South Florida Surfs The Hydra With The SatchVai Band And Nothing Will Ever Be The Same
- Joanie Cox Henry and Fernando Santomaggio
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 12 minutes ago
By Joanie Cox Henry and Fernando Santomaggio
Let's get something straight right now: there are guitar concerts, and then there is a SatchVai Band concert which completely belongs in a category all its own on another planet. What happened at the Pompano Beach Amphitheater last night is something we will never forget. South Florida Concert News was fortunate enough to Surf With The Hydra front row and center and we are still riding this melodic wave that carried us to guitar nerd “Nerdvana.”
Joe Satriani and Steve Vai, two men who have between them redefined what six strings, two hands, and an apparently bottomless reservoir of cosmic inspiration can accomplish, brought their Surfing With the Hydra tour to South Florida, and the crowd that packed the Pompano Beach Amphitheater was left in magnificent awe.
This was not a show. This was a detonation. A controlled demolition of every assumption you've ever made about what live music can be. And it started before Satriani and Vai even set foot onstage.
Let it also be known that it was impossible to walk even two feet in any direction without running into a who's who of local legend. The trio behind South Florida Rush tribute Afterimage were there. Scott Opiela was there. Members of Big Rock Band, MixTape FM, and Idol Eyes were present. Even sound man extraordinaire Randy La Pierre was in the audience. No matter which tier of the local guitar food web you occupy, when the apex predators show up, everyone takes notice. For one night, every ranking, every scene hierarchy, every carefully maintained sense of professional cool dissolved completely. We were all just kids again, mouths agape, basking in the glow of our heroes' brilliance.
First Blood: Animals as Leaders
You want to talk about special guests? The designation "special guest" implies a pleasant surprise, a nice little bonus, maybe a friend who stops by to shake some maracas. Animals as Leaders were not that. Animals as Leaders were a three-man Category 5 hurricane that made landfall on an unsuspecting audience in Pompano Beach and left them utterly unprepared for the storm still to come.
Tosin Abasi is simply not of this Earth. There is no other rational explanation. He appears to be existing in The Matrix. The man plays eight-string guitar with his fingers moving with the confident, terrifying precision of someone who has made a deal with forces we mere mortals cannot see. His technique, which includes thumping, slapping, coaxing harmonics from dimensions that don't appear on any known map, should not be humanly possible, and yet there he stood, doing it, looking perfectly calm about the whole situation.
Beside him, Javier Reyes proved that "rhythm guitarist" is perhaps the most criminally undersold job title in music. Reyes is not a rhythm guitarist in the way a wall is "just a wall.” He is the structural foundation upon which Abasi's architectural madness is built, an immovable, beautifully precise force whose own playing would headline any other bill in any other city on any other night.
And then there is Matt Garstka. Garstka sits behind a drum kit the way a conductor sits before an orchestra, which is to say: with total, almost eerie authority. His polyrhythmic wizardry operates on a level that makes you feel like your own internal metronome has been politely but firmly taken apart and reassembled into something more interesting.
By the time Animals as Leaders left the stage, the audience looked like people who had just learned a new language, or discovered a new color. Which is exactly the right warm-up act for what was about to happen. Honestly, at that point, we felt like the safety bar had come down on our shoulders and the the most rock and roll rollercoaster ever imagined was now in a dramatic ascent.
The Machine: Aronoff, Mendoza, and Thorn
Before we crown the headliners, let us speak the names of the three people who made the whole glorious enterprise function with the seamless, terrifying precision of a Formula One engine: Kenny Aronoff on drums, Marco Mendoza on bass, and Pete Thorn on guitar.
Kenny Aronoff has played on recordings so foundational to American rock 'n' roll that his snare hits are practically embedded in the cultural DNA of everyone in that amphitheater. He plays with the controlled fury of a man who has nothing left to prove and therefore plays purely for the joy of it, which is the most dangerous kind of drummer there is. Every thunderclap kick drum, every perfectly placed fill, every locked-in groove was a reminder that "support musician" is a completely inadequate description of what Aronoff does.
Marco Mendoza is a force of nature armed with a bass guitar. His playing has that rare quality found in perhaps a handful of players per generation where you feel it in your chest before you process it in your brain. He was all swagger and substance, holding down the low end with the ease of a man who finds impossibly cool things easy, and grinning about it the entire time. His was a performance that made the entire venue feel like it was floating slightly above the ground.
Pete Thorn, who carries his own rabid cult following for very good reason, occupied the ensemble guitar chair with the quiet confidence of an ace who knows exactly what he's doing and exactly how much it matters. Thorn's contributions were the connective tissue of the entire performance, the melodic glue that kept the whole magnificent structure from simply levitating off into space.
Surfing With the Hydra: The Main Event
Just when you thought this night is pretty epic already, out walked Joe Satriani and Steve Vai.
The crowd's reaction was the kind you don't manufacture and can't rehearse. It was primal. It was the sound of several thousand people who have been waiting, some of them for their entire adult lives, to be in this room at this moment. And Satriani and Vai did not disappoint them. Not for a single second.
Joe Satriani is, at this point, simply a marvel of the form. The man who taught Steve Vai how to play guitar — the man who taught Kirk Hammett— took the stage with the relaxed authority of someone who has been having this conversation with audiences for four decades and has never once run out of things to say. When "Flying in a Blue Dream" unfurled like a silk banner over the amphitheater, it was the sound of pure longing made audible. When "Surfing With the Alien" exploded into the Florida night air, the riff landed like a punch in the chest from someone you love. When he dropped into "Always With Me, Always With You," even the hardcases in the back row went briefly silent. Satriani doesn't just play notes. He plays feelings and it’s specific, detailed, private feelings that somehow belong to everyone in the room simultaneously.
Then there is Steve Vai, who operates in a category that resists easy description, so let's try this: if music were a language, most guitarists are fluent speakers. Steve Vai is the person who invented twelve new letters. His performance of "Zeus in Chains" was a cathedral built in real time cloaked in gothic, soaring, slightly frightening in its grandeur. "Tender Surrender" was devastating, a meditation on vulnerability from a man who makes vulnerability sound like the bravest thing imaginable. And "For the Love of God." Well, Lord help you if you weren't moved by "For the Love of God." That piece remains one of the most transcendent things ever committed to the electric guitar, and hearing it played live, Vai wringing every ounce of ache and ecstasy from his instrument, was the kind of moment that reminds you why Vai is still king.
"Teeth of the Hydra" was when the evening ascended from spectacular into the realm of the genuinely mythological. Because this was the moment Steve Vai unveiled the Hydra.
If you weren't there, let me try to explain what it felt like to watch a Vai pull the cover off that thing. The Hydra is not a guitar. The Hydra is a fever dream built by people who looked at the concept of "guitar" and decided it was thinking too small. It is a triple-neck, purpose-built beast featuring a seven-string and twelve-string guitar, a four-string three-quarter scale bass, thirteen sympathetic harp strings, fretless sections, and pickup configurations that probably require a physics degree to fully understand. It is so heavy, so structurally insane, that it cannot be worn. It lives on its own stand, like a MOMA sculpture. When the cover came off and the lights hit it, the crowd made a sound that was less applause and more collective astonishment. It’s the involuntary noise humans make when they see something that shouldn't exist.
And then Vai stepped behind it. And played it. With complete, terrifying authority. Every neck, every string configuration, every harp flourish — deployed not as a circus trick but as music, as genuine emotional expression wrung from an instrument that looked like it belonged in a Jules Verne novel.
The South Florida guitarists in that crowd, and there were many, because this scene sent its players out in force, were watching with the particular wide-eyed silence of people who have dedicated their lives to an instrument and are now witnessing what that instrument can theoretically become. It was humbling. It was exhilarating. It was, in the truest sense of an overused word, totally freakin’ awesome.
The collaboration between the two throughout the evening trading phrases, finishing each other's musical sentences, one pushing a melody over the edge while the other caught it and ran had the quality of a long marriage between two people who still genuinely delight in each other's company. They were not competing. They were creating.
And being that close, front row and center, revealed something the back of the room could never quite capture: the sheer, unguarded joy still radiating from these two men. Their facial expressions, their stage banter, their lighthearted musical inside jokes exchanged mid-song like a private language only they speak. It was a reminder that whatever else this tour is, it is also two old friends doing exactly what they love, exactly where they belong. And man is that awesome to witness.
The setlist closed with "Born to Be Wild" because of course it did, because what else do you do when you've just spent two hours Surfing The Hydra with the best in the business? You play the song that started it all for a generation of restless souls, and you play it like you mean every word. If Surfing The Hydra is heading to a city near you, do not miss the chance to catch this wave. Your soul will thank you later.
For the latest on the SatchVai tour, and what city the Hydra is hitting next, check out satchvaiband.com.
Here are some images rock and roll photographer Larry Marano captured at this show:
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