Steve Vai’s rock confessions: ‘I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe’

On July 7 1986, listeners purchasing David Lee Roth’s debut solo LP, Eat ’Em And Smile, were introduced to the talents of a wunderkind. As Yankee Rose, the album’s opening track, sashayed into life, Roth embarked on a call-and-response routine in which he appeared to be sharing an actual conversation with an actual guitar. With this, in less than a minute, the mainstream rock world made the acquaintance of Steve Vai.

“At the time I was living in a little apartment in Hollywood, but the moment I heard that [Roth] had quit Van Halen I immediately knew I was going to be in his band,” Vai tells me. “The weirdest thing was, it wasn’t an ego thing where I was saying, ‘I’m the guy for that job’. It was just the simple knowledge that it didn’t matter what I thought, this was my gig. It was one of those feelings. And I kind of blew it off, only to have the phone ring the next day.”

The key words here, of course, are “Van Halen”. In leaving his post as singer in what at the time was America’s biggest and boldest hard rock band – the quartet themselves preferred the term “Big Rock” – David Lee Roth was required to recruit a guitarist that would stand comparison with the apparently peerless Eddie Van Halen. At the time of the release of Eat ’Em And Smile, Steve Vai was 26 years old. It surely speaks to his musical chops, not to mention the roll-up-roll-up pulling power of David Lee Roth, that, in an instant, a guitar hero was made.

“It was crazy,” Vai says. “One minute I’m in my little apartment, and the next I’m on stage with David Lee Roth. I’m winning all these awards, and I’m on the cover of all the magazines, so at first it was, ‘Well what’s going on here? This is silly. How can I win this award? Somebody’s pulling a prank.’ I just didn’t get it. I thought people were being crazy. I thought, ‘I’m not that good.’”

Only he was that good. Now aged 62, Steve Vai speaks to me from a hotel room in the small Dutch city of Hilversum from where he is recording music with Metropole Orkest. Laughing at my idea that he might serve as the conductor for the world-renowned jazz orchestra – “conducting’s a whole different thing,” he says – the question of whether or not he can read music is answered with a breezy “of course”. Asked to define his place in the firmament, he replies: “Well, mostly I’m an instrumental rock guitar player.”

Certainly, he looks the part. Appearing on my computer screen on the last day of spring, Vai is surrounded by at least half a dozen electric and acoustic guitars. The instruments are on loan from local friends, he explains; save for family holidays with his wife Pia Maiocco, the erstwhile bassist with the all-female group Vixen, constant practice is required to maintain his chops. Even from across the North Sea, Steve Vai has the look of a disciplined man. After missing the timeslot for our original interview, he sends me a loveably anguished email that ends with the words: “I never miss interviews and this was important to me.”

In a sense, though, it’s a miracle we’re even speaking at all. With a backstory from an arena rock scene fuelled by cocaine and foolish living, were it not for a “psychological button” that protected him “from s___” Steve Vai might easily have faded from view in much the same way as wildly talented players such as George Lynch, from Dokken, or Ratt’s Warren DeMartini. But while other musicians of the time ended up in rehab, or else dead, Vai’s sense of discretion is such that he even vapes in a way that makes me think he’s trying to hide it from me.

“I know this doesn’t sound very rock’n’roll to a lot of people, but [that scene] wasn’t for me to engage in,” he says. “I dabbled with stuff, but I felt uncomfortable if anything started to control me. Like drugs, or drinking, or anything like that.” A request to expand on his statement that “I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe” sees the guitarist pause for six long seconds before saying: “Um… well… um, I know what you’re looking for, but I’ve told stories before and they’ve always come back to bite me, so I’m not going to go there.”

Maybe it was always bound to be this way. After leaving the esteemed Berklee College of Music, in 1980, aged 20 Vai made his bones as a guitarist in Frank Zappa’s band. (A generation later, he toured with Zappa’s son, Dweezil, as part of the deliciously titled Dweezil Zappa’s Zappa Plays Zappa caravan.) For a young musician keen to learn the surest way to survive the road, it looked very much like a dream start. Frank Zappa had a golden rule: any musician caught taking illegal drugs was dismissed immediately.

“Here’s the thing, if you’re going to be playing the music of Frank Zappa it means there’s going to be something in you that’s very musical,” Vai says. “Frank only dealt with people who were very musical; he could tell immediately whether somebody had issues. And you just can’t do drugs and be in Frank’s band – not only because it’s not allowed, or wasn’t allowed, but you just can’t. I don’t know how somebody could function [like that] playing that music at that high a level. But, yeah, that was the case. ‘You do drugs? Out.’ And I saw it happen.”

Zappa’s hothouse would prove to be the springboard for a rich and varied career. With his name credited on many dozens of albums, the range of artists with whom Steve Vai has worked spans the spectrum from Joe Jackson to Meat Loaf. In 1986, prior to being recruited by David Lee Roth, he recorded the guitar parts on Public Image Ltd’s Album – including the hit single Rise – in just two half-day sessions. Thirty-six years later, his impression of John Lydon delivering his verdict on what he heard – “he looked at the ceiling and went, ‘It’s f______ great!’” – is a London accent so bad it would make Dick Van Dyke blush.

“The best part is that we went out that night,” he recalls. “If you walk through Greenwich Village with John Lydon, it’s like Jesus Christ is walking down the street. All the punks and everyone else were just falling over him.”

By the end of eighties, Steve Vai had his own messianic complex to deal with. In the age of rock writ large, he joined David Coverdale’s declining but still platinum-rated Whitesnake, a group named after the singer’s penis. By now a star in his own right, he appeared on the cover of music magazines holding a heart shaped twin-necked guitar with a shocking-pink body the size of a Jacuzzi. In 1990, he recorded the track For The Love Of God, from the whoppingly successful (largely) instrumental album Passion and Warfare, on the fourth day of a 10-day fast.

“You start believing the hype,” he explains. “And what you don’t realise is that it’s a big world and you’re just stuck in your little mind. I started to develop an identity for myself as that guy everyone was talking about. So this is the ego coming in the back door, and that had an effect on my creative output because it made me feel that I needed to keep up, I needed to compete, I needed to fit in. Every album had to be bigger than the last one. All these things take away your real power, you know? And it never works.”

The fall, when it came, came fast. By 1991, the earthquake wrought by Nirvana meant that virtuosic solos played on a seven-string Ibanez guitar by a handsome but ageing phenom were at once strikingly out of fashion. Music, as music is wont to do, had decided to cleanse itself by fire, so it didn’t greatly matter that at his core Steve Vai had about as much in common with big-haired pop-metal chancers such as Poison as Rick Wakeman did the Bay City Rollers a generation earlier. It all had to go.

“Everything always changes, and that’s what the ego doesn’t prepare for,” he says. “So when everything changed in the nineties and grunge came along, guys like me, especially me, were public enemy in the guitar community. Everything that was wrong with the guitar was right there with me. So that is a crucifixion of the ego from which I learned some humility. And that was the price of admission of being considered great.”

Of course, in the end, talent will out. Just as punk didn’t do for the true virtuosos of the seventies, so too Steve Vai would in time survive the tumult of the nineties. Wisely placing his Big Rock years behind him, since 1993 he has released seven increasingly instrumental studio albums, as well as eight live albums, that have been universally well received by a sizeable constituency of people many of whom (one imagines) play the guitar.

“I thought in playing this kind of music I’d probably play theatres, nice theatres, and that’s been great,” he says. “I much prefer that to an arena. And economically, I started doing much, much better, because I was also fascinated with the music business, so I protected myself. I didn’t have many situations where I was being taken advantage of… [I learned that] there’s a few things you can do to protect your intellectual property. Because I’ll say to anyone who thinks it’s cool to just be the artist and to not pay attention to the business, ‘Okay, well let’s have this talk in 10 years.’”

In thinking of a conclusion to this piece, I wish I’d have asked Vai to play the expensive looking acoustic guitar to his left for just a minute. As well as being quite the thing to see, it might just have chimed with an ending of a different kind. A year and a half after undergoing surgery to fix a deteriorated left shoulder, two months ago an operation to repair a torn ligament in his right hand left him, for a time at least, unable to strum the strings of his chosen instrument. There was a moment, he says, when he told himself: “This is it – this is what the end of the road is like for a musician.”

Hearing this, I’m reminded of a heart-breaking moment in the documentary film It Might Get Loud, from 2008, in which Jimmy Page speaks of his fear at the prospect of greeting the day on which he is no longer capable of playing the guitar. At the end of an hour in the agreeable company of a man sprung from obscurity by Frank Zappa, and then nominated by David Lee Roth as the heir apparent to Eddie Van Halen, I assumed that Steve Vai would feel much the same way. But not a bit of it. “It felt a little sad,” he says, “but it only lasted for about 10 seconds.”