Pop Music Reviews : Joe Satriani Strikes the Right Chord With Audience

Back in the ‘60s, rock-guitar god Eric Clapton once said that when a player is at his peak, on certain levels he’s talking to the audience--and they thoroughly understand him.

At the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on Thursday, in the first of a two-night stand, hard-rock guitarist Joe Satriani held some rambling, melodramatic conversations with the audience, which was clearly in tune with him most of the time.

Satriani, considered by many the best hard-rock instrumentalist to emerge in the ‘80s, really is good. Even if you’re skeptical about the whole guitar-hero genre, you might like him. Those flurries of piercing notes and those explosions of thunderous chords really do add up to cohesive dramatic statements.

But it’s easy for this kind of player to fall into arid stretches where, for all his effort, he’s simply not connecting with the audience. These are the inevitable detours that come as part of speeding around the cluttered aural landscape in search of paths to glorious dramatic peaks. Some turns lead to the right roads and sometimes they don’t. Most of the time Thursday night, Satriani chose right.

He also varied the mood with some toned-down, tension-releasing pieces and some that featured his strained vocals. Few great guitarists have been better than average singers, and Satriani is no different.