Tour de Frets

Twenty-five years ago, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and Eric Johnson launched the inaugural G3 tour, kickstarting a celebration of guitar virtuosity that remains the longest-running stint of its kind. With new albums and tours of their own. The trio sat down to recall how it all went down.

- By Joe Bosso. Photographs by Max Crace, Jean Baptiste Lacroix, Wireimage, Stefan Hoederath, Bob King, Redferns and Getty Images

BY THE MID-1990s, Joe Satriani had things pretty much sewn up career-wise. Four of his six studio albums had gone D either Gold or Platinum, and his touring dance card was filled for much of any given year. But despite his spectacular success, something had started to feel a little...off. He wasn't having the kind of fun he had imagined years before, when he was a budding guitarist dreaming about rock stardom.

“I thought there would be more camaraderie among other players than what I was experiencing, he says. “As a teenager, I had this idea of what things would be like if I ever hit it big. There would be parties, and I'd get to hang out with my guitar friends. We'd jam and talk about music all night long — that kind of thing. Instead, the opposite was true: I was isolated. I would go on tour and play the same set, and then I'd go back to my hotel room and be on my own. I'd have 100 shows in front of me, and then I'd have to make another record and do it all over again.”

Eric Johnson, Joe Satriani and Steve Vai, shown here and throughout, on the inaugural 1996 G3 Tour

Satriani wanted to shake things up, but he didn't quite know how. And then it hit him: He would create a new kind of show, one that celebrated the communal spirit of guitar playing that he craved. Nobody was really doing anything of the kind,” he says. “You had blues and reggae festivals. You'd see disco revivals and things like that. Lollapalooza had just started up. But there was nothing really that spoke to guitarists.

IT WAS IMPORTANT TO ME TO KEEP THE SPIRIT OF GUITAR MUSIC ALIVE NO MATTER WHAT NEW STYLE OF MUSIC WAS BECOMING POPULAR — JOE SATRIANI