Joe Satriani recalls strangest thing Mick Jagger ever did with him onstage

Publish Date
Saturday, 17 October 2020, 1:55PM

Joe Satriani was only a few years into his career making instrumental rock music when he got offered a very different gig: being Mick Jagger's lead guitarist.

Satch recalls Jagger as a great band leader and a lot of fun to travel and play music with.

But one thing that members of Jagger's solo band never got used to was watching the rock icon dance to the music. Satriani says the band sometimes avoided looking at its frontman so as not to be thrown out of time.

"Doug [Wimbish, bass] used to always agree that couldn't watch Mick if you were grooving because he doesn't move like a regular guy," Satriani told Music Is Win in a new conversation. "He's out there dancing like Jerry Lewis or Jim Carrey or something. And if you start looking at him, all of the sudden, you lose your beat because he's not grooving to you, he's acting for the audience. He's doing something that's on a higher level of performance."

Satch continued, recalling one night during a solo as he was hamming it up for the audience, Jagger launched a sneak attack.

"I was playing some solo and he just came over and he bit me on the shoulder! And I kept saying to myself, 'Just keep going. That's Mick. That's what he does — he does weird things.

"But that was pretty weird. he just came over and he was behind me, and just making faces, then he just chomped down! He just decided to chomp down while I was playing, and I thought, 'That's great! How many people can say they've been bitten by Mick Jagger while playing a solo in front of 90,000 people?!"

Satriani released his seventeenth solo album, 'Shapeshifting', this past April.

This article was first published on iheart.com and is republished here with permission

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