Surfing With The Alien
Legacy Edition
Joe Satriani
Sony Legacy
Release date: August 7, 2007

I was 14 years old when Surfing With The Alien was released. For close to two years prior I had been doing my best to learn how to play the guitar — but I was not entirely unguided. My guitar teachers were all my LP heroes — Randy Rhoads, Ace Frehley, Frank Zappa, Jake E. Lee, Jeff Beck, Ted Nugent, and a 10-minute segment of audio from the movie Crossroads that I had extracted onto cassette tape via my brother-in-law’s Tascam 4-track and a set of RCA cables. I’d record all of my favorite songs onto the 4-track, then turn down the tape speed by half and listen to them, doing my best to pick out what segments I could and attempt to mimic them on my $80 black Yamaha SE-110. Diary of a Madman, Blow by Blow, Alive II, The Wall, Masters of Reality — this was my curriculum.

Then Surfing With The Alien crash landed into my life like a UFO. Suddenly, my world as a budding guitarist was blown wide open. All of my preconceptions of what being a guitar player meant were changed in all of 38 minutes. I had a found a new teacher.