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(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
The power of all great music was never lost on Steve Vai whenever he made his masterpieces.
There are plenty of artists that use every single one of their albums as an excuse to play whatever slop that they want to, but whenever listening to Vai’s records, he was always trying to push what guitar could be, whether that was testing the kinds of harmony he could get away or the occasional technique that no one had thought of before like on ‘Gravity Storm’. But all of those accolades pale in comparison to what could be done with the right artist directing everything.
Then again, Vai didn’t really need to have any guidance to pull off some of the greatest songs of all time. As much as people love the idea of him making masterpieces on his own, it’s not like he was going to be told what to do when David Lee Roth hired him for his solo act. He knew what he could bring to the table, but when listening to his solos, it was never about showing his chops for the hell of it.
Plenty of artists like Yngwie Malmsteen have tried their best to impress everyone whenever they start playing, but beyond being a great guitarist, Vai had done his homework when it came time to serve the song. No solo was going to sound great if it didn’t have the right feeling for the rest of the track, and that kind of musical sixth sense could only come from him knowing how to play off of a band properly.
And you couldn’t think of a better teacher at the time than Frank Zappa. Despite being a late bloomer in the world of rock and roll, Zappa knew how to practically play The Mothers of Invention like an instrument whenever he went out onstage, and while Vai could play his ass off, Zappa had to make sure that this new kid could figure out how to communicate what he wanted, whether that was working on pure rock and roll music or some complicated jazzy section.
It was going to be hard work for anyone to master, but Vai was convinced that Zappa’s intuition is the reason why his music would last forever, saying, “A couple of years later when I asked Frank if I could be in his band, he said: ‘Why?’ And I said right back to him: ‘I know every one of your songs. I’ve been listening to them ever since forever.’ Even though Frank is sadly dead now, I believe that in a hundred years’ time from now people will still be listening to him and writing about him.”
While Zappa has gone down in history as one of the true greats in his field, it’s not like he was known for being the easiest person to like, either. There were countless times where he could fly off the handle and make some truly bizarre music, and outside of the odd song like ‘Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow’, there was no reason to believe that anything off of Hot Rats was going to see any airtime on the charts.
But the mainstream wasn’t what Zappa was interested in. He believed that people could make their living by experimenting with whatever sounds they heard in their head, and even when making albums that seemed almost anti-commercial, it was easy to marvel at the kind of craftsmanship that he put into every one of his songs, whether that’s working with jazzy textures or creating beautiful melodic pieces on guitar like on ‘Watermelon In Easter Hay’.
But even if Zappa goes down in history as one of the greatest to ever come out of rock and roll, he probably would have wanted to be known for more than that. Rock was too limiting for him half the time, and the real accolades would have come from people who were proud of the progress that he made in the field.
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