Joe Satriani’s G3 Tour visits Mesa on Thursday
Satriani, Collen talk G3 tour: Celebration of electric guitar
“When we were kids, wouldn’t we have loved to have seen Jimmy Page, Ace Frehley, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck with Jimi Hendrix just playing with each other, not worrying about who was the most popular at the moment or who sold more records?”
That’s the pitch with which Joe Satriani ultimately talked Steve Vai and Eric Johnson into joining him on the inaugural G3 Tour, a guitar hero’s summit, back in 1996.
It took about a year, the guitarist recalls, to convince them.
The struggle to make it happen
“They had been professional musicians for a long time and the business had trained them well that you never stand next to somebody who might play better than you,” Satriani explains.
And then, of course, there were the managers, who had no particular interest in their artist being made to share the spotlight.
“I just had to personally talk to them,” Satriani recalls, “and say, ‘Imagine if the people in the audience have already made up their minds who their favorite is, so you’re not gonna change that. It doesn’t matter what you wear or how fast you play or whatever. They come to the concert knowing, “Steve’s my favorite guy. I don’t care what Joe plays.”‘ I said, ‘Let’s forget about that. That is no longer part of our job, to try to win over fans. The fans are actually there mainly because they’re so excited that we dropped our guard and decided to play with each other freely, not holding anything back.’”
Satriani prevailed
“And once we did the first show, here in Northern California, I could see that they were blown away,” he says. “Because they still didn’t believe me 100 percent. But once they did the show, they realized, they saw in the audience, the faces of people who loved them specifically. They also saw that those same people love them for standing next to me, who maybe they didn’t even know how to pronounce my last name. Or somebody famous like Steve Vai. They were just so happy that we did it and they were a part of it.”
That first tour was successful enough that 22 years later, Satriani is still doing G3 every chance he gets, including this year’s tour, which brings him back to Phoenix with G3 veteran John Petrucci of Dream Theater and making his appearance on the tour, Phil Collen of Def Leppard.
“I think we succeeded because of the fact that the guitar players on stage were cut from the same cloth as the people in the audience, whether they were musicians or not.” Satriani explains. “We loved guitar and so G3 became a mutual celebration of the electric guitar.”
Satriani came up with the concept of the tour because he missed the camaraderie of jamming with fellow guitarist while touring.
“Towards the middle or end of 1995, although I was playing around the world and we had great success and sold millions of records, I found that I was always somewhere else when I wanted to play with one of my friends,” he says. “I’d be in London and I’d call Steve Vai and he’d be in Australia. Or whatever. I was always on the wrong coast at the wrong time. Or wrong hemisphere.
When can I hang out with the guitar players I know?
“I remember walking into my management’s office and saying, ‘When do I get to hang out with the other guitar players I know and play? It just seems like I’m getting more isolated the more successful I am. What can we do to create a controlled collaboration?’”
Making records with his friends would be too complicated and too costly with too much show-business to clear.
“So I started thinking, ‘What if you formalize guitar players getting together to jam, like what we did in high school when it was so easy.”
Once he and his management had landed on the concept of a micro-festival of sorts, they settled on the magic number – three guitarists – “because of venue curfews, believe it or not,” Satriani recalls. “They say, ‘We can let people in at 7 and everybody has to be gone by 11.’ That’s your curfew. So you think, ‘Well, wouldn’t it be great to have 13 guitar players.’ Then, you think, ‘How do I squeeze them between 7:30 and 10:45?’ And you realize that’s impossible. You wouldn’t be able to invite people and say, ‘Could you come and play one and a half songs?’
Down to a formula
This format allows each guitarist to play anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour, with an all-star jam on another three songs at the end.
‘It turned out to be a really magical formula,” Satriani says. “Because it really did give enough time to each of the G3 guys to promote their latest record or to go through the fan favorites from their catalog. And they always came for the jam feeling like they played enough for the evening. They weren’t just hanging out backstage for hours and hours, not playing enough.”
The key to the all-star jam, Satriani discovered, was keeping it simple and structured.
“One of the things that took a little bit of convincing was that people come in with ideas about what the songs should be that we jam on,” Satriani says. “And very often, you’ll get a player who really loves a particular song but I would have to point out that it’s too complex a song. If the song isn’t friendly enough to allow for improvisation, or if the song is so complicated that it requires anybody who’s gonna play it to sit down and rehearse, it becomes less of a celebration. It becomes less pliable. And performance is all about being pliable.”
That also makes it easier to bring special guests.
“When we go from city to city, you’re gonna have people who just want to come on stage, show up and play,” he says. “And if we have some very complicated song that we’ve all learned that’s more a presentation, not a free-form jam, those people won’t be able to jump on. The first show, who’s backstage immediately but Neal Schon, saying ‘Can I play?’ Of course we want to have Neal Schon play.”
Keep it simple
It never fails, though. Satriani says. New players on the G3 Tour inevitably reach for something way too difficult to suit the task at at hand because they think it’s more impressive.
“And I go, ‘It’s really not about that,’” Satriani says. “It’s about being able to have a song that’s like an open invitation that it would be easy to have two guys show up and give them some guitars and they wouldn’t have to rehearse because it’s a well-known song and it’s easy to play. It doesn’t mean it’s easy to play well. I’m just saying you don’t have to know all the ins and outs of the arrangement. It’s the song that has a good smile on it, that’s an open invitation, that isn’t all locked up and doesn’t force people to play a certain way.”
The three main players do rehearse, he says. “We make sure the parts that need to be rehearsed are rehearsed. There’s still some basic stuff, like what key is it in? Who’s gonna sing it? What tempo? Where do the solos happen? I instituted a couple rules. No matter who is the furthest stage left, that’s the first guy to play. I’ll play the last solo and that’ll help everybody cue the return to the song. That’s a simple set of stage rules that keeps the newcomer in line. So those are simple things.”
The tricky part is lining up the other players, which can take about a year.
“These days, there’s such competition for venues that people really do book in advance, like up to two years,” Satriani says. “If I was trying to put together something with Tommy Emmanuel or Joe Bonamassa, I’d have to think about 2020. So we go through a process where we come up with a bunch of names that I have to say primarily interest me and then we find out who’s available, who wants to do it, any issues that players have playing with the other players, what the management thinks and then what the promoters think.”
It is the music business, Satriani says, which means he’s at the mercy of the people taking the financial risk.
“If the promoters don’t collectively like one of the people that I’ve picked, that means that person doesn’t go,” he says. “That’s just the way it goes. The promoters take the risk to bring a band to town so it’s not up to me, let’s put it that way. If I said, ‘Look, I’ve got this guy. You’ve never heard of him but he’s great,’ they’d say, ‘Exactly, we’ve never heard of him. We’re not confident that anyone is gonna buy a ticket to that.’” However, if I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen, are you interested?,’ they’d say, ‘You don’t have to come. Send those two guys.’”
This is Petrucci’s seventh tour of G3 duty, Phil Collen’s first
“He’s a tremendous musician,” Satriani says. “The consummate professional. His musicianship is at virtuoso level and when he’s on stage, he’s like a little 14-year-old with his first guitar. He’s so excited. And he’s fearless. You put him in any situation and he wants to see if he can do it. It’s really a joy to play with him. It’s easy to tour with him. He’s a great hang. Maybe it’s because we’re both from Long Island and we can relate to each other but it’s always been a lot of fun. And the bonus that I get out of hanging out with him is that I can’t play half the stuff he can play so I’m constantly learning how he approaches his stuff from a technical level and I’m always hoping some of it will rub off.”
Although this is Collen’s first G3 Tour, he and Satriani worked together this past year at Satriani’s G4 Camp in Northern California.
“He surprised everybody with what a huge positive personality he was with the campers and as a performer,” Satriani says. “And what equally knocked everybody sideways was what an incredible guitar player he was beyond what we’ve been hearing with Def Leppard. He turned out to be a really soulful player and a crazy shredder. If you open that door and say, “Hey, do you want to shred on this?,” he’s got a smile on his face and off he goes. All you had to do was whisper a couple of chord changes in his ear and he was right there on stage ready to go. So he’s a total pro.”
As intrigued as Satriani was by the prospect of inviting Collen to take part in this year’s tour, he didn’t really think he’d do it.
“He’s in Def Leppard,” he says. “Why would he jump off the stadium circuit to do this? But he circled back around and said ‘I am available to do this.’ I jumped at the chance. I wanted to play with him some more. And I knew the sort of surprised he would get from the audience because of who he is and who he’s been playing with.”
The gift of improvisation on stage
“I’ll be able to improvise a bit,” he says. “Most of the time, you know, I’m in Def Leppard and it’s very structured; our stuff is all song-oriented. Threeminute pop songs in a lot of cases. You have to have a bridge, a verse, a chorus. So I’m usually restricted, from a guitar point of view. Our songs are meant to be that way. And I’m tied to a microphone because I sing on every song. With this, we can open up a bit and have a more experimentation, although I’ll be singing as well. It’s just a bit more open.”
It’s not that Collen never has an opportunity to improvise.
“I play guitar all the time,” he says. “It’s not just something I do on stage. I’m always recording. I’m always sitting around the house on guitar, just playing. So that part is going to be very similar. But some of the stuff I’ll be doing is stuff people wouldn’t have heard me do before.”
A perfect fit
As to how the three guitarists mesh, Collen feels its a perfectly natural fit on many levels.
“We’re all very different guitar players but we’ve got some things that are very much the same,” Collen says. “The fact that everyone’s an artist, not just a musician. I think that makes a difference. And the fact that we’re all on this eternal quest for better sound, more experience, better playing, just a learning curve. So I think we’re gonna have a blast. Even some of the arrangements of some of the songs we’re gonna be jamming on will be just a nice thing, a different approach.”