JOE SATRIANI still remembers the first time he laid eyes on STEVE VAI. It was 1972 in Carle Place, Long Island, and at the time, Satriani, then just a teenager, was already known around the neighborhood as a killer guitar player — and maybe an even better guitar teacher.
Which is when Vai came knocking at his front door.
“It was your typical Long Island afternoon,” Satriani says. “I open the door and there’s this 12-year-old kid, a stringless guitar in one hand, a pack of strings in the other.” Suffice it to say, Satriani wasn’t immediately impressed. “I really didn’t know him,” he says of Vai, “although I knew and feared his older siblings. When you’d see them walking down the hallway at Carle Place High School, you just moved to the side. Impressive family, you know?”
Satriani laughs, then continues. “So Steve shows up wanting to play guitar, and I think he knew about me because I had been teaching another local kid, John Sergio, who was Steve’s friend. John was a good guy and a really good student, and I probably never would’ve let Steve in the door had he not said John’s name. But I thought, ‘Okay, let’s see what this is all about…’”
Needless to say, anyone who has picked up a guitar or a Guitar World magazine — or, for that matter, has had even a nominal interest in guitar-based music — over the past 40 years knows what this story is all about. Today, Joe Satriani and Steve Vai are two undisputed giants of the six- (and seven-) string universe. Their individual lists of accomplishments are too extensive, and by this point well-known, to spend time cataloging here, and it’s hardly hyperbole to say that there are few, if any, players in the post-Van Halen world that have been so influential, so successful and so beloved for so long. Throughout the years, Satriani and Vai have remained the closest of friends, as well as each other’s biggest supporters and public boosters. They have each pushed not just guitar playing but guitar design into uncharted territories with their various Ibanez signature models (Joe’s expansive JS Series; Steve’s JEM, Universe and PIA ranges) and have taken similar leaps with their respective pickup collaborations with DiMarzio. They have appeared on multiple Guitar World covers — on their own and together — and graced stages throughout the world alongside other guitarists on package tours like the long-running, Joe Satriani-conceived G3.
Two things they have not done together? A co-headlining, just-the-two-of-’em tour, and writing and recording original music. But that all changes this year, as the pair have teamed up for the appropriately named Satch-Vai tour, a first-ever outing that sees the guitarists criss-crossing’s interview, they report is close to completion. “It’s all right there, on my computer,” Vai says, pointing to a workstation behind him in his home studio. Adds Satriani, “We have three pieces that are 90 percent finished. We’ve both got ridiculous schedules, so we’re not even thinking about how impossible it is to get it done. But we’ll figure it out.”
