The Tapes Archive

Greg Renoff: Is it okay if I record this?

Steve Vai: Yeah, please.

Greg Renoff: Okay, so I just had a few questions I’ve spent years as a fan, I saw

you guys in ’86 and ’87 on the Eat ‘Em tour

Steve Vai: Ah, yeah.

Greg Renoff: Yeah, in New Jersey, it was great. So I read all the old interviews, so I wanted to come up upon this story in a way that I think maybe some other people hadn’t. Which is to start with the movie, because I think that’s sort of the lost thread of the whole story there, because if I understand correctly, when Dave called you the first time, at least, the premise of the call was that he was going to make a movie, which was going to happen of course. And then, uh, you guys were going to write songs for the movie.

Steve Vai: Well, you’re close. Dave was putting together, you know, his plan was to put together a kick-ass rock band.

Greg Renoff: Okay.

Steve Vai: With exceptional players. The movie was something that him and Pete Angelus were working on, and we were going to incorporate whatever music we were writing for the record into the movie. And it got pretty deep, you know, at one point, we were actually looking at the scripts and and there were, you know, sort of preparing the whole media campaign,

Greg Renoff: Right.

Steve Vai: Um, with the videos that they did as the Picasso Brothers and all that stuff. But, I was so young and just so bewildered by everything and it was, everything was just interesting and exciting, and wild, you know! I mean, I was ready to do anything and we had a lot of fun preparing for the movie. We actually got together with, I think it was Toni Basil, was that the woman?

Greg Renoff: Yeah.

Steve Vai: And started working on choreography for the songs. It was gonna be really great. And then, personally, I never knew what happened I think there was some kind of something between Dave’s production team and the movie studios, where they either put it on the shelf or they, you know, killed it. I’m not sure. But, next thing I knew, it wasn’t on the table anymore.

Greg Renoff: What’s your stance on how the release would have been different perhaps, if it had been a soundtrack? I say that because I did some digging through Billboard and some other things and Narada Michael Walden, Nile Rodgers, Aerosmith, all these little tidbits I see, they were saying they were writing songs for Dave, or Dave had solicited songs from them, Do you have any thought to how that was going to come together with your original songs?

Steve Vai: No, because I never heard that. You’re the first one telling me that. It was probably before I was in the picture. What you’re saying sounds like maybe on their mind was the idea of taking a hiatus from Van Halen and making this movie. In which case, I know they were reaching out to a bunch of people, I don’t know who, but then once I showed up we just started writing music and I never, really

Greg Renoff: Okay.

Steve Vai: It could have been going on and I don’t know. It would’ve been nice to work with those guys.

Greg Renoff: The other thing I always thought maybe they were just thinking that in a movie you have to have, obviously, quite a bit of music if it’s going to be a rock musical and maybe they were thinking, now Rogers was gonna do like in a quote in Billboard, like a big band Jazz score, so maybe they were thinking these little parts that were gonna be filled in by these music from other guys. But yeah, it’s interesting to hear you, that sort of once you guys got rolling, it was sort of all, that was all beside the point.

Steve Vai: It would make sense to me that some of the scenes might’ve incorporated big band stuff, especially, since, you know, Dave had songs like That’s Life and Just a Gigolo and Nile would’ve been perfect for all that.

Greg Renoff: The other thing is of course, the lost, Kids in Action song, which it sounds like, again, it was gonna be that Kim Mitchell was initially contacted by Dave to supply music before you got in the band by Billy. Billy basically had put Dave unto Kim, and then you guys got down to the factory actually recorded Kids in Action. What do you remember about that tune and how it actually turned out?

Steve Vai: Well, when we had gotten into the basement and started jamming and writing and playing, it was a very open, free, creative environment and that the thing that made most sense is reached out to everybody. Before I got in the band, I know Dave was talking to some other guitar players, I think, Kim could’ve been one of them. I know, Steve Stevens was one of them. Was already tied up with the Billy Idol thing. And there was, I think there was some others, I can’t really remember, but the odd thing for me is that I was just a kid in an apartment and the moment I heard that David Lee Roth was looking for a guitar player. I just, immediately and instinctively had a knowing that it was my gig. I don’t know why. Sometimes, those things happen, it just like, everything is connected, meaning, you know, So, I really didn’t pay much attention to any of that other stuff, but when I did get into rehearsals there were a couple of really good songs. A whole bunch from outside sources, and I know one of them was Kids in Action. If we have a recording of any of that stuff, it was just a basement cassette recording. There was no formal, formal recording that I remember.

Greg Renoff: Yeah, there’s a, I’ll send you actually. ’cause I got in touch with Jeff Hendrickson and it looks like, when you guys went into Fantasy, you guys did cut Kids in Action, from what Jeff has. Track sheets..

Steve Vai: Really?

Greg Renoff: Yeah, I’ll send you the sheet by email. Interesting. So,

Steve Vai: Isn’t that funny, that I don’t even remember?

Greg Renoff: Yeah

Steve Vai: I guess you’re talking to the wrong guy.

Greg Renoff: No, you’re telling me, this is great! That’s why I talk to all these people and so Jeff Bova added keyboards to the power station at the very end and then what Jeff remembers and what Ted told me was that it was kind of came down to Kids in Action and Tobacco Road and for whatever reason, I don’t know why, Tobacco Road was chosen over Kids in Action. But it was finished from what am able to tell. I’ll send you the sheet.

Steve Vai: I’d love to hear it, because I don’t remember recording it, but am not very good at stuff like that. You know, I mean, I write a lot of music, back then the habit for me was to write music on tour. Like, write it. I would actually sit and compose, and then at the end of the tour I’d just throw it in a big pile, ’cause I could never record it all and then many years later, I was working on a record called Fire Garden, and I was going through all these papers, and all these manuscripts, stacks of manuscripts and I found this one piece, and it was in my handwriting and I really liked it and I remember writing it all and it was a beautiful piece and it was a toss up between working on that piece or another piece that I had written while on tour, so I decided to do this one and I recorded it. It was a big, epic piece, it was like in four movements and all this stuff, and the first movement, right before I handed the tapes into the label, I played it for a friend and he goes, oh, I see you recorded Bangkok from the play Chess. So I said, what are you talking about, this is, I wrote this song. And he goes, no, that song was written by Tim Rice, the guy from Abba and am like, well, then they ripped it off from me somehow, you know. And then, he goes, no, Steve, you gotta go, listen to this Go buy that record and for sure, man, I bought the record and I listened to it, and it was exactly note for note, the song that I’d written. And then I realized, I called Dave, something told me he was involved with, he gave, and then I remembered, we were doing, in the beginning of the Smile rehearsals, we were doing, putting the show together and he gave me a cassette with what he called a Hungarian dance song, or something. And he said, learn this and show it to the band, so like, in between set changes, you guys can play it. So, I transferred and what it was, what he gave me was Bangkok from Chess and I transcribed the whole thing and just completely forgot and threw it in my pile of music, so luckily I caught it in time and I was able to give the right credit, and the right information.

Greg Renoff: That would’ve been a hard one to explain. Inadvertently I didn’t know and it’s like note for note.

Steve Vai: Yeah, and how dare you steal my music?

Greg Renoff: So as far as the, it’s a funny story.

Steve Vai: I would be really curious to hear Kids in Action because frankly I just don’t remember recording it.

Greg Renoff: I keep hounding Jeff Hendrickson and the engineer to try to find the tape, you think, he might have a tape somewhere. But, yeah, I’ll send you the track sheet so you can see it. Just to circle back, real quick, does it make any sense to you that maybe Dave had purchased songs from Aerosmith? Because I’ll send you this press clipping and they say, Dave told us about these two scenes and we are going to write songs for the movie, Joe, again, this may be all pre-dated before you got in. But am wondering if any of that makes sense with the Kim Mitchell Kids in Action, like Dave had a sort of small collection of songs that you guys could drop on a pool, if that makes any sense, or is that not accurate? You think?

Steve Vai: Well, I know that there was, Dave had some songs from the past that he really liked, and I know Kids in Action was one of them and he used to, I believe, he used to refer to that song as Snake Killer because it was, a snare was being hit so hard it looked like somebody was trying to kill a snake.

Greg Renoff: But, there were other songs too, and Snake Killer could’ve been another song.

Steve Vai: But, he had some songs, but I don’t recall any of them being written by Aerosmith, okay. That would’ve been on my radar for sure.

Greg Renoff: Yeah, interesting, I’ll send you the little clipping. It’s, yeah, am gonna guess, now that am talking to you, that maybe that was all, Dave’s done with Van Halen doesn’t have a guitar player and needs to get started on the movie.
Steve Vai: What happens in this business a lot of times, you reached out to somebody with my dear and a proposal and all systems look like they are go, so, there’s a tendency, I do it all the time, even though, it’s not a good practice, it’s to leak it into the press, because you are excited about doing it.

Greg Renoff: Yeah, yeah

Steve Vai: And you’re talking to people and people always say what are you doing these days? And it’s the most impossible to resist saying am writing something with Dave Roth, at the time there was a lot of eyes on the band. You know, that might’ve happened where they talked about it but they never actually did it.

Greg Renoff: Right, yeah

Steve Vai: Are you gonna interview Dave for all this?

Greg Renoff: Well, Dave is a little hard to reach. I wrote this book about the early days of Van Halen, Van Halen Rising and I hope to.

Steve Vai: That’s a fucking incredible book!

Greg Renoff: Honestly, am just so flattered!

Steve Vai: It’s the best one.

Greg Renoff: You know, my hope was to try to talk to Dave after I talked to all you guys, and just say look, but you know, he’s a little bit challenging for the average folk to reach, you know, and so, um, I know he’s just come back online. He’d sort of gone black over the last year. He’d like gone offline, no social media, nothing and so am gonna try to get a message to him but we’ll see if that can, that would happen.

Steve Vai: Yeah, I have a hard time getting a hold of him too sometimes, because he’s an enigma, you know. Well, he’s always busy and he’s always been productive, and he doesn’t waste time. You’ll talk to him and he’ll say yeah, I moved to New York for a year and I became a class A medic, paramedic, you know. And you’re like, of course you did!, because that’s what you do. That’s the kind of thing that Dave would do, he would, I have pictures of him that he showed me tugging, pulling, in, he was in the water in the Amazon pulling a boat, of course, they couldn’t get the boat through the weeds. I can’t, I mean, the guy is intense man! I can’t tell you what I’ve learned from him.

Greg Renoff: So the article is gonna conclude basically with the Lucky Strike thing, but it’s gonna wrap up with the end of the, the first tour, the one with Billy. What, what’s your memory as you’re kind of, now you look back on that, what’s your, you said you were young and it was obviously your first huge huge rock gig, what was your experience with that?

Steve Vai: Well, um, sometimes you don’t realize everything that’s going on around you when you’re in it, so when I first met Dave was at his office, and then, the next time was at a rehearsal, in his basement, and we were sequestered in the basement for many, many months, writing and playing, and writing and playing, and Dave is a master at press too. And he had, you know, we were sequestered, I didn’t know what was going on in the outside world, I mean, you gotta remember, I was so young but it was exciting, the thing that was so exciting to me was the rawness of the music, the intensity of the attitude of what we were gonna try to accomplish or what we were aiming on accomplishing. Having Billy as my brother in that band and what we did together and it was the perfect time. It was like the time couldn’t have been more perfect, all the elements came together. The trends at that time were as you know in the 80’s you could wear anything you wanted and boy did we ever, you know, you could put on the biggest stage show, I think, you know, our The amount of light cans that we had on the stage was on the Guinness Book of World Records and we played our ass off and Dave gave us ultimate freedom, you know, infinite freedom on the stage basically to do whatever we wanted and it was just amazing to be on that tour. When I got out on that tour, the thing that, when it really all came home, there was several moments, one was when the record came out, and I just started hearing it, on the radio, I was hearing it, as a matter of fact, the day after it came out I was walking out of the gym and I just walked into the parking lot and I got in this guy’s way and kind of like a jock, kind of a guy, and he rolls down his window and he’s screaming at me, “Get the fuck out of the way!”, whatever he’s saying and he’s just, as he’s jamming to the music in his car and he’s listening to Elephant Gun, and am like, am looking at him and he’s yelling at me, and it’s Hello?

Greg Renoff: Yeah, no

Steve Vai: Yeah, hold on one second okay? Yeah, hold on Hello?

Greg Renoff: Yeah

Steve Vai: Hi, sorry, that was Zakk Wylde

Greg Renoff: Zakk Wylde?

Steve Vai: Yeah, we are doing a tour together, so

Greg Renoff: Oh yeah, yeah, cool, yeah

Steve Vai: So, I was, um,

Greg Renoff: Am just laughing ’cause you’re getting your ass kicked to your own music. The soundtrack.

Steve Vai: No, am looking at the guy and he’s yelling at me with this, you know, freaked out look on his face, while he’s head is bobbing to my guitar. It was hilarious and then the second awakening basically was the first show, and we arrived at the hotel and the hotel was completely festooned with fans and they had to have barriers to get into the hotel, and then the party, but being on the stage that first night in Huntsville, Alabama, it was a shock, because, you are now a rock star performer, and you gotta deliver. And there was 20,000 people, and at one point, Dave does this thing where he just stops and puts the mic out, you know, and it went on for like 10 minutes and the screaming was so loud, that it was, Billy and I were looking at each other, we were like scared. It was louder than our amps, and I just thought, what happened? This is wild, and then the parties, you know, they were just the best. Dave really knows how to throw a party. The whole tour was nothing but a real wild, cool, amazing ride that I am so grateful I had an opportunity to be a part of. I tell you.

Greg Renoff: I have one more question for you, but I’ll tell you what, I talked to Gregg Bissonette and you might’ve been there when this happened, I thought this was such a cool little story he told me. He said that he gave Dave a hug at Lucky Strike and said, Dave, I love you because you gave me my platinum passport, it’s good all over the world, I go anywhere I want and everyone kind of knows me because of your band. I thought that was like the coolest, the coolest thing, you know.

Steve Vai: Well, I mean , I could never, when I do, when I do press and people ask me who my mentors are, my firs mentor was my high school music teacher because he taught me for seven years every day how to write music. And then I took lessons from Joe Satriani for 3 years and he was a powerful mentor. And then I had the great fortune to work for Frank Zappa for years and he was an incredible mentor, but, every one of those people contributed vital things in my learning experience as a professional and an independent musician and then Dave was my real final major mentor because what I learned from him, there was no way I could get from anybody else. When I joined that band I was gawky, I looked like a noodle, I, you know, I had no charisma or stage presence and he worked really hard with me. He took me to the gym five days a week, without fail, worked with me on stage on how to move and just watching him move was, you know, just powerful and his confidence is fierce, it rubs off.

Greg Renoff: Well, yeah, the audacity of everything, I mean, even like the movie, like they’re saying it doesn’t really quite hit you. I talked to Angelus about it too, you know, it’s like this whole, they wanted to basically do in so many words like a Hard Day’s Night 8 to a writer, something like that, you know

Steve Vai: Oh, so you spoke to Pete?

Greg Renoff: I did, I did, yeah, you know, and actually Pete told me it was, which I don’t think he’s gone public about, that it was initially was supposed to be for Van Halen, I mean, that was the original idea, was that, hey, you know what? We are on the top of our game right now, it’s late 1984, let’s make a movie and those guys passed on that, except they went on their own, but, the audacity of that type thing, hey, yeah, you know? But that’s what one of our biggest stars was, like Gregg Bissonette told me the night he heard he was in the band for, they told him he got the gig, that he was on the tonight show with Joan Rivers, it’s like. I mean, that’s what he heard, that’s like over the top.

Steve Vai: And I remember Pete, you know, mentioning that they really wanted to do a Van Halen movie. I don’t know what happened with that, maybe the band wanted or not wanted to, Pete wouldn’t know. But then, nothing is gonna stop Dave from doing what he wants to do.

Greg Renoff: No. Last question for you, which is, where do you see the future for the Eat ‘Em Band?

Steve Vai: Well, you know, I, in all those bands that I was in, in the 80’s and all the people I worked for, I felt like I was a dutiful soldier and that I contributed the best I could authentically because I really liked that music, but my heart was always, well, my heart was in both places, but there was also this brand of music that was just unique to me, and I felt the need, that I had to do. That’s not uncommon and I did it. You know, I am releasing solo records that I love for years and years and there was always a feeling that it would be great to an Eat’em and Smile reunion tour, I mean, I would love to honor that record and that band because it was really a unique band, and Dave, he’s always been, you know, very positive about that idea, you know, obviously, there’s a lot of moving parts and when we did the Lucky Strike thing, it was almost like, you know, rock star interruptus or something. We were ready to play and we were all psyched and we were just, I mean, people say that minutes before we went on, the fire marshal came in but it was seconds, I was standing in front, in back of the curtain just with the hot guitar in my hands and I was ready to start, we were psyched, when I was told we couldn’t play, I did everything I could to get us to play and we just couldn’t. And, I thought, we have to do something, this is too much cool energy to, you know,

Greg Renoff: Yeah
Steve Vai: And, you know, we had a little chat about it afterwards and Dave was just very, very receptive to anything that we’d, we want to do that would work out. Like I said, there are a lot of moving parts, am on tour until you know, mid 2017, and, you know, Gregg is always with Ringo. Everybody has things, but we definitely put it out there that this is something we would like to do. You know, would it be an album or that kind of stuff? I don’t know, I wouldn’t want to get that deep into it yet, but the idea of a legacy honoring of the Eat’em and Smile album and band with it’s 30th anniversary and also, would be really nice, you know. There’s no big commitment, there’s no desire to be big rock stars or have a super group or sell millions of records. It would be about getting out there and just bringing it home, in the way we used to do it.

Greg Renoff: Yeah, yeah

Steve Vai: We’d still have the juice, we do.

Greg Renoff: It would be amazing, I mean, I tell you, everyone I’ve talked to, even, when I talked to, I’ve talked to Ted Templeman frequently and you know, he even says, oh, I’d love, you know, I’d love to do that again, it was just so great and how great you guys were and just how blown away he was when you arranged all the music for Am Easy and Gregg Bissonette called in all the session guys for Am Easy, he just had a blast making the record too so it seems to be unanimous.

Steve Vai: It was a blast working with him too. Gosh! He’s, such a wonderful approach, it was a blessed relief to the way that I usually work.

Greg Renoff: Yeah, I don’t want to keep you because I know you have other stuff to do but I tell you, I’ve gotten a kick reading your old interviews, I now understand how Ted works, and reading how you, you wanted to punch him a million times and Ted, be like no, you did it. What are you talking about? It was one jab.

Steve Vai: I remember we were doing Elephant Gun and I said, well, I wanna double the part, he goes, what do you mean? Double the part? You know, double it, because it’s all over the place, I was like, I can double every single little thing perfectly, and he said, well, yeah, I actually felt like he didn’t want to take the time and I said, let me just, let me just try it. So, I started doing it in the middle of the double, I broke a string and Ted said, well, you know, it’s, it’s, probably just leave it with the one guitar. Then he left the studio and I finished it and when he heard it, he liked it. So, that’s on the record.

Greg Renoff: Okay, that’s cool! Yeah, yeah, yeah Ted told me the work he had with the VP, by that point the record, the company VP, am sure he was thinking like budget, I don’t know that, but might wonder we are spending so much money here, it’s done, it’s good, let’s go, you know, so. Steve, it was a real thrill to talk to you, thank you so much for taking the time and

Steve Vai: If you need anything let me know, ’cause I really like the way you write, there’s an equilibrium there and you do your research really well and your concern about facts and anybody that you’re gonna write a book about, I think it’s fortunate because, it’s good documents for their cache, so. Anything I can do for you, let me know.

Greg Renoff: Oh, it’s a real thrill, thank you so much Steve, have a great day!