Steve Vai has long been worthy of a seat at the high table of guitar virtuosos. While he doesn’t want to be dragged into a debate over who is the best of the best, he’s happy to name 10 players who blew his mind.
And of them all, Vai says just one was more revolutionary than Jimi Hendrix.
Vai knows a thing about the subject. After years of rigorous guitar lessons from Joe Satriani, he became Frank Zappa’s “stunt” guitarist before replacing Yngwie Malmsteen for one album with Alcatrazz and helping launch David Lee Roth’s solo career. The singer had deemed him the man to help him dethrone his former bandmate, Eddie Van Halen.
In the years that followed, his shred-laden exploits as a solo artist saw him climb to the upper echelons of electric guitar greats.
But as he says, there’s a difference between being better than everyone and being ahead of the game.
“Many musicians can be considered ahead of their time, but usually, they’re not,” he told MusicRadar in 2017. “They’re mainly ahead of everyone else at that time.
“For example, Jimi Hendrix wasn’t ahead of his time; he was perfect for his time and ahead of everyone else.”
On the other hand, he says — revealing his pick for the guitarist more revolutionary than Hendrix — “Allan Holdsworth was definitely ahead of his time because it’s hard to realize how great he is. Not many people actually understand.”
Whereas Hendrix worked within the blues-rock idiom and took it to new places, Holdsworth ripped up of the rulebook altogether. His playing combined his unique approach to harmony and liquid legato with horn-like phrasing, which stemmed from his desire to make the guitar sound more like a saxophone. He invented his own complex systems of chords and scales, combining them with fluid tapping techniques and unconventional note choices that put him in an entirely different league from other guitarists.
“I would not be surprised,” Vai continues, “if in 100 years from now, if people are still even listening to guitar — which I suspect they will be — he’ll be singled out as ‘the one’ alone, so to speak.
“The way he uses the whole-tone scale is like his own baby shoes. It’s so easy for him. I can hear any guitar player and I know what they’re doing; I might not be able to play it, but I can see it in my mind’s eye. But I do not know what the fuck Holdsworth was doing at all.”
The British guitarist was also on the receiving end of glowing praise from Vai earlier this year when he guested on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast. He said the reverberations felt from Holdsworth’s guitar revolution can still be felt.
“The reason why I am so attracted to him is because his musical mind is unique,” Vai added. “He had his own vocabulary. He had his own way of constructing chords. His own understanding of how they go on the neck.”
But Vai wasn’t the only one touched by his genius. Writing for Guitar Player, Robert Feist, who co-engineered the three-time GP cover star’s most groundbreaking albums, lifted the lid on what he was like to work with, and why he was so unique.
“He had a brilliant mind and a strong vision for what he wanted,” he said. “My job was to make that happen.”
One particularly poignant moment came as he listened to tapes in the small hours, waiting for his order at a fast-food drive-through.
“I’d heard Allan in the studio many times before, but sitting there, waiting for my breakfast sandwich, listening to his solo, it struck me,” he recalled. “There was a physical sensation to my reaction, a flash like a dream or a memory, something old combined with the future. The tape sounded and felt much larger than the recording we’d just made.”
In related news, Vai has revealed how a theft led him to get Frank Zappa’s phone number and ultimately change his life forever. And while Vai received Robert Fripp’s backing to assume his place in the King Crimson tribute group Beat, Eddie Van Halen was slightly less complimentary about his guitar playing. Which just goes to show, you can’t please everyone
