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He’s penned the classic instrumental guitar album, Surfing with the Alien, masterminded the shredder’s union G3 tours, and is now nailing Van Halen material on tour with Sammy Hagar. Still, not every Joe Satriani guitar solo has been a classic.
There is one cut that, by his own admission, he wishes he had never written.
Ironically, the song in question, Crushing Day, featured on Satriani’s career-defining Surfing with the Alien album. It’s a song, he told Guitar World in 2008, that he “curses” himself for writing.
“It’s just not comfortable for me,” he confessed. “It bothered me on the day we released the record, and it bothered me on every subsequent tour. It got worse when people actually started to like it. I realized the only way for me to play it was to sit in a chair, which I had to explain to the audience. It was quite embarrassing.”
Speaking to MusicRadar about the song in 2017, three decades after its release, he also feels it proved to be style over substance, and has aged less gracefully than its stablemates.
“That was some alter-ego thing where I thought it would be a really cool thing to do,” he said. “I loved the idea of sweep picking, and that was one of the very first things that I recorded for Relativity [Records] when I was trying to sell the idea to Barry Kobrin at the record label.
“This song definitely, out of all of them, echoed the time. It had that early-’80s metal sound and a sense of strictness. It had more Rockman than it should have, and it had tuning issues since it was a demo. By the time we decided to put it on the album, we had run out of money, and so we didn’t have time to replace the parts.”
Everything had conspired against the song. That made its success all the more surprising to Satriani, who saw it as a lesson learned.
“I realized from then on that I should never write songs sitting down, because I can’t play them standing up,” he said in his Guitar World interview.
It’s the age-old problem of nailing something in-studio, sitting on the comfort of a chair with the ability to track several runs, then finding yourself before a live audience baying for virtuosity, only to find you’ve overcooked things.
Still, he believes his audience “got a kick out of me revealing some of my technical shortcomings.” Indeed, it’s nice, from time to time, that the world’s most dazzling guitar virtuosos do show us mere mortals that they are human after all.
The irony of what the song is about, and the future pain it caused him, isn’t lost on us, either.
“It was really about when we have days that really suck, and you feel like the weight of the world is crashing down on you,” he said in 2017. “Because of the guitar instrumental, a lot of that weight that you’re trying to describe has got to be turned into some kind of real screaming emotional melody. And so, my writing approach was to create a super melody and then have it harmonized beautifully.
“The solo section is really long, and I have to say that part of that is that I was so frustrated as a struggling session player that I was always told to stop playing, like, ‘No, you’re playing too many notes. You can’t use that technique.’
“I think Crushing Day epitomizes the idea that this guitar solo’s going to be really long,” he added. “So I thought, ‘I’d better work some of this shit out.’ All the other ones are improvised, but this one was too long to sit there and fiddle about.
“In retrospect,” he concluded, “I regret it, because I’ve always found that when you’re on stage, and you’re playing night after night, that sticking to the script is one of the things that will kill you in the end: it’s a solo killer.”
Mistakes, though, are just as valuable – if not more so – than doing something perfectly. It’s a good thing when shortcomings in our playing and mistakes in our songwriting approaches are exposed. It might seem odd that such an acclaimed album also plays host to one of Satriani’s biggest regrets, but equally, he can be thankful he made the mistake to learn from it.
