Joe Satriani talked about the difficulties of sustaining his sound while playing songs that are written by other artists. He is currently in a position where he has to play Eddie Van Halen’s songs. In a recent interview with GuitarWorld, he said that he had a hard time capturing Ritchie Blackmore’s sound during his Deep Purple days in the nineties. He said:
“This is a mental thing for me. And that’s something I experienced when I played with Deep Purple; I went through the mental torture of playing ‘Smoke on the Water’ and having my guitar not sound like Ritchie Blackmore’s. This thing in my head kept going, ‘It’s not right. It should be a Strat into a Marshall.’ It affected how I played, even though I tried to sort myself out, saying, ‘It doesn’t matter; it’s the notes and the phrasing,’ but, as a fan, I wanted to hear the right sound… That’s the case here, where I want to honor the sound, but I don’t want to lose myself in somebody else’s sound.”
The hardest part of capturing Eddie’s sound, according to him:
“So, the most awkward thing was suddenly not doing the melody and stepping in first on top of the beat. Eddie did that, but he never sounded like he was rushing.”
Then he said that he had to change his thought process in this regard:
“I have to get over arguing with myself that it doesn’t sound right. I’ll have to go through some mental therapy and be okay with sounding a bit different.”
Satriani ‘Screwed Up’ Playing Van Halen’s ‘Mean Street’ Live
Joe Satriani recently appeared on the Howard Stern Show with his bandmates(Jason Bonham, Michael Anthony and Sammy Hagar) from the new Best Of All World tour to talk about their new tour and play Van Halen songs. However, the song Mean Street, which Hagar described as ‘impossible to play’, must have been quite difficult during the live performance, as even he himself mentioned in another Guitar World interview after the performance. He said:
“I royally screwed up, which hurt like a thorn in my side, but I’ll get over it.”
You can watch the Howard Stern Show where they showcase the difficulty of the song below
