Steve Vai has hand surgery

[RevDrucifer]

O.K. - I’m gonna try to do this in a way that does not roll out the ‘Flame’ red carpet. I am as big a Vai fan as anyone. I was mesmerized by his performance in Crossroads and then proceeded to literally wear out my copies of Eat ‘Em and Skyscraper. I lived with his Whitesnake album in the deck for about a year. I loved the fact that from Carvin X-100Bs to now famous Jose heads, to Bogners to Signature amps, he always managed to sound just like ‘Vai.’ Killer player in every regard - massive contributions to the state of the art of electric guitar playing.

But.... ‘I held a chord for 20 minutes while I meditated on it...’ ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

I remember a very early magazine interview with Vai where he claimed to practice for something like 20 hours out of every day and one of the things he would do was ‘put his guitar on the floor and just walk around it in circles for an hour like a sensitive cat.’ (I paraphrase, but I swear to God I did not make that up)

It’s like he’s always had this huge fascination / fixation on weird super-human spiritual hype. It’s almost as if ‘I was blessed to go to Berkeley School of Music and I busted my ass to get as good as I could possibly be’ somehow wasn’t a ‘spiritual’ enough explanation for his musical ability. It’s as if ‘here I am in my late 50’s / early 60’s and I have played seriously every day of my life for over 40 years and my joints and connective tissues are finally starting to wear out’ is just to ‘normal’ an explanation for him. So he has to be the guy who - with the 40+ years of playing music - feels the need to ‘hold a chord for 20 minutes while meditating on it...’

Love ya Vai - always have, always will. But too much of that Yogi Tea and Incense will eventually go straight to your head.

He’s talked about that a bunch in more recent years; basically right around the time he did Flexable, he got really depressed and wasn’t sure why. He was also getting sick all the time, like puking his ass off sick all the time. He decided to look towards the spiritual side of things and that’s when all the 777 stuff, the fasting, meditation, etc all started. Sure, there’s a bit of a Hollywood/LA spin on it for sure, he’s always been a ham in that sense, but whatever it is he’s doing, it seems to work for him.

I think he even says in that Music Is Win interview that “People don’t want to hear me go off on this esoteric stuff.”, so he’s aware of it. I don’t think he’s trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes with the stuff and trick them into thinking he’s some guitar Buddha only because during the pandemic he was doing those streams twice a week and once a week it’d be dedicated to all that stuff where he went more in depth on it and instead of saying shit like “Well I did this and this is why I can do this now”, it was “Here’s the tools that I used to get to this point. Let me explain to you how they did that for me and maybe they’ll work for you too. I’ve already talked about technique and gear for over 30 years, but this is the stuff that’s more appealing to me now and if you want to know why I play the way I do, this is how and why.”

In the end, everyone’s going to have a different path when it comes to spirituality and it’s not a one size fits all thing. Sure, it can seem silly at times and have absolutely nothing congruent with what’s going on in your own life or your own perceptions, but it’s kind of cool to have someone offer more than “This is in E Lydian and I used a Legacy head with my JEM” information he’s been giving for so long.

I mean shit, if I were asked some of those questions, my answer would be “Well, I packed a bowl and after 3 hits I pulled this melody out of my ass.”, which is how I write 98.9% of my songs.