CHICKENFOOT's SATRIANI Talks About Album's Chart Success, Recent Mini-Tour

The I Heart Guitar blog recently conducted an interview with guitarist Joe Satriani of CHICKENFOOT. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

I Heart Guitar: The album debuted at No. 4. How cool is that!

Satriani: Yeah, I swear, I was thinking we were going to be 100-something. So when someone said, "You know, I think we might be in the top 20," I was like, "Yeah, right." Then, "No it's going to be in the top 10." Then as it came closer and closer I started getting emails from Gary Arnold at Best Buy saying, "You'd better be ready, this is coming out at No. 4." DAVE MATTHEWS, GREEN DAY, BLACK EYED PEAS. Classic rock up against those guys, it's a great moment for rock.

I Heart Guitar: So you just wrapped up a mini-tour?

Satriani: We did this little club tour. We called it a road-test tour and we played in places that held 400 people, little sweatboxes, and it was so much fun, to take a real rock band like this with a brand new record that no one had heard and just try to make them hear it and understand it. There's nothing like feedback from a few hundred people who can scratch your nose during the show if they want (laughs). I mean, you really do have to do your work, but the feedback you get is great, and the fans who came to see us can take pride in being part of the experience that told us how to do it. I'm glad we did it and we'll take that experience to Europe for this festival tour that's starting later this week.

I Heart Guitar: Did you learn anything new about the songs after playing them on the tour?

Satriani: What you learn about is which part should stay the same and which parts are flexible. And you learn that with every album. I've learned that every time I've taken an instrumental record on the road. For instance, you learn that "Flying In A Blue Dream" has got to be handled very carefully but "Ice 9" can be played a million different ways and it still works. You just never really know until you try. It was good for us to get this happening because let me tell you something: between February 2008 when we first played together and then a year later, we had still only spent 43 days making a record and about a week more playing together. We had never played all the songs top to bottom, let alone do a show. So we really were a band that against all odds recorded an album, and then all of a sudden we had to get experience like a normal band would. We condensed it into that little two-week club tour.

I Heart Guitar: How do you approach guitar for CHICKENFOOT compared to your own songs?

Satriani: The biggest difference is that in a band like this with the kind of music we're writing, I knew from the start that the rhythm guitar, the guitar that plays the riff, the intro guitar, the guitar that really plays with the rhythm section, has got to be the heart and soul of the band. It really does. It's not about the soloist. To me that's more like an '80s kind of a thing, where the guitarist is always on a self-promotion trip. And that was cool back then. Eddie Van Halen was the star of that: he had the true chops to pull that off. But I didn't want to just revisit that era. Having lived through it myself, I'm not interested in that. So I looked further back, and Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, they created these amazing records with their amazing rhythm guitar parts that really embodied the soul of the music. Then when the solo part came they would freak out and go crazy, but then they'd get back to what you really wanted which was the band rocking riffs. I made it my personal quest to make sure that happened. I wasn't thinking CHICKENFOOT was a vehicle for Joe Satriani to fuse his solo stuff with a singer. I wanted it to be something totally CHICKENFOOT, something totally original with the band. I think everybody felt the same way in their own right. They weren't out to try to reproduce what they were famous for. They wanted to use the band as impetus to do something new that they hadn't done before.

Read the entire interview from I Heart Guitar.