The Smiley Smile Message Board

I associate hard rock music with my adolescence, at which time it wasn’t an art I enjoyed, but a friend. A best friend. Hard rock music was my best friend. We were friends well suited to one another, it catering to frustrated, disaffected but idealistic, mostly white would-be men, and me being one of those.

A cousin inspired me in terms of hard rock music. My parents were old enough to have a record collection entirely predating and circumventing hard rock, and my older siblings had gravitated either toward ‘80s pop or , in rebellion against that, ‘60s classics. But my cousin—a rock and metal fan several years older—seemed to appreciate the years-younger disciple following Him through Galilee, and so baptized me appropriately. By the time I was eight or nine, He’d given me Stay Hungry, Metal Health, and Shout at the Devil.

From there I was able to work forward and backward, both to the likes of Whitesnake, Poison, and GnR, and to KISS, Queen, and Zeppelin. I started playing guitar and gravitated immediately to the attainable power chords and pentatonic scales of then-current pop metal. Paper routes and fast food funded my taste’s expansion throughout back catalogues and incremental exploration toward blues and classic rock, jazz, and guitar heroics. Pop worked its way back from my pre-rock recollection to dominate my aging, less aggressive psyche.

The best friendships exist outside of time entirely. A month is a year is a decade. Twice I’ve spent a decade apart from someone who was among my best friends when we were five years old. At both reconnections, we were best friends: that’s the value of real friendship. Every surrounding circumstance is incidental, coincidental, peripheral. The constant is an intangible connection.

Hard rock and metal don’t seem to have a huge following here, which makes sense considering the lighter fare of the board’s inspiration. But I know there are those here with heavier leanings, either historical or current (if not both).

I can’t imagine why this wouldn’t be a fine place to set down your recollections of this or that album; of the club or arena show that kicked your ass; or or the particular aggression best expressed through [song or album]. What is metal? What is rock? Rawk? What makes it good, bad, or indifferent? For those about to (discuss the) rock, we salute you.

Actually, it seems to me that, aside from the Beach Boys and Beatles, a lot of the members here lean more towards hard rock.

I'm a huge fan of hard rock / heavy metal.

The first concert I ever saw was Aerosmith. 

The best concert I ever saw was Iron Maiden. 

I took my father to see Judas Priest perform their British Steel album in its entirety in 2009. 

Two of my best friends took me to see Kix for my bachelor party.

I used to work at a rock station and got to meet members of Rush, Metallica, and the legendary Alice Cooper. 

Wow! I have been easing my way into hard rock/metal in recent years. It is a much larger and more varied area than I ever suspected!

Speaking of Metallica, Master of Puppets is one heck of a perfect album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6LA7v1PApU

I'm kinda the opposite.  I grew up during the height of hair metal in the 80s.  When that fizzled out, I gravitated towards other classic hard rock artists like Deep Purple, Rainbow, Queen, Black Sabbath, Priest, Maiden, BOC, Van Halen, The Who etc etc. 

In my late 20s / early 30s, I gained more appreciation for stuff like Ricky Nelson, Beach Boys / Brian Wilson, Billy Joel, Jimmy Buffett, etc. 

My general trend was like yours, KDS, except I really left most of the hard rock behind during those years. It's only in the past few that I've begun reclaiming that part of my musical upbringing.

John k -you're right about Master. I'm not a big Metallica fan, but that album has always stood out for me as a masterpiece of the genre.

There are some hard rock / metal bands that I liked when I was 20/21 that don't really appeal to me anymore.  But, I think that's because these bands came out during a very mediocre time for hard rock / metal.  So, they sounded good by comparison.  Two that come to mind are Drowning Pool and Godsmack. 

But, other than that, I still love the genre.  I also like mixing and matching between listening to heavier and lighter acts. 

Heck, in about a two week period in 2012, I saw The Beach Boys, then Dennis DeYoung of Styx, then Iron Maiden with Alice Cooper opening.  All were great shows. 

Most of my favorite music fits into the "hard rock" category, which confuses certain friends when I tell them that the Beach Boys are my favorite group. But I love music that's both heavy and light. When I look at the majority of my records I see lots of heavy psych, old punk and early heavy metal. But there's plenty of Association, Cowsills, doo wop and Monkees too, so....

A lot of the hard rock / heavy metal bands I'm into also do a good job at mixing light and shade, sometimes within the same song. 

Sabbath, Priest, Purple, Zeppelin, Queen, Maiden, The Who, Rainbow, etc. 

Looking through the metal topic on my other board I bumped into this tasty morsel by Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1cdW-ba8Yw 

70s Aerosmith is the first band I really loved.

Great topic...I first started buying albums in 1971 and all of them were hard rock. All of them. I used to ride my bike to the local magazine store, and while guys were lined up in the back of the store gazing at Playboy, I was in the middle feverishly paging through Creem and Circus. I would read the album reviews and see these great advertisements and look at the wild photos, and wanted to be a part of that scene. So, after literally saving my pennies, I would then go to the record store and buy the albums based on what I read in the magazines. At that time, FM radio was just coming into fruition and they weren't playing the bands that I was reading about in Creem and Circus. The artists/records I was buying and listening to in that time frame of 1971-74 included The Doors, Blue Oyster Cult, KISS, Slade, Led Zeppelin, Mott The Hoople, Montrose, early Queen, and somehow Sparks slipped in there. It was such a thrill discovering those artists and records. Nobody at my school was listening to this stuff; I really don't know if they thought I was cool or weird. I had a best friend who had a real stereo system and I'd go over to his house and we'd have these "listening sessions" where we'd spend hours just listening to album after album. I know it sounds strange but my buddy and I were actually DEDICATED to hard rock. I loved the sound of the electric guitar, was a little picky about the lead vocalists (Noddy Holder and Robert Plant had to grow on me), but mostly I could live vicariously in those records. If I couldn't actually be a part of that scene, I could imagine it through the music. I don't think that period/era (the early 1970's) gets the credit it deserves for the hard rock music it produced.

I made a serious stop-and-detour when my older sister purchased Endless Summer in late 1974. I got hooked on The Beach Boys big time, and most of my money and listening time was devoted to the vast back catalog of The Beach Boys. And that was quite a back catalog! I was able to "hang in there" with my hard rock purchases (I was now old enough to get a job), and I welcomed the emerging punk rock music. I was still reading rock publications and now getting into groups like The New York Dolls, The Ramones, The Dictators, Sex Pistols, The Stranglers, and Aerosmith. I welcomed this hard rock as my response to the emerging disco music. Again, this stuff wasn't being played on FM radio stations in my small town. Nobody I knew was listening to this stuff, but again, I kind of liked being different, almost like I was discovering this hard rock music that hardly anybody knew existed.

By 1980-81, my interest and devotion to hard rock started to wane a bit. I was now ten years older, and expanding my musical horizons. Bob Dylan became huge with me (with another vast back catalog to purchase); believe it or not I got into Frank Sinatra and John Denver (because of a girlfriend), and I finally got around to purchasing The Beatles' albums. However, many of the hard rock groups I liked had either peaked, were on their last legs, or were gone. MTV was starting to get very big, and in the early days I watched it frequently. I liked some of the cool groups played on MTV, but I didn't invest in their albums; the videos sufficed.

Finally, in the mid-1980's to the early 1990's, MTV played all of these "hair bands", and hard rock was everywhere. I should've loved that music, or at least liked it, but it never hit home. I mean, some of those "hair band" and metal band guitarists were obviously very talented, the singers were definitely putting out, and the subject matter of the songs, while a little more graphic and sexual, was similar to the previous decade, I don't know...I guess what I saying is that I don't why I didn't/don't appreciate that era. It had the energy, passion, and the electric guitar! It must be an age thing, a generational thing. I sometimes wonder if I would've embraced the "hair bands" if I was sixteen years old at the time of their popularity.

Today, I watch That Metal Show on VH1 Classic. I try to catch up on what I missed; it can be educational, although I don't listen to metal. I occasionally listen to my old hard rock favorites. I usually don't listen to the original albums in full; I've made custom compilation CD's of my favorite songs. But, yeah, I'll still get into Blue Oyster Cult, early KISS, Slade, and The New York Dolls. I just purchased a special 40th Anniversary Edition of The Dictators' Go Girl Crazy, autographed by Andy Shernoff. I guess you can say it is partly reminiscing, but I STILL absolutely genuinely enjoy that hard rock music from the 1970's! Occasionally. ;D

I've been on a Slade binge of late. Amazing sh*t.

This wonderful din (care of U.S. band Earth) comes under the heading of Drone Metal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls1OYn_xGzM 

Aerosmith was never better than they were in the 1970s IMO.  I like a lot of the material from their "Comeback" Era.  But I think they started going through the motions after the Get a Grip album in 1993.

Steven Tyler seems more concerned with being a TV or country star these days. 

I hate pretty much everything post-Done with Mirrors. They're just one of those bands that lost it when they decided to get clean and go safe musically.

I liked some of Permanent Vacation.  Love the Pump album.  And I like Get a Grip.  But, I'm also a fan of the safe late 80s hard rock. 

Their cover of Baby Please Don't Go off their 2004 Honkin on Bobo covers albums is really good.  Sounds like it could've been of Night at the Ruts. 

I had some recollection of writing about one of my absolute cornerstone hard rock albums and bands, and after a quick search, I found that I'd posted it early last year in Bubbly Waves's 1980s Appreciation Thread: http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php/topic,19590.msg495172.html. But it fits here, so below is a pasted repost of my Jan. 22, 2015, Twisted Sister writing.
...................


Nobody here, or anywhere else for that matter, needs me to list out albums from the '80s that hit everyone's best of all time. We all have access to those lists. Maybe that is what Bubbly wants--that or at least recommendations. I'm not sure I want to give a recommendation. Instead I reminisced a little bit about that decade and how I thought about music then. Of what I loved at the time, barely of any of it remains in high esteem (by me, I mean). Graceland and Prince's stuff are probably the only things that were beloved then and now. Other things, like Waits's stuff, I came to well after the fact.

But f*** all that. Here's something else. Here's Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry.
...............
In 1980s rural Minnesota, the almost literal witch hunt for satanism in rock music felt like an obsession. For those of us listening to that purportedly satanic rock music, it was terrifying.

A prepubescent, newly fascinated connoisseur of hard rock and metal struggled in a very conservative Christian household. Songs with curse words were to be played quietly--contrary to every instinct--or through headphones. Album covers with scantily clad women had to be kept out of sight. Most of all, anything looking or sounding satanic had to be disavowed entirely. "I listen to hard rock, mom," the kid would say, "but I don't like that satanic stuff."

The problem in the American influenced by Tipper Gore, the Peters Brothers, and television journalists ready to jump on the dream story of teenage suicides inspired by satanic cults--and yes, they seemed insistent these things existed--was that "satanic" meant damn near everything more risqué than Stryper or Petra. Long hair, torn or tight clothes, men in makeup, obviously any religious imagery whatsoever, anything more reasonably categorized as fantasy (e.g., elves, wizards and the like), any sentiment questioning the merits of a Reagan-era American dream: satanic. Or at least under heavy suspicion.

When Pee-Wee's Big Adventure featured a scene that included Twisted Sister filming a video for their "Burn in Hell," I was placed in a very awkward position. Number one, even saying hell outside of the context of church was an issue in my home. One could just as well have said fucking c***. But number two, a song whose refrain threatened that you'd burn in hell, well, that was pure satanism. Simple as that. My mom didn't have to hear anything else. Not "welcome to the abandoned land. Come on in, child, take my hand. Here, there's no work or play. Only one bill to pay. There's just five words to say as you go down, down down."

Just "you're gonna burn in hell," sung by these ugly men garishly dolled up in absurd makeup and feathered or fringed costumes.

I was so f***ed.

See, by this time--1985--I knew Stay Hungry, the 1984 album on which "Burn in Hell" appeared. Like, really well. I owned the cassette several times, wearing it out from overuse. I considered it the greatest album of all time, or at least in a tight competition with Van Halen's 1984. I was 11 years old.

In the same way that KISS would affect me around the same time or soon after, Twisted Sister had the perfect formula for an adolescent boy. These were huge hooks being punched by the cornered, oppressed underdog. And what 11-year-old boy isn't a cornered, oppressed underdog?

"We've got the right to choose it. There ain't no way we'll lose it. This is our life, this is our song … you don't know us, you don't belong. We're not gonna take it. … Oh, you're so condescending. Your goal is never-ending. We don't want nothin'--not a thing--from you."

The guitar solos are familiar to me even today. Right now--right now!--I am listening to "We're Not Gonna Take It" and miming the whammy bar dives, so entirely ingrained into my psyche did they become 30 years ago. The riffs were among the first I ever learned, and they're rock solid examples of hard rock music.

Twisted Sister were not what we've long-since come to know and dismiss as hair metal. This wasn't a band conceived of by the marketing team of a major label, assembled from girlish boys whose parts could be recorded by Rod Morgenstein, Greg Bissonette, Billy Sheenan, Steve Luthaker as long as the "band" wore their tight leather pants with the banana or rolled-up sock inserted just so. Twisted Sister had by this time been working the clubs of New York for 10 years and had released a couple of albums. They weren't apart from the now-hilarious fashions of the day, but they weren't so much in it, either. More gruesome than girly, more monster than manicured.

"Stay Hungry," the leadoff and title track, rocks. Like, really rocks. A.J. Pero and Mark Mendoza drive it hard on drums and bass, respectively, the guitars really just pounding out sustained power chords atop the rushing current of rhythm … at least until the dual-guitar solo. It, and the whole album that follows, is big. Everyone knows the cartoonish mid-tempo anthems, "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock." Other songs sped past more akin to "Stay Hungry." There were gothic comics and, yes, a power ballad.

Nobody needs a track-by-track, but I mention these songs excitedly because I haven't heard them in more than 20 years. Stay Hungry went from the greatest album of all time to one of those albums I used to like in a heartbeat, not so much because of Nirvana--I hated Nirvana--but because when contemporary music chased its northwestern nirvana, I dug into the past and obsessed on the guitar gods of the '60s and '70s, then jazz, then whatever else.

But listening again now, this is a great album. Always was, always will be. I probably won't listen to it again for many more years, if ever, because it has nothing to do with me now. The adolescent anger and frustration wore themselves out a long time ago; I'm not backed into a corner and have nobody and nothing to rebel against.

But for what it is, for who needs it, this is a masterpiece.

Stay Hungry is an almost perfect hard rock album.  It's a crime that Twisted Sister is thought of as one or two hit wonders. 

Three hit wonder. Everyone seems to conveniently forget Leader of the Pack.

Thanks for the tip, cap'n. I've got this lined up for end-and-start-of-day listening. :smokin

Steve Vai, Passion and Warfare.

For something a little more modern, I was working at a rock radio station in late 2003 when my boss received an email with a link to a music video from a new band. 

The hard rock climate in 2003 wasn't much to write home about.  Mostly grunge lite courtesy of Nickelback, Puddle of Mudd, and Three Doors Down. 

The music was for "Get Your Hands Off My Woman" by The Darkness.  I couldn't believe my eyes or ears.  Three minutes of blistering hard rock with the guitar chops of AC/DC and Thin Lizzy with the drama of Queen.  And the band were having....fun.  There was no fun in hard rock in 2003.

So, were these guys a parody?  A joke?  We quickly went on their website and viewed videos of I Believe in a Thing Called Love and Growing on Me.  If this was a parody, it was a darn good one. 

It wasn't long before the station contacted the label and got some copies of the album Permission to Land.  I got my copy, and played that from start to finish countless times for about six months.  A solid throwback hard rock album in 2003? 

Then, I saw them live in a dingy little club and knew these guys were for real!!!  As a live group, they kicked the audience's A$$ that night.  Showmanship, fun, costume changes, and guitar solos.  I never thought I'd see a new band with either of those elements again.

The UK ate this guys up, and they were heralded as the second coming.  Here in the State, they had a following, but they left most people scratching their heads. 

They put out a second album (2005's One Way Ticket) before dissolving into drug and personnel issues. 

In 2012, they made a comeback with a fairly mediocre effect called Hot Cakes.

But in 2015, they came storming back with a killer record called The Last of Our Kind. 

I feel that many still don't know what to make of The Darkness 12 years later, but I think they're one of the most solid hard rock acts of the 2000s. 

I really can't stand that type of show-off guitarists.

I love that first The Darkness album, and the new on is very good too.

I was a senior in high school and that was probably my favorite new album at the time. Hard rock was definitely my preference then. There was good stuff to be found, but you had to dig a little bit because most rock radio was full of pretty bland stuff like you mentioned. I think losing interest in what on the radio was probably what started my deeper digging and real interest in older music like The Beach Boys.

There was a time I'd have said that. Not now, though I'm not particularly into shredders anymore, either. But Vai's unique.

I don't have time now (being at work), but eventually I'll try to get around to explaining why I think it's the best instrumental rock album ever, and the only one that warrants inclusion among great rock albums.

During middle school, when rock radio fell in love with grunge, is when I started getting into older classic hard rock. 

Queen, Black Sabbath, Styx, Van Halen, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, AC/DC, Bad Company.  The list goes on. 

That's partly true for me as well. I was already a fan of some music that predated my real listening years--KISS, Queen, the Beatles, and a few others--but it was in part my total dislike for what happened in the popular music of a post-Nirvana world that got me digging deeper in to earlier years. Simultaneously, I got better at (and more interested in) jazz, so I went in that direction at the same time.

As I got into my late 20s / early 30s, I started to appreciate the lighter side of rock more - The Beach Boys, Billy Joel, Jimmy Buffett, Elton John, etc. 

Getting into the lighter stuff creates a nice light and shade effect when I'm mixing and matching music. 

That's why I love a bank like Queen so much. It's a great balance of mixed and matched styles. Everything I like about music I can find in a Queen album.

Queen was indeed a special band.  You get everything from early heavy metal, proggy epic numbers, pop rock brilliance, tender piano ballads, power ballads, acoustic songs, and everything in between.

Although I'm not too fond of their dabbling in dance music. 

You and everyone else, I think. Touches of it are fine, but when it started to dominate the sound that's where I usually check out.

Another One Bites the Dust was pretty good.  But the dreadful Hot Space album took it a little too far. 

KDS - have you ever listened to The Paper Chase? I was sent a promo copy of God Bless Your Black Heart when it was released in the mid-00s, as I was writing reviews at that time. While it was a lot heavier than most of what I was listening to at the time, I thought it was great. Dark, dark stuff with a sense of humor in there. Sometimes neurotic like a Roger Waters kind of vibe, sometimes just full-on paranoid, some Faith No More vibe, and most of all just a lot of bandleader/singer/guitarist John Congleton, who has gone on to produce a lot of people across various genres (St. Vincent, the Polyphonic Spree, the Mountain Goats, Angel Olson, The Good Life). I love his guitar playing, an angular kind of stretching and leaping across wide intervals, very creative. Sometimes anthemic, but in a scary way.

I was lucky enough to meet them at a show while they were in the area to record in nearby and somewhat legendary Pachyderm Studios. (I believe that turned into their next album, Now You Are One of Us).

Here's that latter album (though I preferred the former).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4cLlTtpLI4

I've never listened to them.   When I'm at a computer with sound, I'll check out that link.  Thank you

In Defense of—Nay, Praise of!—Steve Vai (Not That He Needs My Help)

“That guy can make his guitar talk!”

I’m not sure who saw it first, me or one of my brothers. But we gathered around the small TV in a little room down the hall to witness the truth: David Lee Roth’s new guitar player was even better than Eddie Van Halen because he could make a guitar speak. Clear as day.

“David.”
“What?”
“[unintelligible]”
“Well, lemme roll up onto the sidewalk and take a look.”
“Whoa!”
“Whoa!”
“She’s beautiful.”
“[guitar agrees]”
“I’m talkin’ about a Yankee Rose.”
“[guitar laughs]”
“And she looks wild.”
“Wild”
“Wild”
“Wild”
“Wild:

Steve Vai blew this 10-year-old’s mind. Granted, this mind wasn’t fully formed. But he made the guitar speak. And he had cool guitars, like an insane green (presumably Carvin?) one in “Yankee Rose,” or a fire guitar in “Goin’ Crazy.” He slithered. Later, he had a triple-necked heart guitar, and he spun his guitar around his back. These traits are all highly prized among 10-year-olds. Or should be.

Now, of course, it’s a different world entirely—several times over. First Guns ’n’ Roses made assless chaps and tiger-print jackets seem silly. Then Nirvana made Guns ’n’ Roses seem silly. Then the crap marketed as “alternative music” made everything seem, well, pointless, causing handsome young Minnesotans everywhere to ditch modern popular music entirely and focus on the classics and jazz. Nobody cared about triple-necked heart guitars and behind-the-back spins by a slithering guitar-talker anymore.

Except this guy. Oh yeah. Through it all, I still loved me some Steve Vai, and I make no apologies. It’s the 30-year anniversary of my discovery of that ultimate guitar superhero, and while he hasn’t been on my turntable on a regular basis in 20 years, he’s still the best.

The.

Best.

In the late ‘80s, research was conducted. Circus, Guitar For the Practicing Musician, Metallix, Metal Edge. Fine publications such as these provided key facts: the slithering triple-necked guitar-talker was named Steve Vai, and he’d played with some (comedian?) named Frank Zappa and replaced Yngwie Malmsteen in Alcatrazz. (The latter meant more to me than the former at the time.)

“Shredders” aren’t well-regarded in many circles these days, and that’s fine: I’m not so into shredders, myself. But to me, that’s a derogatory term reserved for people whose technicality is their totality. Vai is a brilliant—flawless, actually—technician. But he’s far more than that.

First of all, he’s a musician. Not a shredder. I listen to Vai as a jazz player in a rock environment, more akin to the guys often employed by his former boss, Mr. Zappa. Vai’s own songs are often vehicles in which to solo, sure, but the same is certainly true of Zappa’s instrumentals (or instrument-heavy tunes). The same could be said of beboppers like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Was Diz showing off? Sort of, yeah … but that’s a big part of the reason for that music’s existence. Bebop took a more song-oriented form—the jazz of the time—and made it a vehicle for virtuosity. The key is that it’s done in a musical way, within the framework or paradigm of that genre of music. And Vai is a consummate musician.

For all those flourishes, despite the effects that overlay them, the blonde-streaked bluish-black hair and the slithering figure who spins his guitar around his back did indeed audition for Frank Zappa as a 20-year-old kid. And make the band.

“Ask Vinnie [Colaiuta] how difficult it was, [Frank] was brutal on me!” Vai said. “He’d play something and say, ‘play that.’ OK, and I’d play it. And he’d say ‘play it in 7/8,’ Well…ok, and I’d do it. ‘Now play it in reggae 7/8.’ OK, I play it in reggae 7/8. And he’d go, ‘add this note.’ OK, and I’d do it. Playing reggae, 7/8, and I’m adding these notes. ‘OK, add this note.’ And it was impossible. It was just physically impossible, not just for me, but for anybody. So I said, oh, I can’t do that. And he goes, ‘I hear Linda Ronstadt is looking for a guitar player.’”

After the nastily humorous audition, Vai made Zappa’s band … as a “stunt guitarist.” Let’s be serious, in the world of rock music (or jazz, for that matter), anyone who can play—on demand—some line in 7/8 reggae with “this note” is pretty damn impressive.

Vai isn’t just a stunt guitarist. The songs are songs, after all. Let’s get to Passion & Warfare. Around the same time I heard Vai had joined one of my then-favorite bands, Whitesnake, I also became aware of an instrumental album he was releasing, Passion & Warfare. One might have preceded the other, I don’t know. It was a while back, I’m old, I didn’t take notes. (Actually I did. I kept a journal in those days. I should dig through the college-ruled notebooks in the box in the guest room closet…)

Maybe I owned Joe Satriani’s Surfing With the Alien by then, maybe not. I know I only bought it because I’d learned of Satch via Vai. Via Vai. That’s fun to type and say. Try it. Via Vai. Moving on. Passion & Warfare was either the first or second guitar-heavy instrumental rock album I’d ever owned. And it remains the best, not only for its little corner of the world, but right up there among the best albums of that decade. I promise you that: I could not name 15 albums from the 1990s of any genre that I think are better than that one. I’m getting back to the point soon. I promise.

When discussing Passion & Warfare (or anything else Vai did), there’s not much point in even mentioning, much less praising, the technical brilliance. After all, even his critics acknowledge that: they tend to use it as the main criticism, not the saving grace.

So instead, let’s go back to my earlier statement, that Vai is a consummate musician. It’s the way Vai speaks through his guitar that I’d focus on. Part of that is the near-literal sense, the same as on “Yankee Rose” a few years before. Side two kicks off with “The Audience is Listening,” in which “little Stevie Vai” converses with his teacher before a talent show. He—via the guitar—laughs, speaks, winces. When the song, a true Van Halenesque boogie, kicks into gear, the melody seems to be sung through the wah-wah lead line, nonsensical syllables, but sung.

Beyond that literal speaking, Vai brings lyricism and melody to his music. “Liberty,” the opener to the album, is something of a (lite) metal national anthem, majestic and bombastic: the bombs bursting in air, indeed. “Erotic Nightmares” is a hard rock riff any band of the time would have killed for. “For the Love of God” is a soul-searching masterpiece, deeply introspective even as it searches outward for capital-T truth. Lyricism is again a key word, a fluid, lyrical-though-wordless melody. Beautiful and stunning, probably pushing the boundaries of taste with its dizzying flourishes, and yet the absolute source of truth for the 14-year-old who first heard it.

It’s a diverse album. “Answers” is an exotic, rhythmic workout with a typically legato melody that sounds much farther-out than its Mixolydian (that is, major chord with a flat 7…in effect, a 7th chord) reality. “Ballerina 12/24” is exactly what many of the man’s critics despise, an exploration of how effects can alter the music as played: in this case, the Eventide Harmonizer’s digital delay and pitch shifter making something far more complicated than what is being played. Brian May’s old solos, but for the (then-)modern age. “I Would Love To” is straight-ahead power pop: like “Erotic Nightmares,” a worthy part of any vocal band’s repertoire, if it had been put to that use. “Blue Powder” is bluesy in its initial approach, if not its underlying structure.

Throughout, the album is a masterpiece of production. I recall an interview in Guitar For the Practicing Musician in which Vai discussed this, mentioning that he listened to the contemporaneous pop as well as his inspirations for ideas. New Kids on the Block were invoked, and I nearly choked. But in hindsight one can see how smart he was in that respect. For one thing, layering that many guitars is going to create production challenges. Wide as the range of the instrument is, as well-arranged as the songs are, it’s going to take a good mix, proper EQing, to keep it from sounding like distorted mud.

Beyond that, he got a guitar album to sound like a diverse rock album. The fact that one album could communicate anthems, metal, blues, Latin, comedy, pop—whatever—minimized the omnipresent shredder’s risk of monotony. This wasn’t 45 minutes of guitar solos (even though it was). This was a rock album. His Flex-Able solo album was great. I really loved it. But Passion & Warfare is an absolute wonder. Check it out with an open mind to hear a masterpiece of heavy, but diverse and melodic, music.

Second—but not necessarily less importantly—he shone as a second fiddle to David Lee Roth, to David Coverdale. The man is a rock ’n’ roll entertainer, and being an entertainer is absolutely essential to a lot of that form in the same way that being a talented soloist was essential to playing with Zappa (or being a bopper in Diz’s band). Sure, you can stand still, look at your shoes, and make brilliant music, and I’ll love you for that, too. But DLR’s stuff had nothing to do with that kind of music, and so neither did Vai. This is where having a triple-necked heart guitar comes in handy, you know? Or having your moves down just so, the kind of moves that might make someone like Frank Zappa make fun of you for doing. (Oh wait, that happened with some regularity. “On guitar and blue hair, Mr. Steve Vai…”)

Popular metal of that era was a spectacle. Its excesses were essential. When grown men are playing cartoonish music of endless adolescence, when they’re dressed and made up like that, they damn well better have a sense of humor about it. It’s all a kind of cabaret, tongue-in-cheek. Roth understood that in and after Van Halen. Freddie Mercury knew it. KISS knew it. If you’re “serious,” maybe playing simple, adolescent music isn’t the right line of work for you. That’s why we have “classical” music, or jazz. Of course the guys on stage look like silly, and if you don’t want to suspend your disbelief, if you don’t want to engage, the only reasonable reaction is mockery. Hell, Diz—even Louis Armstrong—were sometimes treated the same way when they made shows into something more than just music, puffing out their cheeks comically or doing routines.

But this guy, this slithering, triple-necked, heart-shaped-guitar-playing devil (“Crossroads”) … he’s playing at that serious level of music without the seriousness attached to it, all in the context of eternal adolescence. And it’s fucking spectacular.

Not a big hard rock fan in general, but I thought Steve Vai was pretty masterful and interesting.

I use to be really into hard rock when I was younger. If it was slow or a ballad or something along those lines, I had absolutely no time for it. It had to rock, damn it. I don't know what changed, but now I don't listen to it all. In fact, a friend and I were at a record store while they were playing Appetite for Destruction, and all I could do was laugh as Axl squealed "it's so fuckin ee-zay!" I mean no offense to anyone else who may like the song/band/genre, but it doesn't seem to be for me anymore.

You'll be back.