Guitar hero Joe Satriani has taken us back to his early days, unearthing a number of demos from his very first band, Squares.
Back in 1987, Joe Satriani released his second album, Surfing With The Alien, making him something of an instant guitar icon. With tracks like ‘Satch Boogie’ and ‘Always With Me, Always With You’, fans undoubtedly wondered where this phenomenal guitarist came from.
While Satriani had been recording solo material for a while, he’d actually been on the scene for some time, having joined The Greg Kihn Band earlier in the decade.
However, Joe Satriani’s career can actually be tracked back even earlier, to 1979, when a 23-year-old Satriani founded a band called Squares. While the group never released an official album, many thought that their recordings might have been lost to time.
Now, Joe Satriani has delved deep into the vaults to deliver the band’s very first demo recordings.
Check out Joe Satriani’s ‘Satch Boogie’:
Speaking to Billboard, Satriani announced the release of Squares: Best Of The Early 80’s Demos, an 11-track compilation of songs from his very first band.
“We called ourselves ‘The Squares’, or sometimes just ‘Squares’,” he explained. There were other bands with the same name but we were determined to get to home base first and claim the name. That never happened.”
“We were part Van Halen and part Everly Brothers. A mix of heavy metal, rock ‘n’ roll, punk and new wave. We were hard to pin down and categorize, which is most likely why we never ‘made it’!”
“But as we were trying our best to get a record deal and become superstars we had a lot of good times, and we laid down some seriously good music. We were ahead of our time, which, in this case, is another way of saying we were out of step with what people were looking for back then.”
“Ultimately, I left the band I started to pursue a solo career,” Satriani continued. “It was gut wrenching to walk away from something I put all my heart and soul into, but, as it turned out it was the right thing to do.”
While the tracks are indeed a little bit removed from what music-lovers might expect from the likes of Joe Satriani, the demos from Squares are undoubtedly an intriguing look into the early days of one of music’s guitar icons.
Squares: Best Of The Early 80’s Demos is set to be released in early April, with pre-orders available now.
Check out Squares’ cover of ‘I Love How You Love Me’:
