DJ,
It's possible your mate was confusing visibility of Saturn with visibility of saturns rings - and indeed in that period the rings were barely visible for two reasons - around the time when saturn's pole is exactly perpendicular to the sun, such that the sun lies on the plane of the rings, the rings are not well lit, which happened in August 2009.
In addition, recall that earths orbit us inside the orbit of Saturn. When Saturn is close to this point in its orbit, from earth we are viewing the rings almost edge-on most of the time and worse, earth passes through the ring plane twice each of those years - when seen edge on the rings are so thin they can't be seen at all.
Their visibility in recent years has been far better because Saturn's pole is approaching its maximum tilt from the sun in 2017.
Similarly in 1994-6 Saturn was rather disappointing to look at.
See the figure second from the top here
http://www.classicalastronomy.com/ne...asp?a=313&z=28