A double album with a sixteen-minute jam on one disc and a radio broadcast from a San Diego theater on the other sounds like a collector's fantasy. Yet that is exactly what guitarist Joe Satriani released on 13 October 1993 as Time Machine, his fifth studio album on Relativity Records. The record gathered material recorded across nine years, from 1984 to 1993, in a dozen different places. It was not a tidy studio project but a deliberate excavation of his own past.
Studio outtakes and damaged tapes
The first disc held new tracks, outtakes and unreleased studio recordings. Five of those tracks came from the sessions for The Extremist, Satriani's 1992 album: 'Crazy', 'Banana Mango II', 'Thinking of You', 'Speed of Light' and 'Baroque'. Four more had already appeared on his self-titled 1984 EP: 'Banana Mango', 'Dreaming #11', 'I Am Become Death' and 'Saying Goodbye'. A fifth track from that EP, 'Talk to Me', was left off because the master tape had been damaged.
The second disc was a different beast entirely: fourteen live tracks drawn from three shows on the tour supporting The Extremist and one show from the Surfing with the Alien tour. That older performance, captured at the California Theatre in San Diego on 11 June 1988, had first been broadcast on the King Biscuit Flower Hour radio show. The newer recordings came from the Tower Theater, the Orpheum Theatre and the Hammersmith Apollo.
Satriani produced the album himself, alongside John Cuniberti and Andy Johns. The live material gave fans something the studio discs could not: versions of 'Satch Boogie', 'Summer Song', 'Flying in a Blue Dream', 'Cryin'', 'Always with Me, Always with You', 'Surfing with the Alien' and 'Echo' played in front of real crowds. The first disc closed with 'Woodstock Jam', a sixteen-minute piece that stretched the idea of an outtake to its limit.
Chart positions and Grammy nominations
The gamble paid off in ways nobody could have predicted from a collection of leftovers. Time Machine reached number 95 on the Billboard 200 and stayed on that chart for eight weeks. The single 'All Alone' climbed to number 21 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart. More remarkably, the album earned two Grammy nominations: 'Speed of Light' was nominated for Best Rock Instrumental Performance in 1994, and 'All Alone' received the same nomination in 1995. Those were Satriani's fifth and sixth Grammy nominations.
The album went gold in the United States on 27 October 1994. Critics noticed too: AllMusic reviewer Phil Carter gave Time Machine four and a half stars out of five. For a record assembled from damaged tapes, old radio broadcasts and studio sessions that had never found a home, that was a striking result. Satriani had turned what could have been a contractual filler release into one of the most warmly received entries in his catalogue.
What makes Time Machine endure is the way it collapses time. A song recorded in 1984 sits next to a track cut during the sessions for The Extremist, and a live take from 1988 shares space with one from 1992. The album does not pretend to be a single coherent statement. Instead it offers a map of where Joe Satriani had been, drawn in fourteen studio tracks and fourteen live ones, all held together by the simple fact that he never threw anything away.