There is remarkable talent and then there is Steve Vai – a musician, a master, a magician.
Steve Vai’s new tour Inviolate is currently blazing across the US making its way to Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, NJ on October 29. Tearing through songs off his new album, Inviolate, the guitar legend brings with him a new companion, one that only a multi-neck wrangler like Vai can tame: his new Hydra guitar, complete with three necks harkening back to the heart-shaped guitar days of the David Lee Roth years. It is less of a novelty and more a work of art. This is evident in its unveiling at the beginning of the show. While some guitar players may rely on the edgy, stringed beast as a prop, Vai, never one for the superficial, makes it work – and work hard. There is substance behind the Hydra’s aesthetic. Night after night, yearning harmonics emanate pitch perfectly from the instrument as his audiences are lifted into another dimension.
Praised for his incomparable influence and impact on the genre of instrumental guitar, Vai’s journey from playing in Frank Zappa’s band to stints with Roth and Whitesnake, leading, ultimately, to a successful solo career is unrivaled. His path through music resulted in numerous accolades for albums such as Passion and Warfare and Flex-Able as well as his integral part in the movie Crossroads. All the while, the composer/guitar player stayed true to his creative integrity by only embarking on projects that resonated with his soul from orchestral collaborations to recording and producing new music.
Vai’s guitar chops, honed at Berklee and perfected with Zappa, defy decades, generations, and convention. The new album is an energetic powerhouse filled with emotion, confidence, and transcendent sounds. The phrasing on songs such as “Zeus in Chains” and “Little Pretty” pushes melodic boundaries and weaves in creative strands of story. The track titled “Teeth of the Hydra” proves Vai hasn’t lost an ounce of passion since the eighties; if anything, like a hydra, he’s regenerating and inventing new ways of playing.
When Vai speaks of the creative process, as he did with me one morning from his home in California, one can assume the man knows what he’s talking about. The guitar virtuoso, as genuine and unpretentious as his music, offered up insight into his past, the musical connection to mindset, and how his East Coast roots shaped him along the way.
So, how’s it on the West Coast today? You’re originally from the East Coast.
Nice day in sunny California. I was young, 20, when I moved to California. There’s so much I love about the East Coast. I love the weather. I love New Yorkers – I grew up in New York and I still have family there. But, 42 years ago, I moved out to California. It offers a lot. It’s fantastic: the beaches, the coast. It’s a beautiful state. It’s an expensive state [Laughs], but you kind of figure it out, and we just planted roots here. I don’t know why, but even when I was a kid I wanted to move to California – something about it just resonated with me. When I first moved here, I was 20 and I had started transcribing for Frank when I was 18, when I was living on the East Coast. When I got out here, I started going up to the studio and I joined the band.
The documentary, Steve Vai: His First 30 Years, was fascinating. One detail that I found interesting was how you built your own studio. It seemed like a part of your musical process, in a way.
When you get a vision for something, you just figure it out. Now, this may sound silly, but when I was a little kid, my mother used to buy these Betty Crocker cake mixes. I wanted a cake, so I just figured all I had to do was read the recipe and I’d get a cake. And I did.
When I moved and I got a little house with the shack out back, I thought, “I’m going to study how studios are built, and I’m just going to do it because all of the information is there, and if I’m doing it all myself it won’t cost much,” and I loved doing it. There’s something very rewarding about tactile work, grabbing things and building and hammering. I knew that I was building something that was going to be my little sanctuary. You find the way.
So, building the studio served your vision for making your music. You didn’t have the internet, obviously, only a book?
Right. All I had was the Yellow Pages. Then, I found that book, The Audio Cyclopedia, which spelled it all out.
Your music seems to be part of an ethereal realm at times, and when you have the epiphany in the documentary about how playing musical tone “begins in your mind,” it’s almost as though you pull from metaphysics. Would you say the metaphysical informs your music?
I think we all pull from metaphysics in a creative way. My attraction to that stuff started very young, but it wasn’t compelled by music. I was one of those people who kind of wanted to understand what was going on in the world and life. What was life? Who am I? All the ‘why’s. I was one of those people. So that will set somebody on, sort of, a spiritual quest. For me, it went through various phases.
First, it was more metaphysics, new age study, when I was in my twenties. Then, if something retains your interest, you expand upon it. What I discovered was the terminology of metaphysics, or any of that stuff, means different things to different people, but behind it is the access that a person has to their creative insights. That’s part of the spiritual journey because when you’re expressing your unique creative desires you are being yourself. You are being you without any excuses. This is, I believe, one of the reasons we’re here – to find that thing we love doing and just surrender to it. When we do that we’re connecting ourselves with the creative impulse of the universe through us, so that, I guess, you can consider within metaphysical boundaries of sorts. We all do it.
Do you feel there is a disconnect today from that desire to follow your vision, musically, given the overuse of technology as opposed to living during the time when you were following your desires?
Well, it’s based on the person. The desire to follow our creative impulses is built into us from nature, the universe, whatever… and you can tell. You know it when you’re following it. The disconnect comes, I think, when people are inundated with conditioned thinking from others that they should be doing something different. That story has been the same through history. We can become conditioned into believing that we need to fit in, have approval, and conform to convention. It may be more prevalent with individual age because there’s so much more to choose from, but the person who is choosing what to look at and what to engage in is either following their creative impulses or, perhaps, being hijacked by drama, which is a form of fear – an obstacle to your creative impulses.
You’ve had a longstanding relationship with Ibanez. Now, could you have imagined, as a young player listening to Zeppelin, that you would one day change the guitar industry? Guitars have literally been built around your style.
It happened very innocently. I don’t think that the industry conformed, or I conformed, because in the industry there is so much. I mean, there is anything you want. You just have to decide what you want and look into it. So, for me, I never thought I was going to change anything, really. I just thought, “I’d like to have a guitar that did this, this, and this because no other guitar is doing that, and that’s what I think I’d like.” It was a very simple impulse to find the JEM guitar, and once my cache started to rise in the eighties with bands like David Lee Roth and Whitesnake, there were more companies interested in making that guitar for me. Ibanez were just the ones who made the best guitars. I went with them and it just exploded. It was one of those wonderful things that you could only hope for in your life. The JEM received so much success, and the RG that came from it was massive. The seven-string that I designed was massive. A lot of the guitar companies started to incorporate some of the design elements – and that’s fine because that’s how it works. We look at the world, we see what’s working, and we use it as inspiration.
How did the work ethic instilled in you from your Italian-American family on the East Coast translate into how your approach to music?
I was fortunate because my family was a very Italian-type of family – very tight, a lot of love, a lot of support, a lot of hand-waving, a lot of screaming [Laughs]. You know what I mean? And my brothers were just bulletproof. My brother, Roger, was tough, and I learned a lot about dignity from him. My brother, Michael, was this incredible worker. They were both great workers, totally responsible, focused, and connected. When you’re surrounded by that it’s helpful. My parents were like, “He’s the only one in both families, as far back as we can go, who is interested in music… let’s support it.” It was great.
Speaking to your work ethic, are you still practicing – now that you’re extremely prolific at what you do – nine or 10 hours per day?
No! [Laughs] Well, sometimes if I’m recording, I’ll sit there and play all day. Back in those days, I had much younger hands [Laughs] and they could take a real beating. Intense practicing is just different than sitting and recording. You hone your skill, prepare the vessel, and then you have those academics in the background. When I pick up a guitar now I, basically, play for a little while to warm up and then it’s pretty much there.
Do you think that having a strong family foundation kept you from falling into any salacious traps at the height of eighties’ excess?
Those situations with Roth introduced me to all of that. It was at my fingertips. Anything you fancied was there available to you whether it’s drugs, sex, stardom – whatever that is. I enjoyed it but never engaged in it deeply. I never did drugs, really, or anything like that. I was in a relationship that I liked… and still am. I was more of a colorful fly on the wall [Laughs]. People imagine… but, trust me, you can’t imagine. When I first moved out here with the Whiskey, the Roxy, the Rainbow, it was like a circus. In the eighties, the whole Sunset Strip was amazing.
Your entire journey has been incredible, from hair metal bands to a solo career, now touring with your new album, and you’re also working on an orchestra with a conductor, is that right?
Yes. Jukka Iisakkaila and Co de Kloet is my partner, also.
I’ve always been interested in compositional music, long before I started playing the guitar, when I was a kid. It stuck. It was an expression medium that was very creative to me – the idea of being able to control a hundred people playing instruments by little black dots that were in my command. I just loved that idea. It’s certainly something I’ve fleshed out through the years and recently I took a bunch of my orchestral compositions and had them recorded both with the Metropol Orchestra in Holland and the Tampere Filharmonia in Finland. They were glorious projects. It’s an acquired taste kind of thing, but I did it.
It’s like studying anything. Some people are very quick to pick up languages… if you’re interested in something, you’re drawn to it. It’s challenging, but you love the results. I just never let up because I was interested. This is the power of your intention. It leads you to the right cooperative components. Then, it’s up to you to embrace them, to run with them, and feel worthy.
With the variety of genres you’ve mastered, it shows you are not afraid of a challenge…
The funny thing is that whenever I felt like I was confronted with a challenge that, while I was doing it, felt like I had to really force myself or push myself, none of that stuff ever worked out. All of the good stuff came easily. All of the stuff that ever really amounted to anything was done almost innocently – like the developing of the JEM or a recording of a particular guitar technique that caught on was from just a very simple interest. At least for me, if I have an agenda for something where I feel like if I thought, “Once I achieve this then I’ll be successful,” it just never really worked. Whereas whenever I would just do things that my inner being said, “This is right for you,” that always worked.
Given the name of the guitar, “Hydra”, and some of the song names, is there a mythological theme to the album?
That kind of happened accidentally on this record. When I go to name a song I listen to the track, and I let it tell me what the name is. Sometimes I come up with the name beforehand. For instance, the song called “Teeth of the Hydra” that has some Greek mythology in it, but that song was named because of the way the track sounded and how the guitar looked. Then, I recorded a song called, “Zeus in Chains.” The same thing: I was listening to it and it just said, “My name is ‘Zeus in Chains.’” Then, there’s “Apollo in Color,” the name of a horse my wife used to have, and I just thought it was a great name for a song. I thought, “What would a song sound like if it was called, ‘Apollo in Color?'” Then the song came out.
It wasn’t a conscience effort to make Greek mythology a corner point of the record. That just happened accidentally. I don’t do things like that, usually. I don’t like grabbing onto things that already exist and saying, “Hey, look what I discovered!” If I were to set out to make a record shrouded in Greek mythology… I wouldn’t do it.
Not all the songs have a mythological element to them, like “Little Pretty” seems very playful.
Yes. It’s nefariously playful. [Laughs] The chord changes, they are interesting. They’re dark, but they’re light.
The intensity at the end of “Zeus in Chains” feels like a battle.
Well, you can plant subliminal seeds within yourself, so if I envisioned something like that – which is not an uncommon kind of thing we do when we’re being creative. We’re expressing certain sides of ourselves – and if I tell myself, “This is going to be an intense piece of music with a heroic battle,” like how you’re explaining it sounds, you’re kind of planting the seed in your own creative mind, and it flows into what you’re doing. If you know that you’re doing it, it becomes a valuable tool.
STEVE VAI’S INVIOLATE TOUR HITS BETHLEHEM, PA ON OCTOBER 26, PORT CHESTER, NY ON OCTOBER 27, GLENSIDE, PA ON OCTOBER 28, RED BANK, NJ ON OCTOBER 29, AND HUNTINGTON, NY ON OCTOBER 30! FOR TICKETS, VISIT HIS WEBSITE!
