He took nine guitars on that tour: the Charvel Green Meanie was his main squeeze, plus a Tom Anderson Custom, a yellow Jackson Custom Soloist, two custom guitars made by Steve's friend Joe Despagni-the Flame and the Lightning Bolt-and four Performance guitars put together from parts made by Kunio "Kenny" Sugai at Performance Guitar in Hollywood. Soon after Steve joined David Lee Roth's new post-Van Halen band, they spent the early months of 1986 recording a debut album and played their first gigs in August, starting a US tour that ran more or less nonstop until February '87. One of the first pieces to benefit from the new vibrato range was "The Attitude Song" on Flex-Able. The problem was the body behind the bridge, he figured, so he had his guitar tech, Elwood Francis, gouge out the wood there with a rattail file. He wanted the vibrato to pull up higher than a regular system. He added a single-coil in the middle of the two humbuckers, modding the five-way to give two in-betweens as well as three main settings of each pickup alone. This Charvel Strat-style guitar, the "Green Meanie," became Steve's testbed and main working guitar. "This is what I wanted-but there were still so many things about the guitar that I thought I wanted changed." "For me it was like glory day," he tells me. When he joined Alcatrazz in '84, he visited Grover Jackson in San Dimas, who gave him a Charvel shaped like a Strat but with humbuckers. Now he wanted more frets than the Strat had, he wanted one of those new locking vibratos, and he wanted humbuckers. He'd joined Frank's band with a natural '76 Strat, a guitar he loved for its vibrato but hated for its sound. Soon, Steve was poking and coaxing his own guitars. And it was always done with a joke, too." Frank was this fountain of creativity in all aspects. "Then he'd call the company and say, 'OK, but can you do this to it so I can make it do this, this, and this?' He'd do that with any kind of pedal, guitar, musical notation-anything. "I realized that I didn't have to be limited to the guitars that people are making and selling in stores," he recalls, adding that Frank would take a guitar-or any piece of gear-and squeeze it until it screamed for mercy. Steve had learned an important lesson when he played with Frank Zappa. His previous employer, Frank Zappa, said that Steve did everything that Eddie Van Halen ever dreamed of, and then some.Īt Ibanez, meanwhile, the meeting broke up, and the mission to attract Steve Vai was underway. Toward the end of '85, he hit the big time, joining the ex-Van Halen vocalist David Lee Roth in a new supergroup alongside bassist Billy Sheehan and drummer Gregg Bissonette. His first solo album, Flex-Able, appeared in 1984, the same year he replaced Yngwie Malmsteen in Alcatrazz. His break had come at the start of the '80s when, just 20 years old, he had joined Frank Zappa's elite touring band. He used vibrato dives, fast-picking flurries, tapping, noises, feedback, and a generous touch of showmanship. Steve Vai was a growing force, a guitarist with enviable musical and technical powers. Joe was impressed with the single-minded response and told them to go find this Steve Vai, talk with him, and do whatever they had to do to get him to work with Ibanez. "Is there anybody out there who could work with us and represent the company and make a big impact on the market?" Everyone answered more or less in unison: "Well, yes-it has to be Steve Vai!" Joe declared that Ibanez must find its very own Eddie Van Halen. Business was poor, despite useful allegiances and signature models with Bob Weir, Steve Lukather, Allan Holdsworth, and others-each a fine guitarist, but not exactly a headline extreme rocker. Ibanez was trying to join the superstrat club, without success. The guitar of the moment was the superstrat, with the Kramer brand well in the lead, assisted in no small measure by the endorsement from the superstar guitarist Eddie Van Halen. Steve Vai in Milan, Italy, June 2004 (photo taken by Enrico Frangi)
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