“Sh*t-hot”: Ritchie Blackmore picked the best guitarist of the 1980s
Kind words don’t come easily to Ritchie Blackmore. The Deep Purple guitarist has even admitted that his go-to tactic of stern affront has let him down in front of idols like Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. However, that does mean that when he is forthcoming with praise, it is all the more pertinent.
Compliments don’t come easy for Blackmore, but things do the hard way often provide a little more enjoyment, and this would certainly be the case for one guitarist, whom Blackmore would deem to be the best guitarist on the planet during the 1980s.
With Deep Purple shifting over 100million records, Blackmore helped to define the sound of the 1970s. His stern approach to life was indicative of his robust take on guitar playing. His sound was heaviest, dark, brooding, and dense during the advent of prog and metal. But this all changed in a flash when the 1980s and MTV came along.
Suddenly, flashiness was the order of the day. Guitarists like Eddie Van Halen were rattling off hammer-ons as fast as their fingers possibly could. Blackmore took somewhat of a ‘so what’ outlook to this new gaudy guitar style. “The latest trend seems to be how fast you can get from A to B without actually playing anything,” he told Metal Hammer. “It’s good, but I find it leaves me cold. Okay, you can hear that the guy has practised, but what’s he feeling? A lot of people are out to impress.”
With that, he shunned most of the acts blaring their way through amplifiers. Beyond the showmanship, where were the songs? And where was the sense of sonic refinement? Well, he did find this in one star. “The guy that sticks out at the moment is Steve Vai. He’s really shit-hot. Not only can he play every style there is, he can write and transpose the whole thing as well. He can play the very fast licks, or he’ll just play it another way. Amazing,” he said.
Music isn’t an Olympic event for good reason. It cannot be determined by numbers or distances; no matter how much an artist has sold in terms of records or tour tickets, it doesn’t necessarily make them good. And, for Blackmore, Vai operated in such an anuanced way that he deserved far more acclaim than the big sellers of the decade like Slash and Eddie Van Halen.
It is fair to say that Frank Zappa, who gave Vai his big break, shared this opinion. In fact, he perhaps knew of Vai’s brilliance sooner than Vai himself. When Frank Zappa was auditioning guitarists, a young, inexperienced Steve Vai rocked up. He could barely muster stubble at this stage, while Zappa was well-established as the moustachioed maestro, making the audition akin to a high school student taking a few conical flasks over to Nikola Tesla’s lair and asking for a job.
Nevertheless, Vai had the skills to impress. “I’d play something, and he’d say, ‘Play that’, and I’d play.“ Vai recalled. “Then he says, ‘Now, play it in ⅞’. So I play it in ⅞. He says, ‘Now play it in reggae ⅞”. With styles naturally blurring in this new era, Vai wasn’t all that taken aback.
This continued for some time, with Vai seemingly passing all the early tests with aplomb. But Zappa wasn’t finished yet. “He said, ‘Okay, add this note’. And it was impossible. It was physically impossible, not just for me but for anybody,“ Vai continued. “I said, ‘I can’t do that,’ and he said, ‘Well, I hear Linda Ronstadt is looking for a guitar player‘”. Crestfallen, the young guitarist began to trudge to the door before a deadpan Zappa revealed he was joking and Vai had secured himself a job.
As Blackmore almost alludes, perhaps this sense of humility marked Vai out as a singular talent. He wasn’t interested in being the flashy kid with hoards of attitude, he just wanted to be a humble servent of his axe, and maybe that is where the truly great guitarists are found—not on MTV.
