TONGUE TWISTER

Three decades after its release, Steve Vai takes you inside the making of Whitesnake’s Slip of the Tongue, the album that sent the band into uncharted territory

STEVE VAI WILL BE THE FIRST TO TELL you how uncanny his charmed life in rock ‘n’ roll has been. While his work as a game-changing guitar expressionist (and his hallowed discography of instrumental albums) might take priority in the minds of guitar fans, Vai’s odyssey through the ranks of rock music is the stuff of legend. As a gifted teen, Vai travelled from bedroom woodshed to the bootcamp of Frank Zappa’s band, after which he took the reins from the famously furious neo-classical shredder, Yngwie Malmsteen, in Alcatrazz. Vai left the Alcatrazz gig to join David Lee Roth in spearheading the singer’s wildly successful post-Van Halen solo group, a gig he left in 1989 only to have yet another coveted lead guitar role “fall in his lap” (as he tells it), this time with one of the biggest bands of the Eighties: Whitesnake.

With Whitesnake, Vai did more than just enjoy a casual walk-on with a band at the peak of its success. He reshaped the group’s sound from the inside out with his contributions to 1989’s Slip of the Tongue. That album marked a major shift away from the brand of muscular blues-rock Whitesnake was known for, chiefly due to Vai’s penchant for theatrical flash, flare for painting with effects and layered approach to tracking guitars. Slip of the Tongue brought Whitesnake’s sound into the future and, while it was an album that risked leaving fans behind, it would go platinum before the grunge revolution changed the face of guitar music altogether. Oddly, despite Vai’s massive resume, he got the Whitesnake call because frontman David Coverdale was so impressed by his performance and guitar contributions to the 1986 film Crossroads in which the guitarist famously played the role of Jack Butler, the Devil’s shredder.