The album that left Steve Vai “walking around in tears”
Sometimes we truly don’t realise what we have until it’s gone. That’s something which Steve Vai has come to appreciate many times over the years.
In certain ways, it’s what comes with having played with so many different acts in your time. It’s the rock and roll business, after all, and the unspoken undercurrent which swirls beneath much of it is that the lifestyle takes its toll and many people leave a long time before they were ever meant to. You can find many examples, from the likes of Vai’s own boss, Frank Zappa, to Jimi Hendrix, but none are any less painful than the last.
But part of this is the dawning, and often devastating, realisation of the true greatness of the departed ones. In life, they grafted away at honing their skill, may have enjoyed some glimmers of success, but largely spent most of their time at the drawing board searching for the next great idea. In death, the scale of that work is only magnified, and it’s the moment when you appreciate that everything the person achieved was already the pinnacle of genius.
That’s something which is common to any walk of life, but in terms of music, it’s a notion that Vai is all too familiar with. Having loved and lost so many legends, he knows the importance of the back catalogues they leave behind. Yet in emphasising its sheer power, the one that moved him most to tears was from a man he never even met.
Jeff Buckley may have famously only ever released one album, but it was testament to the strength of its significance, as well as the tragedy of his passing, that it went on to posthumously climb to stratospheric heights and claim the adoration of the world. Grace just possessed that moving power, but it also left Vai in a state of breaking down his emotions.
“The last few records that I bought that I really enjoyed… Jeff Buckley. It wailed me. I was, like, walking around in tears, just so grateful that I discovered this record,” he once told Virtual Guitar Magazine. With combinations of choral singing, rock godliness, and acoustic tenderness, it was true that this was an album like no other, mainly because it could reduce a man to the heart of his feelings.
Of course, this was something only realised far too late, three years after the release of Grace upon Buckley’s untimely death. While large swathes of the industry had been happy to let it pass them by before, suddenly the singer was their unheard revelation, their sonic archangel, their tragically beautiful muse.
All of that made Buckley a hero in the eyes of Vai, as well as a litany of other rock and roll greats. But ultimately, each of them has to wrestle with the fact that they ever gave the man his flowers during his lifetime, while they were too absorbed with what tour or lover or substance took their fancy in the meantime.
This is not an attempt to attack and denounce all rock stars. However, the point remains that they can become too obsessed with themselves and never take notice of the outside world. Vai’s tearful reaction to Buckley is simply a symbol of what happens when you discover something good, but all too late.
