 'But look what I've done all these years.'"
Satriani says he was, at first, resistant to the idea of recording a concept album.
"I think the concept was something that kind of frightened me a little bit and it may have been brewing inside of me and I kind of resisted it, always thinking that, first of all, concept albums are kind of goofy anyway, and then the fact that there are no lyrics makes it even harder, more of a novelty," he says. "I think that as I started to recognize that I had this bulk of material that was representing a particular direction, it wasn't until a funny moment on stage that I realized that I have to embrace this as the concept, the hidden concept that I had been resisting because I thought it would be crazy to do an instrumental, rock-guitar concept album."
Born in Long Island, N.Y., Satriani's profile began to rise after he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. As a guitar instructor, his students included several future stars, including Steve Vai and Metallica's Kirk Hammett. His second album, 1987's "Surfing With The Alien," was his breakthrough moment, the rare Billboard-charting instrumental rock album that yielded Grammy nominations and radio play. The follow-up, 1989's "Flying In A Blue Dream," charted even higher. In recent years, he might be most known for forming Chickenfoot, the supergroup that featured Sammy Hagar, Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers and original Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony.
Another A-lister whom Satriani has rubbed shoulders with is Mick Jagger, who tapped him for the lead guitar slot on his own first solo tour and Satriani calls "funny," "generous" and " a serious, hard-working musician."
"He certainly far exceeded my expectations about what the lead singer of The Rolling Stones is going to be like," he says. "My experience of doing the shows with him, also mind-blowing how dedicated he was to giving the audience the best show possible. He just worked so hard all the way to the end and really was concerned about anything that didn't go right but never came down on anybody.
"He was a good bandleader. ... That had a big impact on me, because that happened just as I was starting my solo career and I had no experience playing instrumentals on stage as the lead guy. I had no idea what I was doing. So the first two weeks of the 'Surfing With The Alien' tour, I'm sort of figuring out exactly how I'm going to do it, and then all of a sudden there's this Mick Jagger gig, and it gave me a break to step back from myself, and then all of a sudden I was next to a true master of entertainment in terms of rock 'n' roll and I learned a lot about how to project myself and to make sure that the audience felt that there was somebody leading the show, because I was thinking you just go up there and like play, how does the audience where the thing's going? Someone's got to actually take the reins, who's driving the bus?"
While that responsibility usually rests with Satriani as the leader of his own band, he also had a recent parallel career in Chickenfoot, where his job was to just play guitar while Hagar commanded center stage. Recent reports seem to spell the end of the band, however.
"That's how I grew up, that's the music I listened to," Satriani says of the traditional rock band lineup fronted by a vocalist. "My formative years in high school was playing in rock bands where we made believe we were The Stones and Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and The Who, so I just fall right into that, it's so comfortable to me. I love working with people who really are dedicated to delivering strong, outrageous statements, and Sammy [Hagar] and Mick are like cut from the same cloth; lead singers, they're like born, they're unique people.
"So my experience in Chickenfoot was fantastic because it was like being 14 years old and in my high school band again. I could hang out with the drummer and the bass player and let the singer run around and be crazy, I didn't have to be the focus of the show. I want to keep that going. If Chickenfoot can't do another record I'm seeking another vocal-oriented band that I can work with, because I do feel that I got a lot more to say in that genre."
