The thinking comrade's headbanger
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPhil HearseTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
The Extremist, Joe Satriani, Relativity Records, all formats.
THE OTHER week Eric Clapton walked off with more Emmi awards than a normal person could carry. Even Clapton was embarrassed by the absurdity of it.
Those who think he's still a guitar god are wallowing in nostalgia or too lazy to listen to anything new. For the truth is that the most technically accomplished rock guitarists today come from the 'Hard Rock' school – Heavy Metal for short.
Mention Heavy Metal to average socialist and they'll go into the nearest corner and puke.
Of course a lot of Heavy Metal bands are junk, but for every ten headbangers abusing themselves with a fretboard, there's someone who can really play.
At last year's Freddie Mercury concert Metallica played everybody else off the stage. Compared with Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai, Nunno Bettencourt and Joe Satriani, Clapton is a very average guitarist.
Of the new wave hard rock guitarists Satriani ('The Professor') is the acknowledged genius, alone in shooting to stardom on the basis of purely instrumental albums.
The tens of thousands of US teenagers learning guitar no longer want to play like Clapton or BB King, but like Satriani and Vai.
His breakthrough in the US was the 1990 album Surfing with the Alien, and the single from it Always with You.
He had to wait for the Seville Expo guitar festival to become widely known in Europe. Already a superstar in France, in Britain he's had to wait for people to stop raving about the 28th version of Layla.
What's Satriani got to offer? A technical bag of tricks and virtuosity to be sure. Numbers like Crushing Day on the Alien album would have been thought technically impossible even five years ago.
But there's also an unrelenting lyricism, full of gentle touches which go way beyond the bounds of the traditional heavy metal vocabulary.
The Extremist combines some straightforward hard rock numbers with jazz and blues inflected pieces, the best of which is Why. It's not his best album, but it's a good place to start for newcomers to the genre.
People who don't like anything which isn't 12-bar blues won't like it of course. Neither will those who think rock guitar stopped with Clapton, Hendrix and Jimmy Page.
But people prepared to try something new, and get beyond the 'metal' packaging, should listen to it. Either that, or get booked in to the next 43-night Albert Hall Clapton run and wait for the 29th version of Layla, probably with strings and a 500-voice choir (yawn).
Joe Satriani: Albums – Not of this World, Surfing with the Alien, Flying on a Blue Dream, The Extremist. Video: The Satch Tapes.