Dangerous Minds

The luchador-masked garage/surf band Los Straitjackets have been a popular live act for over 20 years, thanks to tight musicianship and energetic, theatrical stage shows. They’re known for sharing stages with other showy, dynamic performers like the burleque troupe The Pontani Sisters, but lately they’ve begun working with someone altogether different—Nick Lowe, the great songwriter and producer who lived the transition from pub rock to New Wave and beyond. Los Straitjackets were a feature of Lowe’s Quality Holiday Revue tour last year, and will be again this year. 

That album will contain Los Straitjackets’ version of the immortal Vince Guaraldi number “Linus and Lucky,” famous as the theme music from the PeanutsTV specials, starting with A Charlie Brown Christmas 50 years ago. Thanks to the Peanuts connection, that song is by far pianist Guaraldi’s best-known work, and there are abundant covers out there, by artists as varied as yuppie jazz institution Wynton Marsalis and indefatigable skate-punks JFA. But if it’s all you know of him, do yourself a favor and pick up Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus or even just a best-of. He was pretty amazing.

Los Straitjackets are hardly strangers to holiday music—in the late ‘90s, a Straitjackets Christmas appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien was an annual tradition, and in 2002 they released ‘Tis the Season for Los Straitjackets. Guitarist Gregorio El Grande discussed the appeal “Linus and Lucy” held for the band to DM in an email exchange:

We listen to all different kinds of instrumental music and always loved the Vince Guaraldi score for A Charlie Brown Christmas. One of the discoveries working on “Linus and Lucy” was finding out the opening riff sounds exactly like the opening riff in “You Really Got Me by The Kinks” when you rock it up. You would never think of those two songs being similar! The best thing about covering this song is seeing everybody doing the Peanuts dances when we play it.

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Fred Lincoln “Link” Wray Jr (May 2, 1929 – November 5, 2005) was an American rock and roll guitarist, songwriter and vocalist who first came to popularity in the late 1950s.

Building on the overdriven, distorted electric guitar sound of early electric blues records, his 1958 instrumental hit “Rumble” by Link Wray and his Ray Men invented “the power chord, the major modus operandi of modern rock guitarists”,making possible “punk and heavy rock”. Rolling Stone placed Wray at number 45 of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. In 2013 he was announced as a nominee for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Joseph “Joe” Satriani (born July 15, 1956) is an American instrumental rock guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. Early in his career, Satriani worked as a guitar instructor, with many of his former students achieving fame, such as Steve Vai, Larry LaLonde, Rick Hunolt, Kirk Hammett, Andy Timmons, Charlie Hunter, Kevin Cadogan, and Alex Skolnick; he then went on to have a successful solo music career. He is a 15-time Grammy Award nominee and has sold over 10 million albums, making him the biggest-selling instrumental rock guitarist of all time.

In 1988, Satriani was recruited by Mick Jagger as lead guitarist for his first solo tour. In 1994, Satriani toured with Deep Purple as the lead guitarist. He has worked with a range of guitarists during the G3 tour, which he founded in 1995. His G3 collaborators have included Vai, LaLonde, Timmons, Steve Lukather, John Petrucci, Eric Johnson, Yngwie Malmsteen, Brian May, Patrick Rondat, Paul Gilbert, Adrian Legg, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Steve Morse and Robert Fripp. Satriani has been the lead guitarist for the supergroup Chickenfoot since co-founding the band in 2008. Since 1988, he has been using his own signature guitars, the Ibanez JS Series, which are sold in music stores worldwide. He has also collaborated with Vox to create his own wah, delay, overdrive and distortion pedals as well as a collaboration with Marshall Amplification for the creation of his own signature series amplifier head, the JVM410HJS.

Satriani is considered to be a highly technical guitarist, and has been referred to as a top guitar virtuoso. Satriani has mastered many performance techniques on electric guitar, including legato, two-handed tapping and arpeggio tapping, volume swells, harmonics and extreme whammy bar effects. During fast passages, Satriani favors a legato technique (achieved primarily through hammer-ons and pull-offs) that yields smooth and flowing runs. He is also adept at other speed-related techniques such as rapid alternate picking and sweep picking. Satriani was influenced by blues-rock guitar icons such as Jimi Hendrix, Brian May, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Ritchie Blackmore and Jeff Beck, as well as jazz fusion guitarist Allan Holdsworth.