Steve Vai Discusses Recording 'Skyscraper,' His New Album with David Lee Roth in 1988 Guitar World Interview

Latest Videos FromGuitar World

So when he arrives, a kind of controlled pandemonium breaks out: Everybody wants to shake his hand, stop by and say "Hi," mention one of their favorite bits of his work and all that. Steve is his habitually gracious self, unselfconsciously poised, friendly, unflustered. In a phrase, in control even at his most relaxed, drawing a kind of strength from the exuberant near-chaos greeting him even when it threatens to sweep everything else before it.

Since his early teenaged lessons with Joe Satriani, his debut with Frank Zappa at the ripe old age of 19, through his own solo stuff, his fill-in time with Alcatrazz, his work with Ry Cooder on the movie Crossroads and now his role as co-producer and chief songwriter for multihued rock vaudevillian Roth, Vai has proven time and again that he's got some of the most wicked spins, some of the most outrageous chops in the land of the six-string.

''I've never really heard anybody imitating anything of mine the way they do with Edward Van Halen's stuff," says Steve once the office has been cleared and the coffee's been brought and the chairs tilted back so we can listen and talk with our feet up on the editor-in-chief's cluttered deskful of manuscripts and memos. If that's true, and it seems to be -- it may be because how Steve Vai does what he does is less easily separable from what he does than Van Halen's techniques, like his overcloned two-handed tapping, are from his own musicality.

Where would-be Van Halens can master Eddie's gestures without absorbing the underlying intelligence at work partly because those gestures themselves are writ so large, anyone listening to Vai has to penetrate the carefully woven web of melodic and harmonic understanding, the off-kilter rhythmic flares, the restless and searching tonal variations and, of course, the emotional vibe that come together to spin out this ramified musician's vocabulary.

Like this: "It 's hard to remember what my consciousness was like when I was 19, 20, 21, y'know? Back then, I didn't feel like I was really at my potential, but that I was discovering my potential. So every event that took place in my life back then, and even before then, and even now, is all perfect. I believe that to be true for everybody. A lot of times people who might have wanted to be musicians might sit when they're 30 or 35 and look back and try to think what it might have been like.

“But I believe that every single thing that has happened to me has been perfect in its own right, that every single thing has led to something even if it looked at the time like I was declining or losing status or whatever, it was still perfect. You know, fate seems to know no success in the material form -- I don't know if that makes any sense. But what I mean by that is that I believe your personal development is a reflection of all the situations in your life. And if success in the realm of the arts is the important thing for you to experience, then it will be.

“Don't get me wrong -- I bask in my good fortune. But if I weren't famous, I'd still be basking in the things that I enjoy. And anyway, when you look at it I'm not really famous; I may be in the music business, but when you think about what fame and history really mean, that's something different. I believe that there are musicians right now who are 'famous' who won't survive history, but I also believe there are people alive right now who will be historical figures, whether they're famous now or not."

As he says, "But getting back to how this relates to my looking at how I was with Frank Zappa [laughs], all I can say is that with Frank I was learning so many things that I look at that as my early days. Same with Alcatrazz: it was early days, and I was learning. And now with Dave ... Well, probably when I'm 40 I'll be looking at everything as my early days, y'know [laughs]? But I've found that whatever happens in my life, even if it goes wrong, it's still perfect."

Perfect perhaps, but definitely variable. Basically, there are two broad marketing categories that Vai's work up to now falls into. First, and most lucrative, is the stuff like Alcatrazz and Crossroads and David Lee Roth, which attracts at least a fair amount of public attention. Second is the more experimental, walking-the-edge feel that threads through his solo stuff and his more outside work with Public Image Ltd and L. Shankar. Reconciling those two different aspects of his musical personality has led Vai to do some thinking.

“And there are certain things you do and certain things you don't do for that type of a mega-type view. If I wanted to approach my musicality in a very big, career-oriented way to make a big impression fame-wise, status-wise, then I'd do certain things: I'd play certain music, I'd release certain things at a certain time, and I wouldn't do other things. For instance, I get a lot of offers to play on other records and stuff that I don't do because we're building a band image here, and I don't want to be looked at as a studio musician.

"Now, there'll come a time when I will do those things, y'know. I've only realized this recently. In the past I just played the music that I wanted to; I liked projects, I looked at things as projects, and tried to concentrate my mind on each project. When I did something like my solo record [Flex-able], that was a project to me, and that's what I concentrated on; there was a whole aura and a vibe about that whole thing, a certain way I approached everything I did to be a reflection in that music of that time.

“But back when I was doing all that stuff, I never understood what it meant to take certain steps in order to make a big impression. But now with Dave, it's another approach. I'm taking the approach that it's an opportunity to play music that I very much like, and with the new partnership that Dave and I have for music production, I get to express myself a lot more. So you'll hear on the record that there's a little bit of those other schools of Steve Vai thought in there, in this music, even though it's still very much David Lee Roth. And fortunately I still keep in mind the enjoyment of the music, the fact that I love playing the music."

It would be very difficult to come out from a show after seeing Vai careen around onstage with the energetic abandon that he does and not believe that. But at the same time, there's no radical discontinuity between the flowing-haired lunatic burning up his strings and doing splits and the reflective guy with the solder-covered dungarees a couple of feet away. He's two Vais in one, and the intensity burns through them both equally; it 's just given different outlets, means of expression.

"Well, like we were talking about before, because of my past experiences, my attitude changes. A lot of people feel that they're different people when they're onstage, in the studio or even on the street; they become these different people. I don't, I'm the same guy. Maybe certain aspects of my personality become exaggerated when I get onstage, or certain kinds of technical expertise that I might have learned and then hidden away might become more apparent when I'm in the studio, but I'm always the same guy. And so's everybody else.

“You're fooling yourself if you think you're a different person because you're in one place or another, because you're not; you're only acting on the stage, or else you're only acting in your daily life to cover up what you really are until you get on the stage. For me in the past, the stage has sometimes been a kind of creepy experience, because I'm actually kinda shy about what I do while playing, but once I start playing it's a great communication."

As he puts it, "To be honest with you, at the beginning of the last tour, I didn't know -- because I didn't listen to what people were saying, I didn't read any press, I didn't want to be influenced as to how people were thinking about what I was doing with Dave, because of the inevitable Van Halen comparisons, which was weird, because I love the way Edward plays -- so anyway, I didn't know what was gonna happen when I got onstage. I didn't know if when I got up there people would throw things at me, y'know?

“So I was very happy to find out that, when I stepped on stage with Dave for the first time, it was amazing -- I couldn't believe the response. It was a relief, to say the least; and by the time the tour was halfway over people were chanting my name. So anybody who was there and did that, I'd like to thank, to say the least [laughs]. And by the end of the tour I didn't feel like I was filling in for anybody or taking anybody's place, and neither did the audience. So I started grooving on the whole thing severely [laughs]."

"Now, when I get in the studio, it's the same guy but with his different aspects out front. There are different ways of approaching the music for the studio, because now I'm getting it on tape, and so I'm doing it in more of a technical fashion. I mean, all the same 'spirituality' is still there, the spirit you put into it, but you're not gonna run around and jump around in the studio. It's a more compressed type of concentration. I can tell you I aged a lot more doing this record than I did during the last tour [laughs]. We put a lot of hours in of just plain hard work.

"When two people get together and they're playing music and everything goes fine until one of them wants to do something different, it's best to get together and talk about it, and if one of them decides to move on, that’s it. It was Dave's decision, but it's best for Bill and it's best for Dave; that's at least the way I feel about it. And there don't seem to be any hard feelings going around; it's not like the Van Halen extravaganza [laughs]."

“Even the way they argue is their own language, every way they communicate is their own language. If you slap one guy in the face the other guy feels it [laughs]. They're like Siamese twins. They kid around about it, too: one guy'll drink a beer and the other will spit it out. But the main thing is that they really work together well Greg is a great musician; we only found him after auditioning literally hundreds of people. And then we went out and played 112 shows over six months -- a nice leisurely pace, right [laughs]? But Greg never dropped one beat on that whole tour. Never. He's amazing.

"He's not a flash enthusiast, but he's very very solid, and since the two of them are together all the time, it gives the band a real pump. There's something about the genetic structure of the rhythm section that makes me very happy to be playing with them. It's like what Hendrix must have felt with Billy Cox and Mitch Mitchell as a rhythm section, it's just welded together. These guys are like the Cement Brothers [laughs]."

At this point, out came the tape, the precious tape, as they'd say in Road Warrior; the one that, by his management's righteous decree, couldn't be heard unless Steve himself was there playing it. And so it traveled with him cross-country when he came back to his parents' Long Island home for the Italian Christmas fiesta, making only one significant sidetrip: to Guitar World's offices on 25th Street and Broadway.

Set up across a row of filing cabinets are our listening tools, a Sony portable cassette deck and a pair of self-powered AR speakers. When we first pop the tape in and hit the play button, a bunch of crackle and a bit of flutter distract us, and so Vai, ever the tinkerer, leaps up and begins re-checking all connections in his best techie mode, finds the loose ones, replaces the batteries ("The speed is just a bit off, too slow," he explains) and suddenly flooding the office are the sounds of the months-off release by David Lee Roth and his powerhouse band.

Vai, it seems, is never on remote; he's always digging in here a little harder, slurring a note for two bars where somebody else would try to make it from one end of the fretboard to the other in that same time for no other reason than to show it can be done (like we don't all already know that), biting off a quick flurry of a riff here, stabbing some whammy lunacy deep into the tune's entrails there, looking for the unexpected with a rocker's vengeance. Time after time, he finds it. Let's follow him, then, as we put our feet up on Noe's desk and Vai takes us through the album's surprisingly varied cuts, one at a time.

“He had all the keyboard parts together, and brought it over so I could put the guitar parts on the demo – demo number one - which is the quick demo. I did a certain solo, it was like one pass; I wanted to throw a little something on there, so I threw the echo on. Then we did the real demo, which is higher quality, and I did a completely different solo. Well, Dave ended up liking the solo from the original demo, so when we made the record I learned that solo and put it there.”

"I had an idea for this song that would have been even more along those lines," explains Vai. "What I wanted to do was a double solo: I wanted to play two guitars and pan them left and right, have them solo against each other, do answer licks, harmony licks; but I never got to that because that original solo became everybody's favorite. It’s got that California key change in it [laughs]. But lest you doubt it, the solo is pure Vai, complete with upper-end harmonic squeals throughout. "You don't usually hear those on a commercial song," he comments. "But that's me, always trying to get my two cents in [laughs]."

Once again, the demo solo proved more durable than Vai would have imagined. "The solo is the same as the demo’s, but I replayed it. The one I played on the demo might interest you for a couple of reasons. A friend of mine built a pyramid for me to meditate under; it was a gift from a long time ago. It was in the room next to my studio, so I went in there and did the solo for the demo; it inspired me. I couldn't fly the demo solo in because the speed of the song was a little different.”

There's myriad uses of panning effects: "We had a great time with that one. It was very time consuming, getting all the effects on tape and spatially locating everything. When we did the mix downs, I made sure we used Massenburg automation; I learned a lot doing this project. Whereas in the past I would end up doing everything completely dry to tape as best as possible and then putting all the effects on in the mix, this was completely different. We had two 24-track machines locked up, and if we ended up having to put effects on everything we mixed, we'd be dead [laughs]. So in a song like this, we printed the vocal effects, but I printed them on a separate 24-track machine-so we had 72 tracks.

Actually, the whole album ended up being 72 tracks, except for the next song. And then we did a vocal slave; I just mixed the vocal slave stuff down to Slave One, which you use two machines for. I usually don't print with any reverb. We don't do that because that's real subjective, unless you print it on a separate track, an effects track, where you can bring it up and down. If you've got 72 tracks, you can usually find the room [laughs]. It was fun, a much different approach from just going into the studio and knocking everything out. That's great too; I've done it, and Dave's done it for years and years.

"Well, you know how that goes," grins Vai. "I wrote that song when I was 14; of course, pave wrote all the lyrics. The way that one came about was at the last minute. We'd talked about putting an acoustic guitar solo on the record-just guitar for like a minute and a half, a virtuoso type of thing. I was gonna start it with that lick, just with those two chords that open this. Well, I played those two changes for Dave and he liked it, and I said, 'You know, I wrote a whole song around this,' and I played it for him. And he goes, 'Here, play it again and I'll Sing you the lyrics [laughs).'

“So that's how we decided we wanted to put it on the record. The way it was recorded, as far as the guitar sound you're hearing, was with about 12 guitars: a doubled acoustic six-string Guild, a Guild twelve-string, two Guild twelve-strings at half-speed so it's actually double-speed, a Coral sitar, a clean electric guitar and a six-string at half-speed. They all come in on different parts of the chord.

"The solo is another one where I decided I just wanted to play a melody and not the standard thing to do on a song like this: crank it up and do a rip-roaring melody solo with a fast lick in it. Well, I wanted to experiment with it, so what I did was play that melody, which is being played on a double-speed twelve-string, a Coral sitar and a backwards electric guitar. The way that melody was recorded was fun. I played it, wrote it down in manuscript form, and then I wrote it backwards in manuscript form, learned it, flipped the tape, and played it to the music. That's a little tricky -- very very tricky, in fact [laughs].

"So when you flip it back you have this backwards melody. But it's funny, because you have to think totally backwards. While you're recording that way you don't play on the beat; you play right before the beat, so that when the note hits it's on the beat, more or less. 'Cause what you hear when you're re-cording backwards is after the beat; attack and decay are reversed. And besides, playing on something backwards is one thing, but actually trying to arrange something... [shakes his head]. But that reversal, when you Hip the tape back over to regular playback, also gives you a kind of ghost melody that does some funny things ...

"Hot Dog And A Shake" is a raunchy kind of vaudeville rocker out of the David Lee Roth mold. But Vai's guitar work studiously avoids any kind of mold, deliberately dancing around the expected, thus creating a musical tension that expands the tune 's possibilities. "Every time I expected you to do something that's exactly what you didn't do," I say, and Steve asks, "What are some of the things you expected to hear'"

He pauses a minute, then picks it up: "It's obvious these days that everybody can play pretty fast, and there are people who are playing so fast that it's inconceivable. I don't play fast or not play fast because of what somebody else is doing; you can't compete that way. I feel that if you do try to compete with how somebody is playing fast, you're defeating the purpose of expressing what you want in your music. I guess some people need to express playing fast all the time [laughs], but I'm trying to stay away from that; I don't want to be known as a speed freak or something like that.

“It's funny, actually, the way this whole solo section came about. When I was doing the demo, I really didn't have anything planned, outside of a few ideas. I mean, you can sit and punch things in all day long, but I wanted to see what would happen if I just hit a long note and didn't do anything else about it, just waited to see what it did. And it 's funny, because on the particular evening I cut this, I wanted to lay down most of the solos on the demo, because they were just demos and I wanted to get them done for us to have.

"I remember the night I did this song because there was an Alice Cooper concert in town and I really wanted to go to it but I couldn't because I wanted to finish this stuff. At one point when I was doing this solo I hit the long note and just let it go, let it arc and feed back and go a little out of tune, then went into a fast lick; and right in the middle I just decided -- all this went through my mind in a split second -– to stop playing, just finish the solo because I didn't like the way it was coming out.

“So it's all just like BOOF! not much thought, just done. But there are a lot of cute little noises in this one, like the panned chirping noises. And I really love the solo, the way it kicks off with that sustained low note that never bottoms out, keeps sneaking by. I like playing long notes like that better than quick ones, first of all because they're easier [laughs], and live you can hear them better. I rarely play fast live because of that. Long notes scream and reverberate in the hall, and you can hear them scream and kicking back at you. I go up into la-la land when that happens, really. "The harmonized ride-out with two guitars winds things up with a flourish.

"Having said that, he positions me directly in the middle of the two speakers, for the max effect. It works. "Some of those parts are pretty intricate to be bouncing back and forth when the chords are changing behind them," I open, and he nods. "You've gotta make sure you find notes that work in both chords that it's gonna happen over. When I first wrote that piece, there was one chord change in particular that I thought was really odd because of the echoing. But I just ended up saying, 'The hell with it [laughs]; who cares? 'As long as it works ... "

"What about the way those fills arc up?" is my next gambit, and he explains, "What it is is, when you've got a certain amount of millisecond delay, like a quarter note, say, and you want to build a chord, and you want it to have a certain sound, like a triad, you have to move up in some regular way. So on this, I moved up in half-step form in eighth notes, so that I'm gonna have thirds when it echoes. That solo is also from the demo; I doubled it, so I had half-note echoes-720 ms. And it's got a Harmonizer on it in fifths, a fifth up, and it's panning, so it's very Hendrixy."

Opening with a succinct phrase, Vai picks that phrase up and first repeats it, modulating It over the changes via different positions, while locking into the basic rhythmic pattern shaping it, then expands it, twists it around a bit and finally opens it up for the vocal-led breakdown - a kind of metal dub section. "I can think of the perfect cartoon to set to that part," I suggest. "Remember those old Looney Tunes where one corner of the screen will open up and somebody's head pops out of it, and all of a sudden it expands to take up the whole frame?"

"Last song," he announces as he gets up to turn on the tape machine again. "It's called 'Two Fools A Minute.' This one has Dave being a little more Dave - the top hat and fun guy Dave. I wrote the brass arrangement." The fun is apparent in the music: everybody's phrasing sounds like a Salvation Army band after a bender. "That's Dave; we just expanded what he does in that mode to cover the entire band," grins Vai. "Bill did a nice ripping solo; it was a little different for him, because it was very clean, but he really just rips it up. And the tune is funny without being stupid. "

"The short answer is, 'We're not,’” grins Steve. "The record's too hard to do, so we're calling off the tour. But seriously, folks," he continues, "it's actually not gonna be that hard at all; so far in rehearsal it's sounding great. I like playing the solos that are on the record for the most part; some of them might not be note-for-note, and undoubtedly each night will be a little different. But I made sure while we were cutting it that I had a way out to do everything live, so that we can do the stuff and sound cohesive. The new Harmonizer will help with that. Anyway, when you're live, at least in this band, there's a whole other atmosphere.

“There's a lot of vocal effects we'll cop, but the way David Lee Roth communicates with an audience live is more a personal thing than an audio thing. Not to say that our audibility will be impaired, but I guess what I'm saying is, when you go to our concert I think it'll be very exciting to watch the band and get off on our energy, the volume, the colors, the clothing, the staging -- that’s all part of the atmosphere. 'Skyscraper,' for example, will sound great; in fact, to me it sounds much better because there'll be heavy guitar on it for the show. I'm gonna go all out with that one. Another point is that I don't like to have rhythm guitars underneath me when I solo, and so there aren't many times that happens on the record either. And the main thing is that the band is really good."

"I don't see that as a problem," is how Vai comes back. "I prefer doing that kind of thing live to doing it in the studio. I do it differently, it's another whole state of mind. The notes might be the same, it'll be a little sloppier, but it is live, and live there are a lot of other things that I get off into, things other than just playing the notes. That's part of the show, part of what I like to express.

"Mentally, you get moody sometimes, sometimes it's not quite there. It might not sound like it's there to you, but it might be there-and vice versa. I mean, when I was doing the solos for this album it was like, BOOM, this is good enough for the demo, but then everybody loved it and so we go with it and I end up liking it a lot. So they turned out to be good enough for the demo, the album, and the tour: good enough to live with."

TOPICS