'I gotta be honest with you -- I never thought that anything would ever happen with my career', says Steve Vai talking to me from his home in Encino, CA. 'I never even looked at it like: "Okay I'm going to have a career". I thought I would probably become a guitar teacher, or maybe a teacher in a school or something like that -- I didn't even know, I didn't even think about it. I was just really prolific with writing and just wanted to hear the stuff -- you know, like an artist will just see a picture in his head and he's gotta paint it -- I felt that way about music . . . like a lot of people.'

But while Steve Vai may have thought his passion for music would never amount to anything remarkable, it was to turn out quite the opposite. As a youngster, Vai first felt the touch of music playing organ, and later at the age of 10, the accordion -- but it was the guitar that he viewed with an almost mystical reverence. At 13, Vai bought a guitar off a friend for $5, and with a pack of strings in one hand, and a guitar in the other (Vai didn't even know how to string a guitar at the time), he began taking lessons with one Joe Satriani -- a local kid who already had a reputation amongst the kids in the neighbourhood as a great guitar player.

'I never told anybody I was playing the guitar or taking lessons, cuz, I always felt insecure or just inferior, but lemme tell ya I would just play the guitar all day and all night -- I was just fascinated with it, and I'd shut the door, wouldn't tell anybody or let anybody see me, and I would just play and play and play' recounts Vai. 'I was really driven by the sense of achievement -- it was fascinating to me that one day I couldn't do something and then the next day, if I practised, I'd be able to do it. And it became like a weird addiction -- to keep achieving these little milestones that I'd set in front of me. At the same time I had this wonderful music theory teacher in high school who was teaching me all this stuff about Bernstein, and Stravinsky that I wanted to know, and teaching me how to compose.'

This was only the beginning of a career that is stunning in both its diversity and history.

At 18, Vai sent a demo tape to Frank Zappa, which included a recording of Zappa's "The Black Page Number One" -- an incredibly difficult piece of music, of which Vai had recorded two versions, one at metronome speed 58, and the other at metronome 84. He began working for Zappa soon after, transcribing everything for him from lead sheets, to orchestra scores, and the following year joined his band as 'stunt guitarist' becoming the youngest musician to ever join the Zappa ranks. After recording between 15 to 18 albums with Frank, and two independent albums of his own, "Flex-Able" and "Flex-Able Leftovers" he was enlisted by Ry Cooder to star in the movie "Crossroads" as Jack Butler -- the Devil's guitarist -- and soon after joined the heavy metal band Alcatrazz, filling the sizeable shoes of guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen. In between all this he recorded the generic "Album" with Public Image Limited.

In 1986, Steve joined with David Lee Roth to record the multi-platinum record "Eat 'Em & Smile", and so began one of the biggest chapters yet in the story of Steve Vai. Playing with Roth not only drew comparisons with Eddie Van Halen, but also exposed Steve to a global audience. Music videos for "Yankee Rose" and "Going Crazy!" were in heavy rotation on MTV and music channels all over the world, and Steve found himself on the cover of countless music magazines. It was during this time that he designed and developed a line of guitars with Ibanez, called Jem guitars, which were instantly popular and continue to sell very well worldwide. His partnership with Roth would include another multi-platinum album "Skyscraper" and its following worldwide tour (as well as several more videos, Top 20 singles, and magazine covers) before Steve finally left in December 1988 to pursue a solo career. He quickly found himself joining Whitesnake -- performing all guitar duties on their "Slip Of The Tongue" album. He found the exposure of Whitesnake to be a perfect platform for the cross promotion of his stunning solo epic -- "Passion And Warfare" -- nominated for a Grammy Award and considered by many as one of the greatest instrumental guitar albums of all time.

SEVENMAG: I've really enjoyed reading in the past about some of the approaches you took when making "Passion And Warfare" - in particular your descriptions of dream states that proved inspirational for you. How did these shape the album?

VAI: Well, I mean you plant a seed in your consciousness as far as which direction you wanna go in, and you look for inspiration. I believe when a person goes into that creative side of their brain to bring something out of themselves, they gravitate towards the things that really interest them. Some people write their music or make their art about poetry, or politics, or sex, whatever -- the world is open for it, for anything. But I guess for me, at the time, I seemed to gravitate more towards the metaphysical side of things. I was really fascinated with that, and my real only link to the metaphysical, besides my imagination were these dream states, that quite a few people actually experience. And you know, it's just a way to gather information for creating music.

SEVENMAG: I remember reading an interview with David Lynch where he describes similar states of consciousness -- the state between awake and asleep where ideas and notions float through his mind. It's a delicate state because it's a moment where your mind lets down its barriers and concepts can float through the air and your mind doesn't really judge or process them, but instead stores them, where they can be drawn upon for inspiration later. He actually credits some of these experiences as being real inspirational and conceptual building blocks for some of his films. Is this similar for you?

VAI: Well, in a sense, at the time -- I have had some experiences -- and I don't know whether you'd consider them altered states of consciousness or whatever, in those in between dream states, and some of them are kinda profound, and some of them are just hilarious, or whatever . . . and I'd take note of them, and when I was looking for inspiration for "Passion And Warfare" I went to these experiences, as opposed to, I dunno, going into how much I love to go out on my motorcycle and ride around -- which just doesn't seem as intense to me.

SEVENMAG: You prepared yourself for performing one of the stand out tracks on the album -- "For The Love Of God" in what some might consider an unusual way -- by fasting over a number of days. Do you still work this way now, by say, staying up for 3 days, or not eating?

VAI: Well it's like this: when you're going to create something, like I say, you go into those sides of your mind. It's really easy to sit there and think in technical terms, like: 'Okay I'm going to perform it like this, and I want it to sound like this, and I want my fingers to land like this and I want it to end up here . . . ' I do take that into consideration, but the real thing that people pick up when they hear a piece of music that's been performed a certain way, is what the artist was experiencing in his heart, and his mind (though more so in his heart really . . . ) when he was performing it -- but you have to be able to let those feelings come out on the instrument and it's easier said than done. It's not so easy to play with your heart cuz there are a lot of things that can hang you up. And to be really brutally honest with yourself and your instrument, could be more difficult that you think, cuz it's a control of the mind, and I wanted to put myself in a state of mind where I was overcome with emotion in a sense -- so that I couldn't really think much about anything else -- and there's a lot of ways of doing that, you gotta be careful. The fasting thing -- well I fast a couple of times a year for like, 10 days at a time, just cuz it works for me, and I fast once a week actually. There's a certain frame of mind you can be in when you're fasting. You can be angry and pissed off because you want to eat -- and I've experienced that too. Or you can take more of a humble side and just let it go. I was trying to give up -- to just let go of my own will and let higher will take over. To do something like fasting you have to reach down into yourself and pull that energy out from some place and while in that frame of mind, that's when I wanted to create that song.

I gotta tell you, after I had done an interview and I had mentioned that, (cuz I really thought I shouldn't mention it) it was misunderstood, and I got all this really weird mail. People saying how could I talk about fasting when there are starving people in the world and all this sorta thing and I thought you know what? They just don't get it -- I mean I had done some solos under pyramids and stuff -- I'd sit under a pyramid and do a solo and I didn't mention any of that stuff. [laughs]

SEVENMAG: It's about going beyond the mechanical aspect of playing, where you approach the instrument differently through subjecting yourself to different experiences and ways of thinking.

VAI: Well, you're overwhelmed -- you're forced to think a different way. You're forced to let certain things happen. Maybe I don't recommend those kinds of things because if you're too much of a neurotic you could hurt yourself. But you're right -- I was searching, and I still do . . . but some people just didn't get it, and really, it was my fault -- things of that personal nature I should have just kept to myself. But there were people who did get it -- I wrote this series of lessons for "Guitar Player" magazine, cuz they asked me to write a column, called "Martian Love Secrets" and I got heavily criticised for that too because it didn't really deal with things like 'Well you put your finger here for this exercise and then it goes here and you have to play it really clean . . .' I mean, there's so much of that out there, what more do they need to hear from me?

SEVENMAG: After "Passion And Warfare" you put together a band, VAI (the band featured Devin Townsend on vocals, T. M. Stevens on Bass and Terry Bozzio on drums) and released "Sex And Religion" -- a very different record from "Passion". I can hear a number of different influences in there, like Ministry, Nine Inch Nails and Pantera. Were you listening to that sort of music at the time, or was it your attitude at the time?

VAI: Yeah, well it was the people I was hanging out with and the music I was listening to. Y'know it's funny, when I was growing up, on this one street that I lived on, all the kids were really good kids and we did things like playing baseball and football and basketball and never got into trouble -- wouldn't even dream of doing anything to get us into trouble. Then I would go to the next street and every kid there was a derelict and it was all because of this one bad seed, you know? This one guy . . . he was just bad -- and I'd go there and end up doing things that were just unbelievably bad, for a kid . . . and as I grew up I was friends with both camps, and I'd wear different masks in each camp -- I mean it's just a social type of thing -- peer pressure or whatever. But it really matters what you surround yourself with, when you're in a creative mode because that is going to have a big reflection on what you create. When I was doing "Sex And Religion", I wanted to do something more aggressive, and I wanted to depart from the "Passion And Warfare" thing. It was a shock for a lot of fans that were expecting "Passion And Warfare". I started to hang out with the singer, Devin [Townsend] and he was really into this incredibly, unbelievably heavy music -- bands like Groetus and . . . [laughs] do you know them?

SEVENMAG: [laughing] no, I don't.

VAI: I started listening to Ministry and Nine Inch Nails and I was very interested in what they were doing, but my approach was just different, yet it had a very brutal edge to it, and the record came out, and like I said a lot of people were pretty shocked at how different it was and they really didn't get it -- but some people got it. It was a big record in Germany, and it's funny, to this day I still get mail. It's actually selling more and more now, it's being discovered amongst people who kinda looked at it funny in the beginning -- but it's definitely a departure, but then again if you look back at all my records they all really are so different from each other.

SEVENMAG: At the time you talked a little about your tendencies to be a bit of a control freak, and that's where you saw that the project fell over, to a certain extent. It's always seemed though that for you, the value of those tendencies has been borne out in the success of projects you've handled by yourself. Is that a correct assumption?

VAI: Well when you're left to your own devices, and if you allow yourself to open up and really imagine a piece of music or a piece of art, and then going about making it a reality, you're going to get a different product than if you imagine something, and then bring somebody else's imagination into it. Now, I'm not saying that it's bad to bring somebody else in -- as a matter of fact, working with other people can be really necessary for a lot of artists -- but for me, I work a certain way, and I've just grown accustomed to that ever since I bought my first 4-track, and it's not like an ego thing like: 'My way or the highway', it's just that I feel comfortable that way. I know what I want to do, I know what I wanna get and there are times when I felt a little insecure about certain decisions and I may bring them to somebody and ask them about it. I'm not opposed to working with other people, but for me to sonically go to bed with somebody, so to speak -- I want them to really know what I am, know what I do and have a handle on it, and I don't want them to have to change what they do. There really needs to be a chemistry there and they need to like it, because the worst thing for me is to feel like I'm putting somebody through something y'know -- that they feel like they should be doing something else, or they're doing it just for the money . . .

The "Sex And Religion" band -- it was just miserable. Everybody was unhappy, I mean I hired these guys and they were all extremely talented but along with that kind of talent comes a desire to be expressive in their own realm. I'm not opposed to having that, but it's under certain critiques and whatnot. I was expecting to have really talented people doing their thing within the parameters of what I wanted to have with my music -- and you just can't put certain parameters like that on people.

SEVENMAG: Considering that along with talent, comes a desire to be expressive in your own realm, when working for bands like Zappa, or David Lee Roth or Whitesnake, what kinds of parameters were placed on you in those situations?

VAI: I had a lot of freedom, because guys like Dave Roth or Whitesnake, they hire me and they say: 'We know what this guy does, we know what he's capable of doing -- just do it', and when I go into a situation like that I look at it and I say 'Okay, this is this kind of an artist -- I'm not going to get in there and do this . . . I'm not going to do something so removed from what they are. I'm going to take their whole make-up and my appreciation for that kind of music and do the best thing I can' -- and as you might have noticed, it's still not the norm . . . but it's as normal as I can get and still maintain an integrity that I feel comfortable with. I mean, it was a stretch when I was doing stuff like David Lee Roth -- I mean I wanted to really stretch out and do some wacky things, but I couldn't do wacky things like I would do on "Flex-Able" or what I would do in a different kind of situation. So I had to put up certain kinds of parameters and guidelines and just go to the extreme within those, and that's the way a professional approaches things.

SEVENMAG: Your release of "Alien Love Secrets" and "Fire Garden" was a return to the real Steve Vai solo product. Was your aim with "Alien Love Secrets", a return to a straight-ahead guitar record?

VAI: Yeah, I love the guitar, and I love playing it. Things like "Passion And Warfare" and "Sex And Religion" -- they weren't really solo guitar records, as far as I could tell. "Passion And Warfare' was like an orchestration extravaganza for rock and roll [laughs]. "Sex And Religion" was like a heavy rock band, with some bizarre twists in there, but I have hundreds of hours of musical ideas that span the gamut of anything between a two bar riff, and completed songs, and they fall into different categories. Some of them fall into this 'sit down and play the guitar' category and I took a handful of those and that's when I made "Alien Love Secrets". It was a real liberation for me -- I didn't have to worry about so many of the things I worry about when I make some other records and I really enjoyed just playing the guitar. It's a very guitar-language record -- there was one guitar, no overdubs, not multi-layered, and it's right in your face and it's very personal and that's how I like to hear the guitar. My problem sometimes is that it's hard to be simplistic in those realms, but when I listen to "Alien Love Secrets" -- and it was really well received -- it sort of soothes something in my soul, there's something that's simple yet really fulfilling about it.

SEVENMAG: What appeals to you in a guitar solo -- both in your own and other people's?

VAI: There's a lot. I take it for what it is, I take how the tone sits in the track, I listen to the melody it creates, but most of all, guitar solos function for different reasons. Some are just wallpaper -- and that's okay. Every solo can't have you on the floor crying. But I do like to be thrown on the floor crying over a guitar solo too. [laughs] What I like to hear, basically, is somebody telling a story. Good melodies are like good books. All the phrases are written in sentences, with commas, and they all make up a paragraph, that is part of a chapter. It needs to tell a story, and there's ways of doing that, but you have to approach it that way. You can't just be a meandering Neanderthal -- and I'm not saying I haven't been one of those before either. [laughs]

SEVENMAG: With tracks like the "Fire Garden Suite" -- it's a long and multi-faceted piece of music -- does this come more from your interest in orchestral scoring, or is that something altogether different again.

VAI: No, it's part of that other facet that I enjoy so much about music -- the more orchestrated, arranged side of things. I gotta tell you, that stuff comes so easy to me -- it's frightening. I had to force myself to make that only thirteen minutes.

SEVENMAG: Do you have plans for releasing an album of your orchestral work in the future?

VAI: Yeah, I have this on-going project called "Sound Current" and it's the performance of music of mine that's orchestrated. We did one concert already with the Eastman School of Music Philharmonic in Rochester NY, and it was fantastic -- just unbelievable. I had orchestrated about 50 minutes of past material and new things for 100 piece orchestra, and I did it with Joel Thome the conductor, and we did one of his pieces, and it came off really wonderful, and I have those scores, and what I'm trying to find time to create a new piece of music -- like a 45 minute piece of music that's new. I just don't wanna keep re-hashing old stuff, even though it has a completely different sound it's still the same guitar melody. When I get that, I hope to have a volume of "Sound Current" performed.

Other than that I'm working on something else -- with an orchestra. But right now it's on the sample level, and it's the Music of Broadway -- it's called "Broadway And Then Some". . . cuz I'm a real fan of Broadway musicals and I've got these orchestrations of these wonderful classics, instrumental, with the guitar layered right on top of it all. That's going to be a wonderful record because "Sound Current" is not necessarily like a traditional orchestra, it's got an edge to it. When we did the "Sound Current" in Rochester it also contained a rock band with the orchestra. It turned out really well -- it was one of the highlights of my performing career to stand up on a stage like that with a 100-piece orchestra blasting in back of you with the guitar just gloriously singing on top of it. I'd love to come to Australia and work with their philharmonic one day.

SEVENMAG: Where do you think music is headed, especially the business side, and considering the impact of the Internet, as well as major artists fighting against that recording industry machine, people like The Artist or Ani Di Franco. Do you see that being a trend that will continue?

VAI: Only for creative driven people with the wherewithal to make it real -- and there's as many of those now as there ever was. It's a daunting task to release a record on your own -- it really is. It's overwhelming for people who see it as complicated. There are people who will not turn a computer on simply because it just baffles them, they won't even plug in their stereo, know what I mean? But then there are people who can take a stereo apart and tell you every component. So there's always people who are going to come along and say, 'Wait a minute! What's the big mystery here? I'm gonna do this, and I'm going to do it on my own!', but there are kids that are just . . . especially artists, there are so few that have it all -- the ability to be business savvy and also be creative and musical -- because I'll tell you, it's a fine line. You get too far into one, the other really can be buried. When you realise how much money you can make if you can sell your own record on your own label, all you wanna do is sell records and make a lot of money. Once that creeps into the formula . . . maybe bad things can happen to your music . . .

SEVENMAG: I heard you say once that when an artist comes up with their best work, it's when nothing else matters but the music. Do you feel that in some respects in today's recording industry there is a shift of focus away from the music and more toward the business?

VAI: The thing is this: The business has gotten so strong and so big, that it's dominating the tastes of the listening public. The business is so powerful, that it dictates what is being performed on radio and what people are able to hear -- and really creative musicians are A: not getting the musical education to really exercise those creative muscles, to learn how to use them properly, and B: I don't think that they're getting a chance. It's not like when classical music was king, say, and you had to be really talented and creative, and have great ability. Even in the '70s you had to be talented -- when you look at bands like Emerson Lake and Palmer, Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull and Yes and Queen -- I mean, you ever listen to a Queen record? Jesus Christ! Those guys were really talented. Now compare that with a band these days -- I'm not saying that bands these days aren't talented, but they're blinded. Listen to American radio -- it's fucking pathetic! There I said it . . . these people think they have to sound like a watered-down version of Spin Doctors, or still they're trying to sound like Nirvana and what they're missing is that Kurt Cobain was an inspired guy! He was really artistic and creative, but not in the way that Jimmy Page was, but still on a same type level, and it's really easy to pantomime and chameleonise yourself to sound and look like another band and get on the radio -- because record company execs, they're pushing that, they're pushing 'give me this, and I'll sell it'. And they are selling it, and there are some good songs, but really creative people are getting squashed, because being a musician is shunned upon these days.

Now take someone like Celine Dion though, I mean in her own right she's incredibly talented -- unbelievably so, what she does. So when I say people today, I still believe there are talented people, I mean, you have to be talented to sing like her, but it's a different realm completely. The little guy, who's the real musical guy -- not only is he not getting a chance for his music to be heard, but he's not even getting a chance to realise that he's got the talent because he's not being inspired to explore it!

SEVENMAG: Do you see success for people like The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, who have moved right away from the whole thing?

VAI: Well you see, The Artist has been through so much, and has been through such a whirlwind of success -- I don't think he's concerned right now with that. Cuz if he really wanted to make a lot of money, he would make one record, and he'd promote it properly and he would go out on tour, and it would be on his label and he'd make a fortune. But instead he's releasing 5-CD sets on the Internet. C'mon you're not going to sell a million copies on the Internet -- not now, not without radio. You will never sell records of that magnitude without radio support -- it just won't happen, it never did. But he doesn't care, why should he? For every one record he sells, he's making $10-15 dollars, as opposed to $1 that he was getting from Warner Bros. Y'know, somebody tapped him on the shoulder and said 'Look at this . . . ' and he said 'What the fuck . . .'. [laughs] I'm just speculating. I'm probably making this up . . . but you know, a guy like him, he could really pursue his label and do it that way if he wanted, and maybe he will.

But take someone like Rob Zombie from White Zombie. He's a pretty clever guy, and he's got a real business sense to him, he understands how things work. He could make something like that happen, but there's not a lot of guys like that . . .

SEVENMAG: Taking a bit of a departure from the biz, tell me about the Make A Noise Foundation you set up.

VAI: Well, I dunno whether you've ever tried to set up a non-profit organisation, but the paper work is staggering. So we just recently completed that, so technically right now I have this foundation, but to get it off the ground takes a lot of promotion and a lot of events and stuff like that. As soon as I finish this box set, and I start to work on my next record, we're going to get together -- the staff that I have for that particular organisation -- and create a campaign on what we're going to do, and how we're going to raise money for the foundation, and it's a wonderful foundation. We'll be collecting funds, and instruments -- different things to create completed musical programs for schools that don't have them, and not just for a year or whatever, we implement an entire program for a period of time and we're going to be working very closely with VH-1 who has a similar program, and we may be supporting their fund with our fund. There's a lot of fun creative things to do there. You sit down with the people and you start talking about the capabilities and you can go into lala-land very quickly, but what I'm hoping to do is have some kind of event each year. I'm thinking a kind of a Jam-a-thon where the Jam starts and we take pledges, you know, people who can pledge a dime an hour, a dollar an hour, a thousand dollars an hour -- whatever they want -- and the jam starts and it just goes as long as it can. Everybody is invited to come down and play, and that's how we wanna kick it off here in LA. I suspect it would go for 72 hours or so . . . it's going to be great!

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