Confessions of a Fanboy

Picture it: Bettendorf, Iowa, 1988. A scrawny, 14-year old kid is missing baskets in his driveway with an older neighbor. The garage door is open, a cheap Emerson AM/FM/cassette deck sitting on the garage floor.

We were shooting around and I probably started popping off about this guitarist or that band – I guess not much has changed in subsequent years – when he let me know that all those guys were chumps compared to Satch. I had never heard of the guy, which automatically meant he couldn’t be as good as Steve Vai or any of the other hair metal heroes I was listening to.

“He taught Vai how to play.”

My jaw went slack, in awe at the very idea and in disbelief, wondering if Mike was just fucking with me. He was three or four years older and had lived in the neighborhood longer than I had. He wasn’t a bully by nature, but was prone to occasionally fuck with me. Still, I had to hear this. I had to take the risk. Better than Vai? Taught him how to play? I don’t know how he got turned on to the guitar sorcery of Joe Satriani, but my ears exploded when he dropped Surfing With the Alien into that piece of shit Emerson. Mike was good enough to dub me a copy of that cassette, a cassette that practically melted from overuse.

Before the big wigs at Sony have a fit about my first pirated copy of Surfing, I should set the record straight. In the 20 years that followed, I bought a copy on cassette. When I got my first CD player for Christmas in high school, Surfing was one of four discs waiting under the Christmas tree for me. I’ve since bought a remastered version of that CD, and now this 20th Anniversary Edition. I’ve bought all of Joe’s studio and live releases on CD and own one of his live DVDs. I got to see him in Denver on the G3 tour with Vai and Eric Johnson. I’ve paid my dues.

I can’t believe that was 19 years ago, and that this album is now 20. How the fuck did that happen? Surfing With the Alien, 20 years old. What exactly does that mean?

It means I’ve been listening to Satriani for more than half my life. This album has traveled with me from Iowa to Washington to Alabama, back to Washington, back to Alabama, out to Colorado, and back to Alabama once more. That’s a lot of miles, a lot of hours spent listening.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds to say this album changed my life. It introduced me to an artist and music that will be forever seared into my memory glands and yet my mom still gets his name wrong (”It’s Satriani, Mom! Not Sebastiani!”)! This album and these songs have been a constant for me. Constant doesn’t apply to much in life, even less in music.

I listen to a lot of music much older than 20 years, but those albums were recorded well before my time. I didn’t age with them as the backdrop the way I did with this. Even when Joe’s music periodically fell out of favor and thus failed to make regular appearances in my listening rotation, Surfing never did. It never occurred to me, no matter how long it had been since I last listened to it, to get rid of this album. Even as my CD collection grew, those gaps between listens were never all that long. The music got inside me and never left. It was “Always With Me.” Yeah, I know that’s a bit Gouda, but time pieces and souvenirs exist almost exclusively to elicit nonsensical sentimentality. I fell for it. Sue me.

The 20th Anniversary Edition will be in stores nationwide tomorrow, and we’ll take a look at the goodies: the new mastering of the CD, the expanded liner notes, and the bonus DVD.

Filed under: Tags: Joe Satriani, Seven Days of Satriani