Steve Vai has revealed that, on the day he quit David Lee Roth’s band, he received an unexpected phone call from Eddie Van Halen.
Vai walked into the Roth gig with big shoes to fill. The vocalist was looking to kickstart his post-Van Halen solo career, and needed a virtuoso who could live up to the precedent set by Eddie.
So it was a full-circle moment that one of the first people Vai spoke to after he departed Roth’s band was the very guitarist with whom he’d been pitted against by both the singer and fans.
“I didn't even know how he knew,” Vai remembers in a new interview with Chris Jericho (via Guitar Player). “He said, ‘You have to come over to my house,’ and we kind of struck up a friendship that was very heavy for, like, four months where we were virtually talking every day. It was weird.”
The Roth gig was a huge role for Vai, but one that never fully fazed him. There were some nerves in living up to the era’s greatest guitarist, but Vai approached the Roth spot as his own – even if the singer wanted to compete with Van Halen.
“I just knew that I could make it work, because I had a rock and roll fire that I loved in me,” Vai said of his time in the band earlier this year. “I knew that I wasn't going to try to sound like Edward or do anything like him, because people are very hip to that.”
Though the wider perception was of two elite guitarists going head to head, the reality was anything but. And when the pair struck up their friendship, Vai was given a look behind the Eddie curtain.
“During that period, I’d go up to his house and he would play me this amazing stuff because Edward was like an audio pack rat,” Vai adds.
“He was showing me the studio that was being built at the time and he would just go in there and he'd record by himself all you know tons and tons of stuff. I just thought, ‘Make a solo record,’ but [he’d say], ‘No, I’m Van Halen.’”
Vai, of course, did go solo. Recently, he teamed up with Joe Satriani to release The Sea of Emotion – the pair’s first collaborative studio album, which has been decades in the offing.
In the most recent issue of Guitar World, the pair looked back on the making of the record, recalling the time they saw Billy Gibbons and Brian May play through their rigs along the way.
Vai has also recently clarified his involvement in a potential Crossroads sequel, seemingly ruling out his return after the rumor mill went into overdrive.
