Joe Satriani mounted the inaugural G3 tour in November 1996, co-headlining the trek with Steve Vai and Eric Johnson. Hearing him tell the story, it didn’t feel like the odds were in his favor when it came to an event that would feature an evening of mostly instrumental guitar.”It was amazing that it happened,” he shares in a new interview on the UCR Podcast. “It started with a simple complaint: me walking into Bill Graham Offices and saying, ‘Thanks, guys. I’ve got a career and I can play whatever I want, but how come I’m all alone?'”He wanted to find an answer to that question, which had been on his mind for a while. “It was part of my teenage dream that you’d be partying all of the time with all of the cool guitar players and musicians, but it wasn’t like that at all,” he remembers. “You were either stuck on a bus or in a hotel room or you were just doing the gig. The isolation really started to bother me. I thought, ‘Well, the only way to really do it is to stand next to these guitar players that frighten you. [The ones that] make you wonder, ‘How does that work? How do they do it?'”I thought, ‘That’s the only way to move forward with your musicianship, is to be challenged.’ But not every other month or year. It’s like, every night, I had a hunger for that,” Satriani explains. “I just wanted that challenge. Maybe because growing up, that’s kind of what it was like — kids just trying to outdo each other all of the time. But it was fun. We enjoyed it and there wasn’t this outside world like on the internet. We weren’t adults, so we couldn’t go wherever we wanted anytime. We were stuck in our communities and spent a lot of time playing with each other.”It Took a Year to Put G3 TogetherThe path to G3 was long and arduous. “[From the moment I said,] ‘What can we do? What can we invent that gets me on stage with great guitar players every night?’ It took a year to convince the promoters and managers and artists that it was going to be great, because the audience is going to love it,” Satriani says. “To assuage the artist’s fears, I told them that the audience has already made up their mind who their favorite is. So don’t think it’s about you changing their minds that you’re actually better than the other guy. I said, ‘Forget about that. They don’t think like that. They love music, they love guitar playing. They’re going to be so happy that we’re standing next to each other and they get more all at once.'”Despite Satriani’s assurances, some of his guitar-slinging peers still had reservations. “They love the individuality and they were all skeptical,” he says. “Every artist gets very skeptical and they get very nervous. There’s an anxiety around it, but as soon as they play the first gig, they realize that it’s an unnecessary fear. Because it’s not there. We do celebrate the instrument with the audience. That’s what’s happening.”Satriani’s Bond With Steve Vai and Eric Johnson Was StrongThe first G3 tour hit the road in the fall of 1996 with a bill featuring Satriani, Vai, Johnson and additional openers Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Adrian Legg. Satriani and Vai have 50 years of history, with the former giving lessons to the latter, so it was natural that Vai would be part of the inaugural bill. “I remember him as a 12-year old kid,” Satriani says now. “It’s really hard for me not to think of him as the young kid from my town, who I thought was just supremely talented. He was a shooting star. I knew that when he was 12, it was very exciting. [Even now], we’re talking almost every day. We’re writing and recording a new album. We’re still here doing it, we still love it and we have the craziest ideas.”READ MORE: Joe Satriani and Steve Vai Have ‘Crazy Ideas’ for Upcoming AlbumSatriani also developed a good friendship with Johnson, who was based in Austin, Texas, and brought a unique and refreshing flavor to the trek. “I met him in 1990 when we started touring together,” Satriani remembers. “We were out on the Flying in a Blue Dream tour, Jonathan Mover, Stuart Hamm and myself. We had the opportunity to do a string of dates with Eric opening up. I started to ask Eric to come out at the end of our set and improvise. We would just make things up. I don’t think we ever played songs. We’d just say, like, ‘B minor, reggae,” and just go for a while.”I just really loved that. I thought, ‘Oh, this is great.’ I was such a big fan of his. I thought he was so unique, especially the fact that he was a Texas guitar player. He just didn’t sound like all of the other guitar players out of Texas. He had something else going on that was so deep. He was an interesting person off stage and a really good guy. I thought, ‘Wow, I’d love to be able to do something in the future.’ But back then, there wasn’t a whole lot of people looking to collaborate in the world of guitar players. They were still sort of gunning for each other, which is so silly. But as you know, that’s the entertainment business.”The Ones That Got AwayG3 has featured a dizzying selection of guitar players over the years, including guest spots from Queen’s Brian May, Neal Schon of Journey, King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, Steve Lukather of Toto, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, Phil Collen of Def Leppard and many others. Of course, Satriani had his eyes on other guitar icons as well, with Eddie Van Halen and Jeff Beck being two examples that didn’t come to fruition.READ MORE: Joe Satriani’s Collaboration With Eddie Van Halen That Never HappenedBut he’s happy that the first tour with Vai and Johnson proved it was a viable concept. “It was a risk that all three of us took, because our careers were kind of on the line in a way,” he says now. “You might be able to do it alone, but can you do it standing next to two other amazing guitar players? Does your music hold up to their music? Do you know how to improvise? Do you get faked out? Do you fold? Do you wilt? But nobody wilted. I think that added this legitimacy to not only each of us individually, but also the concert series as a force of its own.”Watch Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson and Steve Vai Perform ‘Crossroads’A new live album, G3 Reunion Live, commemorates the 2024 dates that brought Satriani, Vai and Johnson back together for a short tour. A documentary regarding G3 is also in the works. Satriani and Vai will resume touring together this June with their new band, SatchVai, while continuing to work on their first collaborative album.Listen to Joe Satriani and Steve Vai on the ‘UCR Podcast’Rock’s Funniest Guitar FacesRockers truly immerse themselves in the music, and then it gets kinda funny.Gallery Credit: Nick DeRisoNext: A Look Back at Joe Satriani’s ‘Flying in a Blue Dream’