Friday, December 24, 2004 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Guitar God

Joe Satriani must ice his arm after his performances, but loves the chance to express himself

Joe Satriani performs Wednesday at the House of Blues.

Joe Satriani is often referred to as a "guitar god" for his instrumental performances. But he and his left arm are quite mortal. This is not news to the influential San Franciscan, who was fatigued after playing three-hour concerts in October.

"It's pretty intense," Satriani, 48, says. "I gotta say, when the month was over, my arm was killing me from just playing so many melodies and solos every night.

"It's not a regular job, even in the music industry," because he's working the center stage at all times, without a singer to give him a break.

Grueling tours leave him feeling great, "like I've expressed myself," he says. But Satriani must often ice his arm, just like a Major League pitcher.

"You just get tense. You get tight, and there's not time to relax," he says. "The ice thing is always great after a show, if you're dealing with muscles and tendons.

"It's the bending and the pushing of the strings that's the most fatiguing. When you're doing it for three hours straight, and you're doing six, seven nights a week, it starts to add up after a while."

Satriani -- who famously taught guitar to Steve Vai, Metallica's Kirk Hammett and Primus' Larry LaLonde -- doesn't recommend any one guitar over another. Every guitarist has a favorite sound, he says.

"It's like putting Hendrix and a Stratocaster against Jimmy Page and his Les Paul. How can you say what instrument is best?"

But Satriani says some people in the music industry believe that male and female listeners prefer to hear much different tones. Years ago, Satriani was exposed to this theory while visiting a music store.

"This salesman had it down to the `man curve' or the `woman curve,' " Satriani says. "Women like a lot of bass, and guys seem to like not too much bass and a lot of treble. It was a generalization, but many years ago, that seemed to be the case."

What does that say about what men and women want out of music?

"My feeling is men are more easily interested in titillation kind of things, and women really need to feel some movement," he says. "They really got to feel the force of the rhythm a little more complete."

Does he realize how dirty this sounds? He laughs.

"There's a friend of mine who used to work at Electric Ladyland, and he said every record they (recorded), they would bring in the receptionist, a woman, and they would turn it up and ask her if the bass was right."

Whichever type of sound men and women want to hear, now it's easier than ever to give them good sound quality, Satriani says. He was reminded of this recently when he was rewatching some old Hendrix film footage.

Hendrix played with hardly any P.A. system, a few monster speaker stacks ("It must have been deafening") and a wah-wah guitar pedal, "and I think that's about it," Satriani says.

Today, though, guitarists travel with technicians who electronically tune their six or seven tour guitars. And the music plays through multichannel amplifiers, boards with 20 tone-changing pedals, monitors and giant P.A.'s.

Even bands that keep it simple have complex touring rigs. Satriani played at a Portuguese festival with AC/DC a decade ago and he saw all that went into one of the band's concerts.

"The amount of technology to project the band to the audience is stunning. Onstage, it's just two guitarists who are each playing one guitar that's going into an amp. But the mics are a little bit better. There's compressors, limiters, there's equalization ..." he says.

All that technology pays off.

"They were fantastic," he says. "The audience today hears so much more detail than they used to hear."

And yet, quality musicianship is still way more important.

"All those beautiful performances by Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Coltrane are just horribly recorded. I mean, just horribly recorded. And you think now the recording is so brilliant, and there's nobody around who can play like that. That's a real crime."