Throughout his 25-year career as a solo recording artist, guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani has continually blazed new trails in the arts of music composition and guitar playing. With his current venture as a performer on the 2010 Experience Hendrix Tour, Joe has apparently come full circle. As the story goes, Joe quit his high school football team on the day of Jimi Hendrix’s death in order to devote his life to the guitar. The Experience Hendrix Tour features several amazing artists banding together to pay tribute to Jimi Hendrix, the legendary man and his equally legendary music. Other performers on the tour include Eric Johnson, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Aerosmith guitarist Brad Whitford, Ernie Isley, Living Colour, and bassist Billy Cox, who performed with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock and with the Band of Gypsies.

Joe Satriani initially gained worldwide attention as a “guitar teacher of the stars,” as his former students include Steve Vai, Kirk Hammett (Metallica), and Larry Lalonde (Primus). Then, after years of performing as a sideman for various artists, Joe recorded his first full length solo record, Not of This Earth in 1985. Although the record was not a huge seller, it clearly foreshadowed the tremendous success that Joe would later enjoy. It is an excellent “guitar record” that can be enjoyed by all, as each song combines virtuoso technique with gorgeous melodies. This is a combination that Joe has successfully employed throughout his recording career.

Joe followed up Not of This Earth in 1987 with Surfing With the Alien, the record that forever changed instrumental rock guitar. For this record, Joe brought a pop sensibility along with a willingness to explore several different styles of guitar playing. The instrumentals on this recording combined elements of hard rock, pop, blues, funk, jazz, new wave, and surf music. The result was a unique sounding record that is still just as exciting to listen to today as it was 23 years ago. The album spawned three hit singles, as the title track, “Satch Boogie,” and “Always With You, Always With Me” all became rock radio staples. Surfing With the Alien broke into Billboard’s Top 30 album chart, and it was ultimately certified platinum.

The musical and commercial success continued for Joe Satriani, as his next two records, Flying In a Blue Dream (1989) and The Extremist (1992), were both certified gold. During this period, Joe’s song “One Big Rush” was featured in the film “Say Anything,” and “Summer Song” was utilized for a widely aired television commercial for the Sony Discman. Joe’s immense popularity proved that there was an audience for music that didn’t fit into tidy categories, and his success opened the door for the slew of rock instrumentalists who have since followed his path.

In 1996, Joe joined forces with two other highly acclaimed instrumental guitarists (Steve Vai and Eric Johnson) for the G3 Tour. This was an unprecedented event, as never before had these three premier guitarists appeared and toured together. The blistering performances of each artist were captured for the CD and DVD G3 - Live In Concert. Joe has since reprised the G3 Tour several times, and the other guitarists have included Yngwie Malmsteen, John Petrucci (Dream Theater), and Paul Gilbert (Mr. Big).

Joe has since continued to release ground-breaking solo CDs and DVDs, and his latest release Live In Paris: I Just Wanna Rock was filmed during his 2008 tour in support of his previous CD, Professor Satchafunkilus and the Musterion of Rock. The new DVD (and the two-CD companion collection) captures his band’s performance of a 22-song set that combined classic Satriani tunes with a generous helping of new songs.

For Joe Satriani, 2009 was arguably his most successful year yet. After years of recording and performing as an instrumental solo artist, he finally realized his lifelong dream of forming a bona fide vocal oriented rock band with Chickenfoot. This new band includes vocalist Sammy Hagar and bassist Michael Anthony (both formerly of Van Halen) and current Red Hot Chili Peppers’ drummer Chad Smith. The band’s eponymous debut album is filled with high energy, riff heavy, and downright funky songs that are absolutely contagious. The band enjoyed a successful world tour, and the record was certified gold. In this age of eroding CD sales, this is a truly stunning achievement. The future for Joe Satriani is indeed very bright (and busy), as he will now be juggling the demands of his solo career with those of Chickenfoot.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Joe while he was on the road for the 2010 Experience Hendrix Tour, and our conversation is provided as follows:

How has the Experience Hendrix Tour been going so far?

JS: It’s been fantastic! It’s very fresh in my mind because I’ve been writing these tour blogs for “Music Radar” and I’ve had to encapsulate every day. It is a wonderful experience for all of the players without a doubt because it’s the only kind of a tour where you get so many musicians together. We’re hanging out every day, we’re traveling together, and we’re listening to each other every night. The main thing is that none of us are playing our own music. We’re all away from our main gigs, and there’s no self-promotion going on. We’re all focused on celebrating the music of Jimi Hendrix, so this creates a different feeling on tour. Everyone’s having a great time, and the audience is loving it.

How did you get involved in the Experience Hendrix Tour?

JS: I got a phone call from John McDermott and Janie Hendrix, the CEO and directors of the Experience Hendrix foundation. They’ve done about five tours, and I’ve been invited to each one of them. This time, I actually had time. Usually I’m busy. I’m out of the country on tour, or I’m in the studio and I can never really take part. I only played at one show on the very first tour many years ago. This time it was perfect timing. My Chickenfoot tours were finished, and my solo tours were done. I actually was going to spend four months at home just working on the next Chickenfoot record and my next solo record. When this offer came in, I said “Yeah, let me do it!”

Which Hendrix songs have you been performing, and why did you select these particular songs?

JS: I’ve been doing the instrumental “Third Stone from the Sun,” “Foxey Lady,” “All Along the Watchtower,” and “Red House.” The way John McDermott likes to arrange this for the musicians is that he asks everyone to give their top five songs, and then an additional top ten Hendrix songs, that they would like to play. He then gathers all the information, and then he decides who would constitute a good pairing of players. He came back to me and said: “How about doing these four songs, and how about using Living Colour as your band?” I thought that was brilliant, and it turned out to be not only a great choice of songs but a great pairing of musicians. We have a great time every night, me and Living Colour.

Since you’re doing this tour, is it safe to assume that Jimi Hendrix was a major influence on your music and your guitar playing?

JS: Yes. Jimi Hendrix was a major influence without a doubt. He was the reason I started playing guitar. I gave up sports and decided to be a guitar player the day he died, and I never looked back. I was actually a drummer starting at age nine, and I struggled with it. Then I started to get into the music of my older sisters and my older brother, and one of those artists was Jimi Hendrix. As soon as I heard him, I became his number one fan. So I was pretty devastated when he passed away, and that changed my life.

What other artists did you listen to during this period?

JS: I grew up listening to everything that my older siblings were listening to. Through them, I listened to early American rock and roll, R and B, blues, Motown, and the British Invasion. As I started to become a bit more self-aware, I started to listen to what was becoming what we call “rock” today. Starting at around 1966, I began listening to that style of music: Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Jethro Tull, and The Who. Those bands were creating a new style, whether they knew it or not.

I also listened to a lot of jazz. My parents were of the jazz age, so they played a lot of jazz music in the house. I listened to Miles Davis, Wes Montgomery, and John Coltrane, and I then got into “fusion.” I studied classical theory in high school, and I studied bebop with Lenny Tristano. I just wound up with a somewhat unusual style that is the sum total of all of those influences.

How much did you used to practice when you were learning how to play guitar?

JS: As much as I was allowed to. When you first start out, it’s tough to get past an hour of real practice. You spend a lot of time just fooling around, or playing with friends. I tried to increase it from a half hour to an hour, to an hour and a half, and to two hours. When I was in high school, I started to wake up early to practice an hour before school. Then at night, I would try to put in another hour or two. In between after-school activities, jobs, homework, all that kind of stuff, it was always very difficult. My family likes to remind me that I was always practicing. I brought my guitar everywhere, and I insisted that I had to play. So I guess I was pretty serious about it.

How much do you practice nowadays?

JS: I don’t really get a chance to practice the way that I used to. It’s not really the same. When you start out, you don’t know stuff. You don’t know harmonic minor harmonized in thirds in every key. Practicing that stuff takes weeks to commit to memory. Once that is committed to memory, that kind of practice isn’t necessary anymore.

I guess I spend more time writing with the guitar on, and then once something is written, it’s new to me. I then have to teach myself how to make it work, and how to apply myself. That is a new kind of practicing. It’s more of a “professional” kind of practicing. Back when I was young, I certainly didn’t play as many shows or make any records. A lot of that pre-professional workout has been replaced by serious music making.

How do you think your latest DVD compares to your many previous DVDs?

JS: It’s completely different in a lot of ways. We started out making DVDs trying to document the event, so the camera work was always pretty straight-ahead. Even pedestrian at times. When it came to making a “B roll,” after the second or third DVD there was this attitude that we had to somehow break the monotony of the documentary type of performances. We began providing behind the scenes shenanigans. That sort of thing turned into a high art. Anyone who puts out a DVD has got to include a B roll. In fact, the DVD retailers will tell you that it’s not really the performance that sells the DVDs. It’s the B roll, the extras, and the interviews, and the goofing around backstage that really sells the stuff.

This time around, I wanted to do something different and I didn’t really know what. I thought that we already had five or six of these things out, and I couldn’t imagine putting out another one. Then we were approached by Gunther Kutsch (director), and he had a very different idea about it. He wanted to try to make the DVD look like what it would look like if you were actually at the concert. You’re really surrounded by the light show. You’re being hit with these images on these really tall LED screens, and you’re caught up emotionally in the music. You’re next to people who are all really into the show, and that was from his experience being at our shows. Our previous DVDs didn’t really capture this. They looked more like a TV show where everything is plain and simple. Gunther got the idea to bring the true concert experience to the home DVD viewer. So he shot the movie and spent quite a bit of time editing, and trying to get the spirit of it into the disc.

The odd thing about the B roll of this DVD is that it is the opposite of all of the other DVDs. Instead of the B roll containing goofing off in front of a home camera, it’s a very serious professional interview. It’s an interview that I’m very proud of, and I feel it should have been done many years ago. I think the fans get a true insight, without any fooling around, into how I feel about touring, playing, and the writing process, making records, my influences, things like that.

Please tell me how the band Chickenfoot was formed.

JS: The back story is that I had been in a band with Sammy Hagar, Neil Schon, Michael Anthony, and Deen Castronovo about six years ago for a very brief period. I played one radio show with them, and the band broke up before I could even try to arrange my schedule to play with them.

Fast forward to February of 2008, and Sammy called me out of the blue and invited me to come to his show in Vegas. He told me to bring a guitar and jump onstage at the end of the night for a little celebrity jam. He mentioned that Chad Smith and Michael Anthony were going to be there, and the three of them had been playing together for about six months. He said it was a really rockin’ trio, and they needed a fourth member to make it work. So I was thinking that I would just go down and have some fun, but what happened was during our sound check it sounded so good. And when we did the show, it just really clicked. We walked offstage and said: “Wow! We sound like a real band, and we should do something about this.” We sort of shook hands and committed to somehow get together to see if we could write songs and really make something of it.

Who came up with the band’s name?

JS: Chickenfoot was a name that Sammy had improvised one night before he was going on stage. He was a teenager, and he had to come up with a name for the band he was in. As he was walking on stage, the announcer asked: “What are you guys called?” He just said “Chickenfoot.” Apparently, it became a funny phrase for him, and any time he was doing a project that may not take off, he would call it Chickenfoot as a temporary name. He mentioned it to me that night in Vegas, and I actually thought it was a really cool name. It ended up being a perfect name for us.

The Chickenfoot record doesn’t sound at all like any of your solo records, nor does it sound like Van Halen or the Red Hot Chili Peppers. How did you guys develop such a unique sound?

JS: We really didn’t go out of our way to sound like anything. What we tried to do was actually just make sure that the record sounded exactly how we sounded when we first played together. The very first set of recordings that we had were a bunch of demos. I had written a bunch of songs and sent them to Sammy, and Sammy had written some lyrics. We all got together at Sammy’s studio, and we recorded four or five of these songs. As a band, we just arranged them and recorded them right away.

We then started to live with it, and we spent about two months apart before getting back together again. When we first got back together, everyone said: “You know those recordings we made are actually kind of cool.” It was because everybody noticed what you just said. It didn’t sound like me, or the Chili Peppers, or Sammy’s solo records, or Van Halen. It had something else about it, so we all thought that we should just keep doing that. Let’s not try to get clever about it. Let’s just write and record, and whatever we sound like, that’s what we sound like. We made sure that that was the hallmark of the record.

As you know, there has been a lot of talk about a collaboration record between you and Steve Vai. Are you guys any closer to making this a reality?

JS: I don’t think we’re any closer. The funny thing is that both Steve and I are extremely driven composers, and so there’s never any down time for us. We’re always working on something. We keep saying that we should do something together, but we also know that it’s extremely important for both of us to continue to find the time to do what we’re driven to do. Which is to write our own original music. So I don’t think it’s very high on our list to tell you the truth. I think what we expect from each other are more solo projects.

You have to understand that we have been playing together since we were teenagers. It’s not like it’s something that hasn’t happened yet. We’ve collaborated since we were little kids. The fact that it’s not on a record doesn’t really mean anything to us.