What: Steve Vai: Passion and Warfare 25th Anniversary Tour
Where: Port Theatre, 125 Front St., Nanaimo
When: Monday, 7:30 p.m.
Tickets: $62.50-$73.50 at porttheatre.com or by phone at 250-754-8550
For all his achievements as a performer, bandleader, guitar designer and record-label owner, the root of what makes Steve Vai who he is today can be traced back to three key events during the 1980s.
Vai first came to the attention of music fans at the turn of that decade as the guitarist for Frank Zappa. The wunderkind, then still in his early 20s, later changed gears and played the Devil’s guitar-wielding sidekick in the Ralph Macchio movie Crossroads.
Vai eventually reached peak popularity in 1985 when he joined the solo band of Van Halen singer David Lee Roth, whose five-year tenure with Vai produced two multi-platinum Top 10 albums and several No. 1 singles.
The New York native has done plenty in the time since, from co-founding the Favored Nations record label to further developing his line of guitars for Ibanez.
But those early days when his face was a fixture on MTV definitely left an imprint on the three-time Grammy Award winner.
“When I [think about] the way my career has unfolded, I’m astonished,” Vai, 56, said recently.
“I look at it and think: ‘Everything happened exactly the way it should. There was nothing out of place.’ Even the stuff that might have been very challenging, there was value in the challenge.”
Vai has been looking in the rearview mirror a lot lately.
In July, he began what is expected to be a prolonged stretch of concerts to commemorate the 25th anniversary of his landmark solo album, Passion and Warfare.
The recording, Vai’s first following his split with Roth, is considered his best, if not the most well-known of his eight albums.
“Whenever you do something creatively, it’s like a little snapshot of who you were at that time,” Vai said of the album. It appears the snapshot in his head prior to the Passion and Warfare era troubled him at one point.
It is well-known in Vai circles that he loved the process of making Roth’s debut, 1986’s Eat ’Em and Smile, but generally disliked the rock-star nature of the tour to promote its followup, 1988’s Skyscraper.
He is still good friends with Roth and his bandmates from that era, but Vai clearly looks back at the late ’80s as a period of material excess.
“Any event that happens to you in your past has many angles of perspective to it,” Vai said. “The memory has energy in it, and it’s got a sting — even though you were a rock star making millions of dollars. And I’m not saying that was necessarily the case with me. But at one point, it was a particular perspective I had. When you think about it that way, it makes you unhappy, so all you have to do is change your perspective on it. Focus in on the things that were really enjoyable. It heals the past, so to speak.”
He’s philosophical about music, to say the least. And when he speaks, it is with a Zen-like calm; perhaps that explains why the former child prodigy, who talks eloquently and with a sense of down-to-earth mysticism, has always been so difficult to pin down artistically.
Vai has a range of credits on his resumé, but the line that connects them is not easily drawn. There is a commonality in all his guitar playing and songwriting, but fans often miss it because they are looking for something musical. Wrong approach. The truth always comes from within, according to Vai.
“The most vitally important thing in your life is the amount of peace you have within yourself. The amount of calm and the amount of presence and emotional equilibrium is really important. From that comes everything.”
Though he is comfortable with his place in the world today — which has him near the top of the great guitarists in history — a silver lining emerged when it comes to his current tour, during which he will play in sequence all 14 songs from Passion and Warfare.
Even as he oversaw the reissue process of the 1990 album, he was able to do so with a smile on his face. Those were good days for Vai.
“It’s nice to go back and see that guy,” Vai said. “He’s still in here, but there’s years and years of evolution.”
Vai will perform Monday in Nanaimo with his bandmates, his first concert on Vancouver Island. The uninitiated should prepare for an outright odyssey: Vai is a big-idea thinker, and will shepherd the show with one foot on the brake and the other on the gas pedal.
“When I go to put a show on, I try to imagine being in the audience. The entire show has screens with videos going on in the background and at one point I have various friends of mine appear on the screen and we jam — [Dream Theatre guitarist John] Petrucci, [Joe] Satriani, even Zappa.”
Vai is akin to a frontman who rarely sings, and he commands the stage like the best in the business.
“A lot of people who haven’t been to a show but kind of have an idea who I am, perhaps their idea of the show is guitar wankery,” he said with a laugh.
“And there’s some of that for sure. But I try to create something that is connected to a broader audience. People want to be entertained, and I want to be more than the guy who stands up there and plays the guitar.”