YouTube 4/13/88 Toronto

[FORD]

I find it very interesting that the supposed guitar player Dave had in mind was Steve Stevens, who said no but recommended Vai, if i'm remembering the story events version correctly. I saw Idol/Stevens last year and he is a hell of a guitar player. Loved his Atomic Playboys cd and he elevated Vince Neil. What an interesting combo DLR/Stevens would have made because he is a guitar player that has so many textures and layers......

I remember reading that Steve Stevens decllined, because he was happy working with Billy Idol. And then they only made one more record together, before a breakup of about 20 years or so. After hearing the cover version of "Jump" from a recent Idol tour, I can imagine Stevens would have been a great fit with Dave. He probably should have asked him again before he made the YLFM record (love it for what it was, but Lord knows it could have been better)

[Terry]

This was during Vai's 'David Copperfield' onstage phase which continued for a few years until he calmed it down a fucking bit.

No doubt on a technical level Steve Vai has always been a monster.

Far as my own tastes go, Vai's guitar tone on the 2 DLR records he was on was overall a bit too plastic-sounding, if that makes any sense. Way too much distortion/overdrive and high end in terms of the eq frequencies. Am not talking about what he was playing note-wise, but just the sound of it.

The other part of my problem with Vai on the Roth stuff is that on virtually every track he was just...uncontrollable, really. No sense of self-restraint. It kind of made sense within the context of Roth's style of high energy rock to a degree, but sometimes it didn't always serve the songs well. Take, like, Elephant Gun, Big Trouble, Bump N' Grind: the solos are just a blitz of Vai playing as many notes as fast as he can. It's almost as if Vai was thinking he had to try and better what Eddie Van Halen had done with Roth, but all Vai seemed to have gleaned from Eddie's playing was the speed aspect of what Eddie was doing. Was this Roth telling Vai to do this kind of stuff? Other tunes like Ladies Night In Buffalo?, Goin' Crazy and Tobacco Road demonstrated Vai utilizing his mastery of technique to craft solos that were an addition to the songs, rather than a wankfest that was impressive the first time around but less so with each subsequent spin. Like, the Goin' Crazy solo was really quite good: memorable, melodic and not an ounce of overkill in terms of showing off. Contrast that with Big Trouble, where I really like the tune, but the solo is just a shredfest for the sake of it and detracts from the tune.

It's like, Vai knew he was the shit but he was - despite all his showmanship bravado and bluster- in a way insecure about what he was doing with Roth, so he was cramming everything and the kitchen sink into every space he could and just going beyond over the top with the solos...and kind of coming off as an unintentionally humorous parody of the limited stereotype people were defining Eddie's playing as by the time 1985 rolled around.

And honestly, even at the time, watching Vai mugging his way through those videos and performances with Roth (making the typical guitar hero facial expressions and then taking THOSE to the nth degree)...I mean, no doubt my jaw dropped when I first gave EEAS a spin far as the guitar playing went, but WATCHING Vai perform with Roth was laughable at times.

By the time Vai went to Whitesnake, his solos were (despite the fact that I wasn't nearly as good as him then on a technical level...and am STILL not as good to this day) just yawn-inducing. Like, great, ANOTHER 100 miles an hour guitar solo complete with trademarked Steve Vai facial contortions!! Vai always kinda struck me as someone who wasn't totally 100% comfortable limiting himself to hard rock music. Which is fine, because for someone with his abilities I suppose 1980s American hard rock WOULD be a fairly limited genre.

[Von Halen]

Make no mistake about it. Vai's look and antics, were all Dave inspired. Dave was "The Boss", and they were doing it his way. Dave has been his own worst enemy in many ways, since day 1. That trend continued with EEAS, and continues to this day.

[Seshmeister]

Stevens is thanked in the liner notes of either EEAS or Skyscraper, I can't remember which one.

From memory it was on EEAS for providing a custom Marshall amp that Vai used.

[Terry]

Make no mistake about it. Vai's look and antics, were all Dave inspired. Dave was "The Boss", and they were doing it his way. Dave has been his own worst enemy in many ways, since day 1. That trend continued with EEAS, and continues to this day.

Well, I don't quite know if I agree with the entirety of what you said.

If anything, to hear how people who were around the band when they were playing the parties and clubs in the mid-1970s tell it, Roth wasn't much of a singer or a showman. Many thought Roth's antics, conventional vocal weaknesses and attitude were somehow not up to par with what the Van Halens were doing.

I'd say what Roth did eventually worked well enough for him basically through Skyscraper. After that, a big shift in musical tastes caused Dave's support to wane: 5 years on from Van Halen, it appears to me that a many of Roth's fans who had been there the previous decade had sort of moved onto other musical interests.

I'd say after ALAE, THEN one could make the case that Roth's seemingly at times random approach to his career hurt him. Couple that with the 1996 biz, the combined effect was that of making Dave look sorta washed up.