Music in the 1980s largely involved hearing with one’s eyes as much as ears, all due to a waterfall of on-screen pop stars like Madonna, Michael Jackson, Culture Club, Milli Vanilli, Lionel Richie, Duran Duran, and Cyndi Lauper.
The decade’s MTV and VH1 music videos also featured the sounds of synthesizers, electronic drums, programming, overproduction, and pitch-corrected and auto-tuned vocals along with its makeup, spandex, hair spray and gel, parachute pants, shoulder padding…well, you literally get the picture.
Somehow, the best-selling instrumental rock guitarist of all time emerged out of the middle of that vocal and audio/visual-dominated pop era.
Joe “Satch” Satriani certainly got the ’80s memo. He just never paid attention to it.
“It’s strange that Steve [Vai] and I came out of that era, when there was no instrumental rock guitar scene,” Satriani says by phone in mid-March from Las Vegas. “And now I’m doing a residency here, playing with [singer/guitarist] Sammy Hagar and [bassist/vocalist] Michael Anthony, keyboardist Greg Phillinganes and drummer Kenny Aronoff, doing lots of Van Halen because that was Sam and Mike’s band, 40 years later.”
Joining forces with fellow guitar hero and former student Steve Vai in the SatchVaiBand (satchvaiband.com), Satriani performs at the Pompano Amphitheater on April 22 during the co-led group’s Surfing With the Hydra 2026 Tour. Their quintet is rounded out by third guitarist Pete Thorn, bassist Marco Mendoza, and longtime John Mellencamp drummer Aronoff.
The 69-year-old Satriani gave lessons to the 65-year-old Vai in the 1970s before both Long Island, N.Y., natives moved west to seek fame and fortune.
The younger guitarist had risen from his elder’s lessons to attend the Berklee College of Music in Boston, then moved to Los Angeles to join Frank Zappa’s band after that iconic bandleader received Vai’s exacting transcriptions of his complex music. Satriani likewise relocated west during the late ’70s. His other students included Kirk Hammett (Metallica), Larry LaLonde (Primus), and jazz/fusion guitarists Alex Skolnick and Charlie Hunter.
“Joe’s the best,” Vai said of Satriani as the two prepared to play separate sets at the Pompano Beach Amphitheater in 2024.
“He’s a few years older, but he was always very cool and sharing in his guitar lessons. He was strict, and expected you to do what was required, so I always felt like there was someone pulling me up. I can’t imagine what my playing, career, and life would’ve been like without those precious lessons from him in my youth.”
For Satriani, youth involved trying to get signed to a major label with San Francisco rock group Squares before turning away from music with vocals. Early demo recordings and releases, including the 1988 EP Dreaming #11 (Relativity), spawned the instrumental hit “The Crush of Love.” A rare non-singing star was born.
“Squares was trying to do what Green Day and Blink-182 eventually did so much better,” Satriani says. “So as an experiment when we had a few weeks off in the mid-’80s, I recorded a weird EP of instrumental electric guitar music. No bass, drums or keyboards. It got reviewed in ‘Guitar Player’ magazine by a journalist who had no idea that I was also the guitarist in the Squares, and set me on a path to embrace that weird side of my playing.”
“I’d figured that I’d have to make a living in some other way until radio stations picked up tracks from my album ‘Surfing With the Alien’ about a year later. I couldn’t believe it when I got the call that the album was on the ‘Billboard’ charts, but I accepted this wonderful reality that had suddenly started to blossom in front of me.”
Both Satriani and Vai’s full-length debuts had appeared in the mid-’80s. Vai’s Flex-Able (Akashic, 1984) was a Zappa-adjacent mix of instrumental and vocal hysteria; Satriani’s Not of This Earth (Relativity, 1986) an all-instrumental showcase for his all-purpose technical abilities. Vai also appeared in director Walter Hill’s blues-based 1986 film Crossroads in a case of perfect casting — as Jack Butler, the guitarist who’d sold his soul to the Devil for stardom, only to earn a spot in Hell’s house band.
“Nothing could be better than sharing the stage with Steve,” says Satriani. “We’ve known each other since we were young teenagers, and we’ve always shared this sense of the bizarre. We worked to become good musicians, studying really hard, but were also two rock and roll kids growing up in the suburbs whose parents gave them the freedom to freak out. We realized we could play all wrong and turn things upside down, breaking the rules as composers. And we liked it and developed it from there.”
Vai also toured and recorded through the ’80s with David Lee Roth and Whitesnake, designed Ibanez’s JEM and Universe seven-stringed guitars, and founded the Favored Nations recording label with former Guitar Center owner Ray Scherr before the turn of the century.
The three-time Grammy Award winner’s latest solo recording is Inviolate (Favored Nations, 2022), and he’s since joined fellow guitarist Adrian Belew, bassist Tony Levin and Tool drummer Danny Carey in the group Beat, which reinterprets ’80s King Crimson material.
Satriani likewise toured with a famed singer (Mick Jagger) and hard rock band (Deep Purple), and is part of another supergroup called Chickenfoot with former Van Halen members Hagar and Anthony and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith. The 15-time Grammy nominee’s latest solo release is The Elephants of Mars (earMUSIC, 2022).
Yet the album that’s largely defined Satriani’s career afterward, Surfing With the Alien (Relativity, 1987), was a molten slab of rock guitar heroics that climbed the charts based on popular cuts like the title track, “Ice 9,” “Crushing Day,” “Satch Boogie” and “Circles.”
His ongoing, guitaristic and similarly definitive G3 Tour started in 1996, with Vai often appearing before Satriani’s closing sets. Third guitarists have included Eric Johnson, Steve Morse, Peter Frampton, Steve Lukather, Robert Fripp, and Yngwie Malmsteen.
“G3 is one of those guitar festival things that never really goes away,” Satriani says. “We did a reunion of the original G3 lineup with myself, Steve and Eric [Johnson] a couple years ago, and the shows sold out and we wanted to extend it. But Eric told us he’d already booked the next year and a half on his tour schedule. That was the reason Steve and I toured together with our separate bands in 2024.”
The “Surfing” portion of the Surfing With the Hydra Tour is obvious, but the “Hydra” portion refers to Vai’s triple-neck guitar/bass hybrid. Designed by Vai for Ibanez, the Hydra features a seven-stringed guitar, a 12-stringed guitar, and a four-stringed bass; with fretted and fretless options throughout. The all-purpose instrument is featured on both the cover and recorded portions of Inviolate.
“We mix things up live, playing songs from our forthcoming album as well as from our latest releases and classic stuff,” Satriani says. “We toured Europe for a couple months last summer, and it was so successful and so much fun, so we won’t change too much.”
Ironically, the two guitarists who reached stardom for their sounds in the visual era, and are set to release a SatchVaiBand album, are using music videos to promote the new project. Both “Dancing” and “The Sea of Emotion” insert ample comic elements, including the duo’s self-deprecating humor, amid the expected guitar histrionics.
“We were taking finished tracks to the earMUSIC label, and they would tell us they needed a video for them,” says Satriani. “And we’re like, ‘Really? Do people actually still do that?’ But they’ve been a lot of fun. The ‘Dancing’ video involved a great day of watching all these different people dance in such incredible and different ways. My only stipulation beforehand was that I wasn’t going to dance. And they said, ‘No, you and Steve don’t have to dance.’ Thankfully.”
If You Go
The SatchVaiBand, with opening act Animals As Leaders, performs at the Pompano Amphitheater, 1806 N.E. 6th St., Pompano Beach.
When: 7 p.m. April 22
Tickets: $47.86-$91.50
Info: 561-223-7231, www.pompanobeacharts.org/amp