Q+A: Joe Satriani

Tuesday, March 13, 2007 | 7:17 a.m.

What: G3 '07 with Joe Satriani (pictured) , John Petrucci, and Paul Gilbert

When: 7 p.m. Thursday

Where: House of Blues

Tickets: $38 to $65; 632-7600

The G3 Tour - the legendary orgy of guitar wizardry - lands at the House of Blues on Thursday.

"I just wanted to be onstage every night with guys I thought were the best players so that I could jam with them and learn," says super-shredder Joe Satriani, who launched the tour 11 years ago in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Each year Satriani picks two other guitar heroes to join him on the tour. This year he'll share the stage with John Petrucci and Paul Gilbert - and a few surprise guests.

Satriani established himself in the San Francisco music scene during the 1980s as a guitar teacher. His students included Steve Vai, Charlie Hunter, Kirk Hammett of Metallica, Larry LaLonde of Primus and David Bryson of Counting Crows.

Twenty years ago Satriani rocketed to stardom with his debut solo album, "Surfing With the Alien." He has since sold more than 10 million albums and DVDs worldwide.

Satriani recently talked to the Sun from his home in San Francisco.

Q: How did G3 come about?

It goes back to '95. I was managed by Bill Graham Management. Bill had always focused on artists being live performers. He was really into that. One day I walked into his office and said, "Everything is great, I'm performing all the time, selling lots of records, traveling around the world, but I'm kind of lonely. I'm the only guitar player up there onstage all the time. It seems like all my friends who are playing guitar are always in Europe when I'm in the United States or I'm in Australia and they're in Canada and we never get to hang out."

I thought as a kid that when you got successful as a magician you'd be hanging out with other magicians all the time, but in fact it seemed like the industry kept us apart on purpose. So we sat down, and after a few hours, we came up with this plan to create our own little micro-guitar festival that we could squeeze into one night into one venue.

We realized for practical reasons that there couldn't be six guys playing guitar. So we settled on three, figuring everyone would get at least an hour or so to play on their own and then have at least a half hour or more for an all-star jam at the end of the night.

Believe it or not, it took a year to convince the rest of the music community that it was a good thing to do. The community was inured in the old showbiz rules; one of them was keep like-minded performers away from each other. So here we were breaking the rules: Let's bring everyone together, let's forget about competition.

Who was with you on the first bill?

Eventually I got Eric Johnson and Steve Vai to see that it was going to be a lot of fun. That the audience was going to love it. That they were dying for it to happen and that all the worries about competition and all the worries that the promoters had about bringing three solo artists together on one night were really unfounded. That there was a uniqueness to it that would make it work from a business point of view.

What was the first concert like?

The first one took place on Oct. 11, 1996, at the Chronicle Pavilion (in Concord, Calif.), which was the Concord Pavilion back then, an outdoor amphitheater. It was huge. The venue holds about 8,000, and it was sold out. It was larger than what each of us had done separately. We never could have booked it as solo artists.

The scene back stage at the end of that show was really cool. Each of the performers came up to me and said, "This really works. This is really amazing." It had never really happened before. It was just a really rare occurrence that some other well-known artist would show up at another artist's show to play. And here we were doing it not for just one song but for three or four and it was going to happen every night. The appreciation they showed for it was far and above what was expected.

How does the concept work?

Basically G3 is three solo artists with their bands. In this case, Paul Gilbert will open the show with his band, playing music from his new album "Get Out of My Yard," as well as stuff that he's well known for. After his set, John Petrucci will jump onstage with his band and play his solo material from his last solo record, and sometimes he throws in other stuff for a surprise. Then I get onstage with my band and we run through a series of our greatest hits and exciting misses and toward the end of our set the other guitarists start joining us. By the end of my hour the other guitarists are onstage with me for as long as the venue will let us.

What's the music like?

We play guitar-centric favorites from the last 40 years. It might be a Hendrix, a Stones, Neil Young, Beatles - you never know. But they're songs that are easy to manipulate that everyone knows, that the audience can get into and participate in and are ripe for improvisation.

Do other musicians join you onstage at the end?

The way it works, if people are in town who are well-known players, they generally get asked up for that period as well. Sometimes we end up with four or five players.

When we played that very first show in Concord our guest that night was Neal Schon from Journey. He's been the extra guest more than anybody else. He's played with us in Nashville, L.A., New York City - it's like, he's the guy who calls up and says, "Hey, you're not going to believe this, but I'm in town."

How do you select the other two who will appear on the bill with you?

It's a long process. It takes nine months to a year to nail down a six-week to two-month tour. There are a number of considerations. The mundane ones, like scheduling - most of the players are busy with their own careers. We have to think, 'When can we extract him from his ongoing schedule?' Some bands book a year, a year and a half in advance.

And there's the artistic side. I'm always looking to play with a wide variety of players. I write up a wish list of G3 hopefuls, sit down with my manager and then we go through what we think would work in terms of bringing the deal to promoters. The thing I always have to point out is that we don't tour where we want to play, we tour where we're invited to play.

It takes a really long time to put the tour together. It's not like Joe gets an idea, calls everyone and goes out on the road. It doesn't work that way.

Is it as big a thrill now as when you first started?

It's great. I tell people it's fantastic. It's artistic but it's also really frightening because I end up standing next to guitar players who warp me in certain areas of musicianship. They are just so much better. But that's the excitement ... when you can hang out with people who are far better than you in different areas of music and you kind of jump on their crazy wave and take it for a ride.

So there's a lot of sharing onstage. The competition thing kind of fades away and people are just interested in playing their best. The players use the jam as a way of seeing how far they can take their own playing, and they're encouraged by the audience.

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