A few years into Vai’s tenure with Zappa, he’d saved enough money for a down payment on a little house in Sylmar, a remote L.A. suburb. And there, in a backyard tool shed, Vai erected his second studio, Stucco Blue, based around a Fostex eight-track, 1/4-inch reel-to-reel tape machine and a Carvin console. It was here, between April and November of 1983, that Vai recorded the tracks that would become Flex-Able.
“After working on four tracks, moving to eight-track was like, ‘Wow, this is a party!’ ” Vai recalls. “And the first piece I recorded was a song called ‘Chronic Insomnia’ [included on Flex-Able Leftovers]. The tape machine had a vari-speed control—half a step up in pitch and half a step down. I wrote this linear piece of bizarre music, with all these polyrhythms, and I recorded it eight times on each of the eight tracks, each time changing the [tape] speed a little bit. And then I flipped the tape backward. So when you listen to the piece, you get this eight-piece octonal, bizarre piece of music.”
Many of the Flex-Able tracks originated as wild studio experiments or even jokes. Vai brought his friends in on the recordings, along with fellow Zappa band members Chad Wackerman and Bob Harris and bassist Stuart Hamm. Pia Maiocco, soon to be Mrs. Vai, was also in attendance. And because these tracks were basically goofball home recordings, Vai’s initial thought was merely to press up the music on a limited run of flexi discs that he would give to friends. Flexi discs were phonograph records pressed on very thin, flexible sheets of vinyl that were often bound into the pages of music magazines as a free giveaway. The flexi disc idea may well have contributed to the genesis of the album title Flex-Able.
But when printing up the discs proved to be too complicated, Vai decided, reluctantly, to attempt to secure a conventional record contract. He was shocked at what he discovered. Then as now, the standard record deal involves signing away all of your copyrights in return for an upfront advance (generally around $10,000 at that time) and a minuscule royalty of a few cents for each record sold.
“I thought, This is absurd; I’d never sign anything like that,” Vai recounts. “Record labels bank on the fact that artists believe that a record deal is the Holy Grail, so they’re willing to sell their intellectual property very cheaply. But I had no attachment to the idea of being famous or having my record released by a record company. And that gave me the freedom to turn away from that kind of deal without even considering it.”
Instead Vai formed his own label, Akashic Records, and found a distributor, Cliff Cultreri of Important Records, a raving Zappa fan who became Vai’s lifelong friend and ally. The Important distribution deal netted Vai a generous $4.10 per record sold, and Vai retained his copyrights—a dramatically better deal than a conventional record contract. And Flex-Able began to sell. The shred/metal/virtuoso guitar phenomenon was getting underway, and Flex-Able became one of the genre’s cult classics. Starting in the late Seventies, indie records had been a key component of the punk/new wave scene. And now the indie concept was fueling another kind of rock phenomenon.
But Flex-Able’s appeal transcends the Eighties. The album continues to be a solid seller. And as vinyl records gave way to CDs, and Important Records was acquired by Sony, Vai found himself sitting even prettier.
“To this day, Sony distributes Flex-Able, and they have to account to me for $7.50 for every CD sold,” Vai says. “That’s more than they’ve ever paid any artist in history, I’m sure. Because it’s a distribution deal, not a record deal. And I’ve sold, like, 300 to 400 thousand copies of Flex-Able. I’ve made millions of dollars from that little record by retaining my rights. I don’t mean to sound like I’m bragging, but it just goes to show you that it can be done—even with a record as bizarre as that one.”
Vai seems to be in a career-retrospective mode of late. In addition to remastering Flex-Able, he is releasing a new set of discs he calls Naked Tracks. Basically, he’s gone back to the master recordings for all his post Flex-Able solo discs—Passion & Warfare, Sex & Religion, Alien Love Secrets, Fire Garden, Alive in an Ultra World, The Ultra Zone, Real Illusions: Reflections—and stripped away the lead guitar tracks, so that aspiring Steve Vais the world over can play along with the backing tracks. Along with this he has launched VaiTunes, an internet subscription service that will release one previously unreleased Vai track a month culled from the guitarist’s vast vault of studio experiments, soundcheck recordings and so on, along with a five-to-10-minute Alien Guitar Secrets instructional video.
As that weren’t enough, Vai has just released a new concert DVD, Where the Wild Things Are, documenting a stop along his 2007 Sound Theories tour and featuring a stellar band that teams Vai with dueling violinists Alex DePue and Ann Marie Calhoun.
But it all ultimately gets back to Flex-Able, the album that started it all. Some artists look back on their earlier careers with bitterness and regret, but not Vai. For him, Flex-Able was not only the first in a series of smart career moves but also the start of a musical and spiritual quest for the absolute, a journey that has taken him to the highest pinnacles of rock guitar artistry.
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