Steve Vai Remembers Auditioning for Zappa
A Steve Vai interview to ultimate-guitar.com on which remembers the great guitar master and other anectodes.
A day doesn't pass where I don't marvel that it all happened. Because I was a huge fan. (Steve Vai)
"When I was 18, I actually spoke to him on the phone and he hired me to do transcribing, which was amazing. I was too young to join the band - he wanted me to try out for the band but when I told him I was 18 he said, 'Forget it.'
"So when I was 20, I moved out to California - the day after my 20th birthday [June 7, 1980] - and got an apartment right down the street from his house, which was a great advantage, because I was going up there every day, virtually. auditioning
"And then, when auditions came for the band, for a tour, he invited me to the auditions, gave me a bunch of music to learn." "He didn't call on any of those songs [he gave me to learn] during the audition - he called on all other songs - and I thought I completely bombed the audition... "I went to him after and I said, 'I'm so sorry I wasted your time coming down here.' And he said, 'What are you talking about? You're in the band.'
When I heard Bob Dylan's ‘Like a Rolling Stone’,” Zappa told the writer Clinton Heylin, “I wanted to quit the music business.” That is quite a statement considering that when it was released in July 1965 Zappa was yet to release an official studio album and he would go on to unleash 62 of his own.
Zappa Records/UMe will be releasing Waka/Wazoo, a five-disc multi-format box set that features a complete historical rundown of the entire project, on December 16, just ahead of what would have been the Maestro’s 82nd birthday.
In December 1973, Frank Zappa & the Mothers performed five concerts across three nights at the Roxy Theatre on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. Though portions of the recordings taken from these performances have been released in a couple of forms over the years—primarily in 1974's Roxy and Elsewhere and 2014's Roxy by Proxy—they have never been released in their entirety, until now that is.
"Valley Girl" by Frank Zappa and his then 14-year-old daughter, Moon Unit Zappa became his biggest selling single ever, (topping out at No. 32 on the Billboard charts). In her improvised lyrics to the song, Zappa's daughter satirized the vapid speech of teenage girls from the San Fernando Valley, which popularized many "Valspeak" expressions such as "gag me with a spoon," "fer sure, fer sure," "grody" (gross), and "barf out".
Last record reissue is a Seven-disc set collects Mothers' entire two-night, four-show run at Los Angeles venue in addition to recordings taken from rehearsals and soundchecks prior to the shows.
Ahmet Zappa said "This is one of my favorite FZ line-ups ever. This box contains some of the best nights of music Los Angeles has ever seen with their ears at an historic venue,"
