Review: Six-string surrealist

Geoff Carter

Sunday, Oct. 25, 1998 | 1:23 a.m.

Joe Satriani is an alien being. One had only to see him in action at the Hard Rock Joint Saturday, Oct. 25 to confirm any suspicions of intergalactic involvement - the shaved head, wrap-around sunglasses and reflective silver shirt gave the guitarist away before he strummed a note. What's he hiding under those shades? Is his reflective shirt designed to reflect x-band radiation, making him impervious to radar tracking?

Damned if I know, kids. What I do know is you have to be in touch with something bigger than yourself to play that kind of twelve-finger, rapid-fire gee-tar. And play it he does, like few others on this planet.

More people are listening, too. The standing-room crowd at the Joint cheered Satriani as a conquering hero, hanging on his every last chord as he burned through warp-speed renditions of "One Big Rush," "Summer Song" and "The Extremist." Virtuoso sidemen Stu Hamm (bass) and Jeff Campitelli (drums) paced him at every turn, providing a surface solid enough to launch rockets from.

All that was lacking - and this was only to my ears, I'm sure - was variety. Satriani needs more songs like the hypnotic "Flying In A Blue Dream," with its road-trip rhythm and Eno-esque sonic trickery. Every time I hear the track I find myself drifting right along with it and the mental pictures it draws continue to be striking some nine years after it was released.

Some of his new material comes close. "Love Thing," in particular, comes close to raising your dreaming head to its level - and Satriani never dropped a note, even when his guitar strap broke. By and large, however, you can't tell one jam from another unless you're a diehard fan. It can be supposed that's why Satriani gives his songs titles like "The Mystical Potato Head Groove Thing" - it's kind of hard to forget something that guilelessly cheesy. Or perhaps the space monkeys made him do it, who knows?

But these caveats are only the shortcomings of the unenlightened. Satriani is less a player and more an alternate source of energy. We should be hooking entire cities up to this guy's noggin. We could get a decade's worth of power out of him before Mulder and Scully catch up with him and send him packing, right back to surfing with the aliens.