Happy Birthday to Surfing With The Alien - 30 years
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I gave that a spin yesterday...always brings back memories hearing that album as I was 14 and my mom had just left my dad when it came out - that was one of those tapes I always had with me to play in my walkman or boombox, that and the $5.98 EP during that time. 30 years...that's just crazy to think of.
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It's not an exaggeration to say that this album changed my life. Great tour, too.
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Between Surfing and The Extremist, those 2 albums were my bibles when I was getting a grasp on playing lead guitar. Hell, I own 3 copies of this album. :lol: Songs like Crushing Day, Circles and Echo, still blows me away to this day.
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Same boat as you guys.
The first time I heard this album it just completely changed me as who I wanted to be as a guitarist.
The songwriting just was just embedded into you and it was almost like it touched your heart. Made you feel alive. Especially "Surfing With The Alien" and "Crushing Day" for me.
My Dad also adores this album and my Mothers absolutely loves "Always With Me, Always With You."
The first time I heard this album it just completely changed me as who I wanted to be as a guitarist.
The songwriting just was just embedded into you and it was almost like it touched your heart. Made you feel alive. Especially "Surfing With The Alien" and "Crushing Day" for me.
My Dad also adores this album and my Mothers absolutely loves "Always With Me, Always With You."
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I never really liked that track all that much - solo sounds a little too structured, riff isn't too memorable, verse isn't too memorable, great chorus though. I just think it pales in comparison to Ice 9 immediately before it, and Always With Me... immediately after it, which IS pretty damned staggering company, to be fair. :lol:Crushing Day is still a must on anyones playlist
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Didn't see the tour but this also changed my life. EVH made me want to play guitar but this album made me want to ABSORB the guitar - to use it for things I didn't think it could be used for. I had always loved solos but this was something completely different to me - just guitar, guitar & more guitar, all in songs that you could hum along to. Listening to it now - I really need to try to learn something from this album, as I've loved it for so long.
Scary that it's been 30 years, since I got it (the cassette) probably only a year or so after it came out.
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He's never done another tour quite like that one. He only had two albums out at that point (and only one that most of the audience had heard), so he and the band stretched out and took more liberties with the songs than he did on later tours.
Someday, I wish he'd break out of his "instrumental power pop" box and do a project that's looser and more experimental. Robert Fripp has worked with him and says that Joe has a lot more musical capabilities than he's ever shown.
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I was too young to see that tour live, but thankfully got exposed to them thanks to the live recordings on Dreaming 11 and Time Machine. Those shows were mind blowing to me as the band did so much in a power trio format. It helps with Stu Hamm and Jonathan Mover being jazz fusion powerhouses, with Joe trying to steer them into rock n roll territory. It made an interesting dynamic take took said liberties and turned the songs into something else. I always go back to how the hell Stu Hamm provided the musical backing to Satch's songs all by himself. Doing the arpeggios to Always, all the chords on Memories and going balls out on Echo etc.
The latter tours usually had a similar spirit but the arrangement structures were more regimented, so the fire wasn't as raging. The Crystal Planet tours brought Satch back to the power trio format, though the album was already recorded in that way so there was less of an element of surprise. The Super Colossal tour tried to bring out more extended jams, but a lot of them felt a little too long winded at times. And the last 2 tours really got Satch going with a monster backing band really messing around and adding progressive elements with old and new material. But on recent interviews for the new album, looks like that's the last we'll see that side of Satch, as he want to go back to basics and just rock out, hence the Glen Hughes/Chad Smith ensemble. I guess that's understandable as the man is now in his 60s.
Joe did get the Surfing trio lineup back together, though they were only exclusive to the G4 summer camps. It'd be interesting if he'd try to go back to that Surfing vibe with a trio band for the next tour.
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Concerning what Robert says, I believe it and that ultimately is what frustrates me about Satch. The man can write melodies for days and create an atmosphere but he never "goes off" so to speak. He always stays within these blues scales and etc. But as we've all mentioned, "Surfing With The Alien" or "The Extremist" has moments where it takes us back and blows our mind with the experimentation he does.
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Agree completely. I was revisiting 'Not of this Earth' fairly recently and was quite surprised at how off-the-wall a lot of it was (in terms of both song-writing and soloing) it is compared to most of his more recent output. It'd be really cool to hear him in more experimental contexts again, as he usually turns in something interesting when he's taken out of his comfort zone. Remember this duet he did with Pat Martino (skip to 21:17)?
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Though, to be fair, while I would totally characterize his playing as "blues based," a lot of his playing even recently is NOT based around blues scales and is often way "weirder" than he makes it sound. I want to say "With Jupiter in Mind" was mostly based on whole-tone scales, for example. You just don't really immediately latch onto it as a "whole tone scale solo" because, well, it's rock, and he has a good melodic ear.
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