THREE FOR ONE: Satriani (left, with Vai and Malmsteen) defied music-biz skeptics with a hit guitar-hero tour.
BACK IN BLACK: on their first new album in 10 years, Living Coloür show that they haven't mellowed.
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Joe Satriani’s G3 Tour is based on a simple premise: three great rock guitarists on the same stage are better than one. But according to instrumental-rock hero Satriani, who launched the outing in 1996 with fellow six-string masters Steve Vai and Eric Johnson, it took a while for the concert industry to warm to the idea. "After selling millions of records and being on tour year after year, I started to realize I was isolated from all these players that I thought I’d be hanging out with," he explains during a call from a tour stop in Winston-Salem. "I got all the excuses: ‘It’s better for business, the record companies prefer to keep your release schedules separate, they don’t want you hanging out with each other.’ I thought, ‘That’s just wrong. I didn’t come all this way just to be by myself on stage night after night.’ " The key to Satriani’s plan was to have the three players join one another for a jam session at the end of the show. "I kid you not, it took me a year and a half to convince Steve and Eric that it was a good idea. They really had to have faith in my belief that the audience was going to be overjoyed that we decided to play standing next to each other. I said, ‘The bonus is, you’re going to like it too.’ After the first one we did, they just said, ‘Of course, this is great.’ I had a hunch that if I wanted it, my audience probably wanted it too, and it played out." Four North American outings, one European trek, and a platinum home video (G3 Live in Concert) later, the G3 Tour is a rock mainstay: this year’s model hits the Orpheum Theatre on Wednesday. Satriani and Vai, who grew up together on Long Island in the 1970s, appear every year, but the cast of characters around them is in constant rotation. Past openers have included Johnson, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Robert Fripp, and John Petrucci; this year, Vai will have both his former David Lee Roth bandmate Billy Sheehan and Tony MacAlpine. But the biggest addition to the line-up is fiery Swede Yngwie Malmsteen, whose mid-1980s commercial breakthrough set the stage for the subsequent solo successes of Satriani and Vai. Satriani has been a Malmsteen fan since the day he heard his current tourmate’s classic debut, Rising Force (Mercury). "I first heard Yngwie when I was still teaching guitar in Berkeley, and I remember being just overjoyed that a student had brought in something that was really amazing. It was played with such ferocity, and it was also kind of daunting, because I had to say, ‘Look, I can’t show you this because I can’t possibly play it.’ It was a very exciting time." The two had never met in person until this tour, though their paths did cross when Satriani was on the road with Mick Jagger in the late 1980s. "I almost met Yngwie one night when I was playing with Mick Jagger. We were in New York City, and there was some sort of drunken altercation between one of the guys in the band and Yngwie. It was a really funny scene. I’m sitting there with Mick and about 12 other guys, plus the bodyguards, and the horn player says, ‘Who’s this Yngwie guy? I just bumped into him and had a little altercation.’ I turn around and he’s walking toward us, and I said, ‘Okay guys, get ready. Yngwie is not a subtle person, especially when he’s had a few.’ When he walked in, it was like a hyena walking into a lion’s den — he came back there expecting to cause trouble, and then he looked at a bunch of really big guys staring at him like, ‘Yeah, what do you want?’ " Figuring he had offended Satriani, Malmsteen sent a letter of apology, and the two have been in touch ever since. The nightly jam sessions on this year’s G3 Tour — featuring "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)," "Little Wing," and "Rockin’ in the Free World" — have lived up to Satriani’s expectations. He had the Denver show filmed and plans to release a second G3 Tour home video. Satriani fans who can’t make it out to the tour still have plenty to look forward to this month, starting with the imminent release of the two-disc compilation The Electric Joe Satriani: An Anthology (Epic). His first greatest-hits set, it includes 30 tracks (two of them outtakes from his most recent album, Strange Beautiful Music) that he selected after conducting a poll on his Web site. "It’s a daunting prospect to look back, and in a way I think the artist is the worst person to ask," he admits. "They’re always going to pick the most obscure stuff, and who knows if it relates at all to the fans. The list I got was reaffirming on one hand and surprising on the other. There were some songs I thought people had forgotten about that wound up consistently in the top 20. It was great to see so many songs from the techno record [Engines of Creation] on the list. That record was a real risk to release, and some people really didn’t get it. So when the fans who responded to the poll came in four songs deep from that record, it was like, ‘Yeah, that’s great.’ They saw that it was an artistic reach, and they appreciated it." This month also brings the DVD re-release of Satriani’s 1992 home video The Satch Tapes, a collection of live and studio footage with comic narration by This Is Spinal Tap star Christopher Guest. One of the highlights is a performance from an early episode of MTV Unplugged on which Satriani shared the bill with the late Stevie Ray Vaughan. His memories of that day are bittersweet. "When I saw Stevie Ray there, he gave me this big hug and said he was happy to see me. But then they separated us, so I never got to talk to him, and of course months later he died. It felt like we had unfinished business." Speaking of unfinished business: Satriani is currently in the middle of recording his ninth studio album, which he describes as Led Zeppelin/Aerosmith–style blues rock. "We’re working on 14 tunes. One of them is a 10-minute improv extravaganza. I’m excited about that because it’s something I’ve never been able to offer the fans before. There are two vocal songs on the record. It’s very in-your-face-sounding, but it’s got some beautiful pieces as well." NOVEMBER IS A BUSY MONTH for rock-guitar freaks in Massachusetts. A reunited Primus, with former Joe Satriani student Larry Lalonde on guitar, are at the Orpheum on November 17 and 18. Neo-classical shred gods Symphony X play the Palladium in Worcester next week, with former Steve Vai singer Devin Townsend in the opening slot. And in a curious scheduling coincidence, Robert Fripp’s King Crimson play Avalon with opening act Living Coloür next Wednesday — the same night the G3 Tour rolls into town. Of all those acts, the ones with the most commercial success to their name are Living Coloür, the NYC band who won two Grammys during their 1989–1990 heyday. Anchored by guitarist Vernon Reid’s hair-raising riffs, their MTV smash "Cult of Personality" is one of the most enduring rock songs of its era. They opened a Rolling Stones stadium tour and crossed the country with the first Lollapalooza festival. By the time they broke up, in the wake of the 1993 album Stain (Epic), they had set a new standard of popularity for all-black rock bands. But that almost seemed irrelevant to their fans, who were wowed enough by the broad streaks of experimentalism and social consciousness in their music. There’s an ample supply of those two qualities on Collide0scope (Sanctuary), the first new Living Coloür album in 10 years. Working for the first time without a big-name rock producer, the band use sampling and drum loops more than ever before. But they start things off with the old-fashioned rocker "Song Without Sin," a psychedelic spiritual that proves they can still rumble with the best of them. On "? of When," Reid drops the disc’s thorniest riff and Corey Glover introduces the September 11 theme, something the group also hint at by posing in front of a gray Manhattan sky in the back-cover photo. Glover gets more literal over the gentle pop funk of "Flying," an unsettling look through the eyes of a World Trade Center victim who laments, "Fate has given me wings/Such a terrible funny thing." Glover is a distinctive frontman whose sly wordplay and maximum-soul bombast have polarized audiences from the start — fans will be happy to hear he hasn’t mellowed with age. Neither has Reid: check out his synapse-frying solo on "Lost Halo," or the sinister pop licks on "Pocket of Tears." Bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Will Calhoun, who also play together in rapper Mos Def’s rock supergroup Black Jack Johnson, catalyzed the reunion, and they keep pushing the rhythmic boundaries here. The pair of cover songs span the ridiculous and the sublime: the claustrophobic transcendence of "Tomorrow Never Knows" makes it a fitting closer, but Glover’s relentless yelping detracts from the trusty stomp and mischievous double entendre of "Back in Black." Still, as is the case with their old Lollapalooza tourmates Jane’s Addiction, it’s good to have Living Coloür back. The G3 Tour features performances by Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and Yngwie Malmsteen this Wednesday, November 12, at the Orpheum Theatre, 1 Hamilton Place; call (617) 679-0810. Living Coloür open for King Crimson on November 12 at Avalon, 15 Lansdowne Street; call (617) 262-2424.
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