It might look like a shonky piece of 90s concept art for Terminator 2 but a new career-spanning box set is set to join the pantheon of music’s strangest collector’s editions.
That silver head with shades is actually a new limited edition set containing the complete discography of guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani, who is celebrating 30 years of music this April with the release of Joe Satriani: The Complete Studio Records.
While fans can get their hands on a regular 15-CD box set, containing remastered versions of Satriani’s studio albums along with rare and unreleased tracks, but real diehards will be gunning for the ‘Chrome Dome’ version – a life-size sculpture of the guitarist’s head with removable sunglasses that contain two USB drives featuring the same set of music in “24-bit/96kHz High Resolution Audio.”
The box set isn’t as artistic (or as ridiculously expensive) as Wu-Tang’s high concept secret album and the Residents’ one-of-a-kind fridge full of recordings, but the ‘Chrome Dome’ package is pretty memorable in its own right, painstakingly modelled directly on the guitarist’s own cranium.
“It’s a bit creepy to see your own head in chrome,” Satriani himself admits in an interview with Billboard. “I was photographed at every possible angle in 3D to make several different prototypes, which was pretty scary because it looks exactly like me. But it’s ingenious the way they figured it out.”
The ‘Chrome Dome’ boxset is available only from Joe Satriani’s website, for $US 185; “My whole life of losing my hair was leading up to this moment,” jokes the guitarist, who’s three decade career is also the subject of a new biography that will accompany the new box set.
Entitled Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir, the tome is – in Satriani’s words “filled with all the wonderful and horrible things that happened along the way.” From deciding on the day that Jimi Hendrix died that he’d become a self-taught six-string legend, to mentoring fellow guitar legends like Steve Vai and Metallica’s Kirk Hammet, and playing with Mick Jagger and supergroup Chickenfoot, the tome covers the full scope of his multi-platinum, multiple Grammy nominated career.
Including a little tale involving one of Australia’s most iconic rock bands and Satriani’s shaved head and shades look that has become his trademark.
“When I was on tour in Portugal opening for AC/DC one night,” Satriani tells Billboard. “I took out the clippers, forgot to put the attachment on, and before I knew it, realized I had gone right down to the skin. I went out there with sunglasses on, and it made me more mysterious than I had been, so I just stuck with it.”