Passion and Warfare was released with perfect timing, especially opening with “Liberty,” a celebratory, almost sentimental track that nearly reaches into the painfully naïve. By early 1990 it was clear that he had to make a record that bested the competition and lived up to his own reputation. As he became a fixture in the omnipresent guitar mags of the day, where he espoused the virtues of the Lydian mode and took readers inside his 10-hour guitar workouts, his debut became a fixture in every budding guitar player’s collection. There were obtuse love songs, a track about drug addiction and an ode to extra-terrestrials rendered with a childlike sense of wonder.īy the time Vai joined Whitesnake in 1989, Flex-Able had picked up steam. What might have been pop music in someone else’s hands was rendered almost entirely alien in Vai’s. His 1984 solo effort Flex-Able had plenty of guitar on it, including the quintessential six-string number, “The Attitude Song,” but it also had vocals. Vai, who was about to join Whitesnake, had not yet made an instrumental guitar record. Suddenly, instrumental rock guitar became fashionable for the first time in over a decade. He left Roth’s employ after the keyboard-heavy Skyscraper, around the same time his former guitar teacher Joe Satriani released Surfing with the Alien. With an increasing profile and an appearance in the film Crossroads, Vai was no longer a player that people simply talked about he was a player that people heard.
He exploded the technique further during the intro to “Yankee Rose” with Roth. By mimicking his boss’s patented Sprechstimme (“speech song”) in pieces such as “The Jazz Discharge Party Hats” and “The Dangerous Kitchen” he’d made listeners believe that a guitar could actually talk. Vai had changed the function of blues call-and-response during his tenure in Frank Zappa’s band. He replaced Malmsteen in Alcatrazz, and in 1985 recorded the little-heard hard rock effort Disturbing the Peace, shortly before joining Roth’s band for Eat ‘em and Smile. Though Vai might have become a star in his own time, both Malmsteen and Van Halen may have helped his career.
By the time Malmsteen issued his first solo LP in 1984, Van Halen had turned his attention to keyboards, having tasted success with a guest turn on Michael Jackson’s Thriller and his band’s sights set on similar heights in pop stardom. With its emphasis on technique and classical influence, shred might not have happened without the Dutch-born prodigy. Yngwie Malmsteen’s neo-classical wares helped shape shred, though he would never experience the mass appeal of Edward Van Halen. Vai was a singular voice on his instrument, though he had competition. Upon its release in 1990, his album Passion and Warfare changed the face of rock guitar forever. If guitar shred was entering its twilight during the ‘80s, Steve Vai was supremely unaware.