“The most inspired rock guitar performance of all time”, according to Steve Vai
When Frank Zappa was auditioning guitarists, a young Steve Vai rocked up to chance his hand. He could barely muster stubble at this stage, 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. He was unknown, inexperienced and understandably nervous.
Nevertheless, Vai had the skills to impress. After a youth spent riffing along to his favourite rock records and later reinventing those riffs, he was sure he could handle what Zappa would throw at him despite his tender age. “He’d play something, and he’d say, ‘Play that’, and I’d play [it],” Vai recalled. “Then he says, ‘Now, play it in 7/8’. So I play it in 7/8. He says, ‘Now play it in reggae 7/8”.
This continued for some time, with Vai seemingly passing all the early tests with aplomb. But Zappa wasn’t finished yet. The tests grew increasingly weird. “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. Without a single hair on his chin, Vai had already shown enough skill to work alongside one of rock’s most demanding virtuosos.
Since then, the three-time Grammy Award-winning guitarist has been recalibrating what we thought was technically possible on the guitar and with seamless melody, too. However, there is one artist that even Vai says remains unmatched when it comes to soaring expression: Jimi Hendrix. As Vai’s fellow six-string virtuoso, John Frusciante, once said, “When you hear Jimi Hendrix play, it’s a pure expression of him as a person.”
Adding to that, he doted over the star’s live performances. “You see him on stage and there’s absolutely no separation between him and his guitar—they’re completely one because he’s just putting every single bit of energy, everything in his whole psyche, and every single part of his body into his guitar playing,” he said.
Vai’s opinion is essentially the same, as he told Far Out: “Although, learning to play a Jimi Hendrix song for most contemporary guitarists may not pose a tremendous challenge, playing them just like Jimi has never quite been achieved. His touch on the instrument, sense of groove, choice of notes and overall ability to control audio chaos in innovative ways was remarkable.” You might be able to play a Hendrix tune – maybe even note for note – but nobody can play them like Hendrix.
As Vai continues: “One such piece of guitar divinity he has performed is ‘Machine Gun’ with The Band of Gypsy’s live at the Fillmore on New Year’s Eve. For me, this is perhaps the most inspired rock guitar performance of all time. Every note is imbued with his unique musical DNA and never drops character.”
Vai dotingly concludes, “For this entire performance, he is deeply connected to the creative impulse of the Universe, and it manifests through him uniquely and powerfully. There is not one note that is authentically copyable as every phrase flows from his otherworldly connection.”
Indeed, it feels like Hendrix is lassoing notes from the ether, and the fixed expression of imaginative contemplation plastered on his face is testimony to this. He is in a state of creative flow so unmovable that a wrecking ball could’ve smashed into the side of the stage and he’d still be stood there shredding. He drags you into that ‘zone’ with him. Keith Richards feared that as Hendrix built a reputation for being ‘outrageous’, he felt the need to live up to that and lost sight of the true beauty of his playing, but here everything is perfectly pure and all preconceptions pertain only to the next note.
The playing waxes and wanes on its own unique narrative course, unfurling like a story that only Hendrix could tell, where each line is both inevitable and entirely spontaneous, all while spellbindingly, soulfully singing along for large parts, too. It comes from a repository of creative flow that Vai is always looking to plug into himself.
After all, there are plenty of virtuosos out there in the world, it’s combining that with character that draws the interest of the masses—maybe that’s what Zappa was testing most of all when it became clear how gifted the young guitarist who wandered into his midst clearly was.
