Joe Satriani on Deep Purple: “I Was the Odd Guy in the Band”

Joe Satriani on Deep Purple

In 1993, with a tour already in motion and Ritchie Blackmore suddenly gone for good, Deep Purple called in Joe Satriani to rescue the show. The Long Island guitar hero walked into a legendary gig feeling like anything but a natural fit.

“I had no idea who they were as people,” Satriani recalled. “All I thought was, ‘Well, I’m just this American kid from New York. What am I doing in this legendary band?’ But they were so open to just letting me be myself, and as a matter of fact, they insisted upon it.”

Their first rehearsal said it all. “We had one rehearsal in Tokyo before the show, in this small, completely dead rehearsal room,” he said. “I walk in there, and I’m thinking, ‘Okay, this is really weird.’ Because this is Deep Purple, they’re all right here standing in the room with me, and we play ‘Highway Star’, and they sound exactly like the record. That was mind-blowing.”

The only thing that didn’t sound like the record was him. “The only problem was, I didn’t sound like Ritchie,” Satriani admitted. “That was the biggest issue. My guitar just doesn’t sound like Ritchie Blackmore’s guitar. How am I going to get through with this gig?” The band’s answer was simple: “They just kept saying, ‘Be yourself, be yourself.’ So it turned out to be great.”

Even Blackmore, from a distance, gave a backhanded compliment, calling Satriani a “brilliant” player while knocking him as too “polished.” Inside the band, though, the support was real enough that bassist Roger Glover eventually floated the idea of making Satriani a permanent member.

That’s where Satch drew the line. “Somewhere along that summer tour, Roger had asked if I would be interested in becoming a permanent member,” he said. “But even though I was having the most fun playing that material and playing with them, I still always felt like the odd guy in the band.”

He also wasn’t about to walk away from the thing he’d built under his own name. “I have a solo career, why would I put that aside?” Satriani explained. “The one thing that gave me the most amount of pleasure was being able to play my own music in front of people and having them respond to it, and I thought, ‘I don’t want that to go away.’”

In the end, he knew that any long-term Deep Purple gig would always come with one unspoken rule: “I will never be able to play a Deep Purple gig and not have to play like Ritchie, because that’s the gig.” So he did the impossible job, nailed it, and then walked away on his own terms — still the odd guy in the band, but very much himself.

Credit: Ultimate Guitar