The Music and Mojo of Steve Vai
When Steve Vai says he loves playing guitar, you believe him. Something about the way he says it—the passion and urgency in his voice, the way his eyes glaze over with that lovestruck look and the daft smile that lights his face, the way he swoons over the instrument—leaves no doubt. Vai speaks of making music like a bodily function. Like breathing. Something involuntary, done automatically to sustain him.
Devotion to his craft has propelled Vai to the top of the list of shred wizards. The three-time Grammy Award winner's extraordinary musical explorations and cunning guitar stunts have earned him a spot on arena stages with Frank Zappa, David Lee Roth and Whitesnake, and career sales of over 15 million records. Vai's talent is often described as unearthly. In his deft hands, the guitar is a lightning rod conducting melodies from the heavens to our ears.
But Steve Vai is more than a mere shredder. He is too a humble student of the human experience and an unrelenting seeker of knowledge. From his achingly beautiful balladry to orchestral grandeur to balls-out heavy metal, Vai's music comes from a deep and spiritual place and is informed by a sense of reverence and mysticism. His creative process reads like something right out of The Secret—see it, believe it, live it.
Born Steven "Steve" Siro Vai on June 6, 1960, in Carle Place, New York, Vai's first remembered musical experience is walking up to a little spinet organ as a four-year-old and playing the theme song from the Bette Davis horror flick Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte. Although the movie scared the bejesus out of Steve, it was the melody that haunted him. He picked out the tune and noticed right off that the notes went higher this way and lower that, and suddenly, music became very clear to him.
Vai's passion firmly took root a year later when he walked into his kindergarten's auditorium and saw a boy who was a bit older than he strumming a guitar. Steve claims that's when he first fell in love with the instrument. It was a transformative event, one he calls a "moment of clarity." That rare instance when we zero in on something to the point that all else falls away, leaving us acutely aware of our surroundings. The memory of that boy in the auditorium is so deeply ingrained in Vai that some four decades-plus later, he can still describe in detail what things smelled like in that exact moment, the color of the auditorium chairs, what the kid with the guitar was wearing.
Steve says he instinctively understood the infrastructure of how to play a guitar that very day, without ever having held one in his hands. In his mind he knew the fingers go here, the pick goes there. You play lead on it, strum it. He knew that a guitar's strings vibrate and that you can add distortion. That you can play it really soft and close to the note, or hit it as hard as you can and create an explosion of sound. He immediately felt the potential for a player to mine infinite depths with the instrument.
Vai can't explain why or how he'd come to know this so young except to chalk it up to karma. Knowledge accrued over the course of many lifetimes. The natural inclination we all share toward certain things. After all, he loves Van Gogh but can't for the life of him understand how an artist takes a brush and paints a Starry Night. He can't visualize the process in his head like he can playing guitar. He can barely manage a stick figure, yet Vai's a Renoir when it comes to musical notation. Notes on paper is art to him. It's always thrilled him to write little black dots that others would then transcribe into breathtaking virtuosic pieces.
For years after Steve first stumbled upon the boy in the auditorium, he maintained a fantasy love affair with the guitar. He never asked his parents to buy one despite their strong support of him. Steve was initially intimated by the instrument in the same way a geeky, gawky kid would be intimated about approaching the prettiest girl in school. He instead took up the accordion because after all, all good little Italian boys played accordion in those days.
Before Steve was ever to understand the pleasure of playing guitar, it was the instrument's physical beauty that captivated him. The long neck and strings. The guitar's sexy shape. He would anxiously await the arrival of his mother's Sears catalog in the mail. The book always included a couple pages of guitars, and as soon as Steve got his hands on it, he would feverishly thumb through and fetish the pages with pictures of electric models. "It was like porn," he says of the the excitement at just seeing the photos.
Vai finally got his first guitar—and another moment of clarity—at age twelve when a friend offered to sell him the guitar off his [the friend's] bedroom wall for $5. It was a red Teisco Del Rey with a whammy bar, three pickups, and lots of knobs and switches. "It was the most beautiful piece of art I had ever seen," Vai said in an interview with FaceCulture. Steve handed over the cash and headed for home, guitar in hand. He slept with the instrument every night. Took it into the bathroom and to the kitchen table with him. Vai says the instrument felt like "home." It felt like Christmas morning every time he picked it up. Although his parents initially dismissed it as an adolescent phase, they eventually bought Steve a better model when they realized he was serious about switching from accordion to guitar.
Vai grew up in a house filled with music. His parents listened to polka and comedy records, and to soundtracks from Broadway musicals like West Side Story. The music of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim made a huge impact on Steve for it contained all of what music was about to him. It had drama and intrigue. It had a story and an incredible melody. It had power and wasn't confined to conventional beats. Vai felt for a time that that's what he wanted to do with music. But then in the next room, his brother was listening to Sly and the Family Stone. And in another room, his sister was listening to Alice Cooper and Led Zeppelin. It was the Zeppelin that ultimately turned him. Once he heard Jimmy Page, that was it. Vai was a goner.
Steve began taking lessons in 1974 from a well-known guitarist in the area named Joe Satriani, who lived in the same town and went to the same school. Vai initially couldn't afford the $5 charge per lesson, so he went in on a two-for-one plan with a friend. Joe was a few years older than Steve and served as his mentor. Vai thought Satriani was the embodiment of cool, and in his mind, believed neither Hendrix nor Page held a candle to him.
So what was it like for Vai when he first picked up the guitar? Very difficult, he says. Although music came naturally to him, not so much an instrument. Vai told FaceCulture that, "I see music. I hear music in my head…and I instinctively, immediately, intuitively understand how to get it out in the world. How to make it real. It's just a process for me. There's no experimenting. I get it immediately, and I know how to do it. When it comes to playing an instrument, I have very little natural talent. I had to work really, really hard, and I didn't sound good for years. I practiced 15 hours a day sometimes. If I didn't practice 9 hours everyday, I was in pain because I loved it. The biggest thrill for me is not knowing something, practicing real hard, and then knowing it."
Steve took lessons from Satriani for three years. Learning to play the guitar gave him the sense of achievement and accomplishment he wasn't getting elsewhere. That feeling became very addictive to the budding guitarist because, as he says, "the better you get, the better you get." He dedicated all the time he had to playing though didn't tell a soul, and certainly never offered to play for anyone, as Steve was rather shy and insecure. He would instead imagine himself performing in front of an audience. Vai would lay in bed with his headphones on, listening to all his favorite music, and actually create a character in his head who was enigmatic, completely in control, confident from head to toe, and had command of the instrument. He pictured the playing as elegant and effortless. "You perpetuate your own reality," Vai says. "A lot of things I do now are a direct reflection of the things I envisioned as a kid."
It was about the time Steve began taking lessons that he too began having extremely vivid dream experiences relating to music. "I saw myself playing the guitar, but I handled it in ways that made totally abnormal sounds," he told Guitar Player. "I would touch it a certain way, and it would make a squeak, or I'd scream into it. There were no barriers—even my movements were beyond gracefulness. That event was the beginning of my realization that I had an identity on the instrument, and it was the single most important event in my musical career. It's where I got most of my musicality from, I believe, or at least that's how I discovered it."
Vai played in several local bands while growing up. After high school, he was accepted into Boston's Berklee College of Music where he immersed himself in transcribing the music of Frank Zappa. Vai became Zappa’s official transcriptionist—a three-year task that culminated with the publication of The Frank Zappa Guitar Book—and by 1980, he'd signed on with Zappa's band for a two-year stint.
In 1984 Vai set the guitar world on its ear with the release of the self-produced solo album Flex-Able. He replaced Yngwie Malmsteen in Alcatrazz for Disturbing the Peace, recorded the disc Album with John Lydon's Public Image Ltd., joined his friend bassist Billy Sheehan in the David Lee Roth Band for the Eat 'Em & Smile and Skyscraper albums, and replaced Vivian Campbell in Whitesnake for Slip of the Tongue.
Vai resumed his solo career in 1990 with the instrumental album Passion and Warfare, which included what has become his signature song, "For the Love of God." Passion and Warfare was based on the musical dreams Steve had experienced as a teenager. He followed up with Sex & Religion (1993), the EP Alien Love Secrets (1995), Fire Garden (1996), The Ultra Zone (1999), and Real Illusions: Reflections (2005), the first in a trilogy of concept albums about the cosmic journey of a man driven mad by grief, intertwining tragedy, revelation, enlightenment, and redemption. One of the songs off Reflections, "Lotus Feet," was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. In August 2012, Vai released The Story of Light, the second installment in the trilogy. At some point in the future he will come up with the third record.
Steve has participated in multiple G3 tours with Satriani, Malmsteen, Eric Johnson, and John Petrucci; orchestral gigs in Japan, Europe, and the US; sessions and collaborations with dozens of artists as diverse as Alice Cooper, the Yardbirds, Meat Loaf, Mike Stern, Spinal Tap, and Sharon Isbin; numerous film scores; a couple of Experience Hendrix tours; and a host of compilations and live albums. Vai also runs two recording studios (the Mothership and the Harmony Hut), his own record label (Favored Nations), and somehow still finds time to be an actor, a professional beekeeper, husband and father.
As for those moments of clarity, they just keep coming for Vai. He says Zappa provided him a few. A lot of what Frank taught him was in the studio understanding production, understanding how to record properly, understanding how to protect yourself as an independent musician facing the music industry, how to be honest and straight with people and not get taken advantage of.
Vai's time with David Lee Roth taught him how to be a "rockstar." He learned how to conduct himself in the press, how to conduct himself on stage in front of a large group of people, how to emote, how to take control, how to be commanding. With Alcatrazz he learned about camaraderie and how to be part of a touring band. With Whitesnake he learned about ego balancing, tour politics, and band dynamics. "Every experience is a learning experience," he says. "It's your perspective. If you change whatever it is that you're looking at, whatever it is you're looking at will change. Simple as that."
If we're to take away any advice from Steve Vai, it would be to find the thing that excites you the most and go after it with everything you've got. But you must remember that progress is an ongoing process. Music is not finite. There is no way you will ever know everything there is to know, or play everything your heart desires. But do take yourself to the brink of your potential. Vai says that to this day he lays in bed at night and just imagines all the things he can't do. "You have to first imagine it before you can do it," he says. "And not only imagine it, but you have to see yourself doing it. You have to actually use your inner eye and visualize yourself doing it. And like magic, it just starts to happen. And once you've accomplished that, there's no end."
Image by Vento di Grecale (originally posted to Flickr as [1]) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
