Alissa Ordabai:  You are in the middle of a UK tour.  How does it feel to be back in Europe?

 

Paul Gilbert:  It was really nice to be playing these songs live.  There are some funky songs on this record and there is a lot of improvisation and I can do, and as I’m thinking through the songs, each thing has its magic that blossoms when you play it live.  The theatres are great, there were some really nice venues we’ve been playing opening up for Joe and a great guitar audience, so all is well.

 

AO:  How many pieces from the new album are you including into your set?

 

PG:  We managed to squeeze a lot of them in!   I think we’re doing almost a half.  Six or seven.  Seven or eight.  Something like that.

 

AO:  Have your European audience changed since you’ve played here last time?

 

PG:  Audiences are very influenced by the venues.  If people are sitting down or standing up makes a huge difference.  If they are drinking or they are not drinking – that makes a huge difference.  And I think that is bigger than any cultural difference.  If you take people from any culture and make them all sit down and not drink anything, they are going to be much calmer.  If you take people from anywhere in the world, give them some beer and make them stand up and squeeze them into a little space that’s really hot, they are going to go “Arrrrrrr!!!”   People tend to be influenced by their surroundings and I’m the same way. 

 

AO:  What would say is an ideal size venue for you at this moment in time?

 

PG:  Place that a really-really big, it’s almost impossible to make them sound good.  But small places can sound really bad too (laughs) if they are not treated right.  So if the venue is taking the trouble to make it nice acoustically, you can do that.  Most theatres are made for sound, they are made for some kind of sonic performances, so theatres sound really good.  Sports arenas are often not designed for sound, they are designed for sports.  So those are going to be a little gloomy, and at clubs you get a huge variety – everything from great to horrible depending on the material it’s made of.  Cement is a reverb nightmare, sometimes you get places where everything is carpeted, so the sound is dry.  Hopefully somewhere in between sounds good. 

 

AO:  Your new album in entirely instrumental.  In fact, it was your second entirely instrumental album.  How would you say writing a song is different from writing an instrumental piece?

 

PG:  Well, you can’t write the second verse and just change the lyrics, so it’s a lot different.  I haven’t figured out the system yet.  I’d be nice if I had a system, it would make things easier.  But at the moment it’s a lot of…  it’s a combination of musical intuition and trying my best to learn.  When I get a spare moment, I take a lesson from a composition teacher and try to learn a little bit more about music writing. 

 

AO:  Do you take lessons in composition?

 

PG:  I love taking lessons!  I wish I had more to.  It’s good in a couple of ways. Any musician, the more you play, the more the musical universe opens up and the more places there are to explore.  And you have someone who’s an expert in a certain area, they can help you to save time and explore whatever you are interested in.  For me at the moment I’m very interested in composition because I feel my weakness in that area.  Or at least my lack of…  I don’t know the rules.  A lot of times I’m going purely by instinct.  I think instinct is valuable, but it’s really helpful if you can stand on the shoulders of giants, if you can learn from the people, take some of their knowledge and use it for your own purposes. 

 

AO:  Who do you consider to be giants in terms of composition?

 

PG:  Anybody from Bach and Mozart, the great classical composers, to the great pop composers like the Beatles, the Beach Boys…  there is another B-band…

 

AO:  The Bee Gees.

 

PG:  (Laughs)  Yeah, the Bee Gees!  Todd Rundgren, Cheap Trick, all my personal favourites.  And there are little bits and little gems that I find in jazz medleys.  They have these crazy chords that you can never figure out.  And that was the spark that inspired me to take lessons again.  I loved the sound of them.  I said to my teacher, “I have no idea what’s going on there.  My ears love it, my fingers are totally confused.”  It wasn’t anything fast, it wasn’t a technical challenge, I just didn’t know what was going on.  So I took that recording to my teacher and said, “You know about jazz, what is this?”  And he immediately said, “Oh, it’s this,” and he showed it to me.  The only thing about taking lessons is that after about five lessons he’s answered all my questions.  And I thought well, at that point I can either stop or I can try to think of more questions.  And that is a very valuable exercise – to look inward and to ask, “What do I need to work on?  What areas do I want to improve, and what areas do I need to improve.”  And if you don’t ask those questions, you are going to stay at the same spot.  So there are always further places to go to, and for me there is no shame in finding a teacher to help you. 

 

AO:   This is not the first time you are touring with Satriani.  How far does your association go?

 

PG:  The first time I ever played with Joe was at a NAMM show, which is like an annual musical instrument fair in California.  And that must have been mid-nineties – 1993 or 1994, I think.  I’m thinking of the haircut I had…  Maybe 1996.  And there was a party for Ibanez, we both endorse Ibanez guitars, so there were a lot of Ibanez endorsers on stage at the same time.   At that particular concert I remember there were seven guitar players on stage.  There was Joe, Steve Vai, myself, a bunch of other amazing guitar players, and I thought, “It’s incredible to have so many great guitar players, but the trouble is – there are too many guitar players.  It’s going to be too noisy, you are not going to be able to hear anybody, because they all play at the same time.”  So I thought, really the only thing that is going to matter is how we look.  Because there are going to be a lot of photographers, they are going to try to get a picture of all of us.  So I decided, it doesn’t matter how we sound, so I’m gonna play left-handed.  And I can’t play left-handed at all.  But people are going to see the photos and go, “Oh my god, Paul is playing left-handed!”  So I just turned my guitar off completely and pretended I was playing, because there were six other guys, they didn’t need me to play.  Eventually it did come to a place where I had to do a solo, so I had two distortion boxes, so I turned them all the way up which makes the guitar extremely sensitive, the smallest sound comes up really loud.  And I put the guitar to my mouth which makes me look like I’m playing with my teeth.  So I just sang to the pick-up which sounded like a giant electric kazoo, and just went  “Uuuuuuuhhhhhh-loooo-looo-uhhhhh”, and I sang the solo while pretending that I moved my fingers, and the audience was stunned:  “Paul is playing left-handed with his teeth, oh my god!”  So that was the first time I met Joe.  He, of course, knew what I was doing.   And he thought it was pretty funny.  Hopefully made a good impression.

 

AO:  In terms of musical knowledge, do you still gain anything from seeing and hearing him play live?

 

PG:  Yeah, he’s a master, one of the pioneers of instrument guitar.  Not only is he a player, but he is a composer.  As I said earlier, it’s been my passion lately, to learn more about how to write, and especially for this style of music.  There is one song in particular from his new album called “Revelation” and I really love that song, it’s great stuff.  And that one in particular is just always in my ears.  And that’s where music starts.  So maybe I’ll accidentally steal something from that song for the future.

 

AO:  How do you maintain your technique?  Does it still require everyday practice?

 

PG:  (Laughs).  The way I maintain it, is whatever mistakes I make on stage the night before, I practice over them during the soundcheck the next day.  But it’s funny, the songs that I have now, there is not that much improvising.  Most of the stuff is worked out.  And for that I don’t need that much hand strength.   I need a lot more hand strength when I do a lot of improvising.  Because then I may stumble across something at the last minute and not be quite ready for it, so you need extra hand power to get through it.  So I don’t do nearly as much pure hand strength exercises as I did when I was a teenager.  I think now it’s more brainwork, trying to play the best notes and choose interesting phrases.  But before that I was new to the techniques and was trying to get the basic tools.  Now that I have the tools, I’m trying to figure out what to make with them. 

 

AO:  What would your advice be to someone who is just staring out on the guitar?

 

PG:  I think the fist thing is to learn chords and learn to read the chord symbols.  Which is pretty easy.  Maybe the key is to pick things that you can master within a day or a couple of hours.  Because if you have to spend more time with that, the payup is too far in the future, and music is meant to be enjoyed right now.  If you’re saying, “Well, in two years I’ll be able to pay this,”  you’re gonna give up, unless you are a robot.  So for me, I was always learning just basic songs and slowly building on that.  I’ve learnt a song with a couple of chords, and then I discovered a song that had the same chords but one more, and gradually I build on that.  It helps to have a teacher to guide you though that.  Because they can pick things that are right for your ability.  So I’d say the one thing to avoid no matter how much you love a band that plays complex music, like Racer X or Dream Theatre, that’s not the place to start. Buy a couple of old Beatles records, get a Beatles chord book and learn to strum first.  If you can’t stand pop music, you want to play metal, then buy and AC / DC chord book.  Something with the simple stuff.  It’s so much more satisfying to play something simple really well than to play something really complicated really bad.   I recommend getting used to the feeling of being confident with your playing.  It is so much easier to be confident with something simple.  And when you get used to that feeling of confidence, you get addicted to it.  And that’s a really good addiction to have.  Then you can contrast the feeling of when you’re trying something that you are not ready with being confident, and how bad it feels as opposed to being confident.  And saying, “You know what, I’m gonna get that, but I’m not gonna get it today.  Today I’m gonna just get something that is a variation of what I know already and I’ll play it really-really well.”  So I’d say play well and don’t be concerned if it’s not the most complicated thing in the world. 

 

AO:  Who were your guitar heroes when you were growing up?

 

PG:  Oh, Jimmy Page!

 

AO:  Really?

 

PG:  Love Led Zeppelin, so Jimmy Page.  Absolutely a huge guitar hero. 

 

AO:  Were you excited about the reunion concert?

 

PG:  Not really!  (Laughs).  It was interesting, but it’s never gonna be what it was in 1973. 

 

AO:  Is that because of changes in his technique?

 

PG:  Well, it’s not just him.  John Bonham is not there and he is not going to be there.  And Jason’s great, Jason did a fabulous job, but they are not 26 years old any more, and that kind of music requires…  it’s a physical music.  It depends.  Certain people were able to…  If you look at Vladimir Horowitz – I don’t know if he’s alive or not. 

 

AO:  I think he’s dead. 

 

PG:  Yeah.  But in his 80s he was still performing pretty rigorous classical music.  So there’s hope.  But I think a lot of rock’n’roll people punish themselves to the point where they really not able to deliver the way they could when they were younger.

 

AO:  You’ve been in this business for over 20 years and recorded 13 albums in 10 years since you’ve left Mr. Big.  What motivates you to work as hard as you do?

 

PG:  I’m really happy to have a job in music.  And I know that with trends and styles, and more recently with the total chaos in the music industry as far as how to sell recorded music, you are not guaranteed work, and so I wanted to work as a musician while I can and have opportunities that I can take while I can.  Because some day my manager could call me up and say, “Well, I’m sorry, you gonna have to go work at Burger King because you can’t make money as a musician anymore.”  I want to make sure that while I have the opportunity I do the best I can.  But I’m pretty optimistic, I think.   Hopefully I’ll be somewhere near Horowitz – playing something scary when I’m 80 years old.

 

AO:  Do you welcome the changes that are taking place in the music industry right now?  The way music is being distributed and how fans are finding out about bands?

 

PG:  I like the speed of things.  I remember when I was a kid I wanted to buy an Iggy and the Stooges record called “Raw Power”.  And I ordered it from a magazine because my local record store didn’t have it.  And it took about 6 months to get that record.  That’s a long time.  And now it would be 3 o’clock in the morning and I’d be thinking to myself, “You know, I really want to cover that song the next tour, maybe I’ll download it.”  I go to i-Tunes and in 30 seconds I have it.  And there is a big difference between 30 seconds and 6 months.  As a music listener, it’s fantastic.  There’s no way to calculate as a working musician if I’ve lost a lot of money from free downloads or if I’ve gained a lot from things like YouTube which is great free promotion that MTV would have never given me.  So you know, there is no way to calculate what has happened to us, but all you do is keep playing the best you can and hope people come to the shows.

 

AO:  I’ve got a one last goofy question, I hope you don’t mind.  You’ve been in this industry for such a long time, so if you could write a letter to yourself that would travel back in time, what would you write?

 

PG:  “Don’t get a perm!” (Laughs).

 

AO:  Is that all?

 

PG:  As cool as Def Leppard looked in 1982!  (Laughs). I should have stuck with my straight hair, I’ve wrecked it with my perm!  Besides that…  I’m pretty happy with most things.  Most of it has to do with fashion, don’t wear those pants…  But at the same time I’m proud of it, you know, that was the 80s, that’s what was exciting – to have orange and blue and pink pants at the same time.  I’d have to say I’m secretly proud of it.

​

First published in Crusher magazine in May 2008.