Steve Vai - Interview (Audio) - 2009

In 2009 I finally got to interview an artist who I'd loved since I was 10 - guitar virtuoso Steve Vai.

We'd met briefly at Hammer's Golden Gods Awards - I was working with Christian Stevenson on second camera, working the red carpet, and Steve was there to pick up a Golden God Award. I liked to try and stay professional un-phased and distant from all the amazing artists circulating - they would have enough trouble fending off admirers without me adding to the cling-fest. However...

Every so often I would meet a childhood hero and indulge myself.

I saw Steve standing by himself waiting to head out and pick up his award. I approached and introduced myself. He was very friendly and we started to chat. After about one minute, his PR (an older lady that reminded me of my mum) bowled up and said, 'Oh Steeeeve, you've met Gill, he's SUCH a fan, oh, he's been DYYYYYING to meet you, haven't you Gill?'.

Oh, it was great.

Luckily the ground did open up and swallow me.

Anyway, I later got to interview Steve for the My Life Story article in the magazine. Here is that interview.

Interview as it appeared in the magazine:

Steve Vai received a hero’s welcome the 2009 Golden Gods Awards, but having played alongside everyone from Whitesnake and David Lee Roth to Devin Townsend and inspired the likes of Children Of Bodom and Dragonforce, it’s not really any surprise at all…

What was the music that got you into music?“

My older sister was listening to Led Zeppelin and Alice Cooper, so I'd just sit outside her room and listen to all her stuff and when she was around or sneak in when she wasn’t. The first records I bought were Frank Zappa's Freakout and Deep Purple’s Machine Head.

What made you pick up the guitar?

"I always wanted to play the guitar, ever since I was in second grade and the kid in third grade had a guitar. I didn’t think I was cool enough or good enough to play but Led Zeppelin pushed me over. When I heard Heartbreaker, that was it, I had to play, so I got a guitar and it kicked it off.

What were you like as a kid?

“I didn't belong to one social group although the people that I hung out with were the greasers because I wore a leather jackets – I hung out with jocks and braniacs too. I had an earring and a tattoo which wasn’t very common or popular back then but I was a good kid too.”

You learned guitar from Joe Satriani in the early days:

“When I was 13, my friend John Sergio - who turned me on to loads of great 70's music – was taking lessons from Joe. Every time he touched that instrument something musical came out and that had a big impact on me and my lessons with Joe were the most important thing in my lifer; when you you're 13 and somebody's 17 they're like a God.

"But also he was just great. He helped me from getting into bad habits and he inspired me to think for myself and he also became a friend because my lessons just turned into 6-hour jam sessions. We would just sit together and just play using our ears only and it was the most fantastic musical experience I can remember having."

What was it like working with Frank Zappa?

“It was really musically challenging. Some of the music I was playing with Frank was pretty unprecedented for guitar playing at the time because it designed for the guitar and it was very musical. Every now and then someone comes up to me and goes 'did you really do this?' and those are the most learned musical people in the world and to me it just seemed obvious and natural. It wasn't until later that I realised 'no Steve, not everybody can do this'."

By the time you were in Alcatrazz and with David Lee Roth you had developed a very distinctive style?

“With Frank, my playing was relatively mechanical because it was his music. When I joined Alcatraz it gave me an opportunity to go back and exercise my real rock and metal roots. With Dave Roth my voice on the guitar my voice really started to emerge because I changed my style completely.”

What was it like being in the Dave Lee Roth band?

“It was such a blast! I think back and I think what a great experience that was. Dave really knew how to throw a party you know, and I being 26/27, touring like that with all these excessive crazy fun parties every night, playing arenas, being a rockstar overnight, having the freedom to play whatever I wanted and running around on one of the biggest stages in the world was amazing. I learned so much from just being with Dave and being a part of that whole thing. Before I’d been very naïve, because he called the shots and it was his world basically, my ego was kept relatively in check. I didn't go off the deep end with drugs or sex or any of that stuff because I always knew in the back of my mind that this rockstar stuff was relatively fleeting and eventually I had to get to real serious business.”

You then joined Whitesnake…

“That was a very different environment. The dynamics as a band in Whitesnake were very different than with. With Whitesnake it was wonderful, those guys were wonderful, I enjoyed that process quite a bit too.”

What did you do when grunge killed everything fun in rock and metal?

“I knew in the '80s just instinctively that genres and trends come and go and there was no way to sustain that rock stardom of those bands I was in, and I didn't really want to, because for me, when that was done and I put it on the shelf in my mind, then I was prepared to become the composer and guitar player that I always wanted to be in my head. From then on it didn't matter to me what was happening trend-wise. I was getting hit very hard by critics for not only the way I played but the kind of music. You can't compare it to anything!”

It's interesting that the critics panic...

"It's a knee-jerk reaction. And here's the thing that I also knew instinctively. History doesn't remember the transitions in the trends. History doesn't look back at the time The Beatles were considered old, or that Elvis style was considered old. There was that transition period between classical ages where composers was considered passe, gone and whatever and 'you don't wanna play that stuff anymore'. But when you look back, history doesn't remember any of those things, they see the greatness for the contribution, and I know that I stuck to my guns through all these years and all the trends, and when people look at 'Passion and Warfare' or any of my records, I don't think in the future they will think 'shred died' or 'virtuoso guitar playing died'. They're just gonna see each genre as the contribution that each person made. And I'm feeling it now, because the '90s came and went and I got the living shit beat out of me and I was the poster boy for everything that sucked about great guitar playing. And history doesn't remember that. Now it's like 'we're talking to Steve Vai who was one of the guitar innovators of the 90s that created this whole genre; the 7-string guitar that most of heavy metal was based on for a whole period."