Steve Vai says Eddie Van Halen phoned him on the very day he quit David Lee Roth’s band. A friendship between the two guitarists followed, and it lasted for decades.
“I didn’t even know how he knew,” Vai said in an interview with Chris Jericho and Joe Satriani, transcribed by Guitar Player. “He said, ‘You have to come over to my house,’ and we kind of struck up a friendship that was very heavy for, like, four months where we were virtually talking every day. It was weird.”
Vai spoke with Jericho and Satriani about those months. He described what he saw inside Eddie Van Halen’s home, where music seemed to pour out of every room.
“During that period, I’d go up to his house and he would play me this amazing stuff because Edward was like an audio pack rat,” Vai said. “He was showing me the studio that was being built at the time and he would just go in there and he’d record by himself all you know tons and tons of stuff. I just thought, ‘Make a solo record,’ but [he’d say], ‘No, I’m Van Halen.'”
Roth hired Vai to kick off his solo career after he split from Van Halen, he described in the interview. Roth himself positioned Vai as a rival to Eddie Van Halen. Vai says he took the job with respect. He never saw it as a contest.
“I sharpened my knives,” Vai said when asked about joining Roth. “When Edward hit the scene and that first record came out, I remember thinking, ‘game on.’ He raised the bar for all of us.”
The job made Vai nervous for about a minute. Then the doubt passed, since he knew he could pull it off.
“I just knew that I could make it work, because I had a rock and roll fire that I loved in me,” Vai said in the interview. “I knew that I wasn’t going to try to sound like Edward or do anything like him, because people are very hip to that.”
The album Eat ‘Em and Smile turned 40 this year. Its 1988 follow-up was Skyscraper. After that second record, Vai’s time with Roth came to a close, he said.
Vai also believes no one has matched the playing of Eddie Van Halen. Satriani now takes up an Eddie Van Halen-like spot in Sammy Hagar’s Best of All Worlds band.
“I’ve heard so many people play his songs, play his parts, some people more authentically than others, some people more personally like themselves, and some people it’s just an abysmal disaster,” Vai said in the interview. “But I’m yet to hear anybody, especially myself, have that DNA in their fingers.”
Vai has never tried to copy Eddie Van Halen’s solos note for note.
Vai and Satriani recently released The Sea of Emotion, their first studio album as a team, per an announcement. Vai has also answered reports about a second Crossroads film. He shot down the rumors. A simple mix-up, he said, started the story, per Guitar Player.
