The night Steve Vai left David Lee Roth's band, Eddie Van Halen called him out of the blue.
“I didn't even know how he knew,” Vai recalls. “He said, ‘You have to come over to my house,’ and we kind of struck up a friendship that was very heavy for, like, four months where we were virtually talking every day. It was weird.”
The timing was remarkable. Vai had spent the previous few years occupying the guitar spot in Roth's solo band — a role that inevitably invited comparisons with the man he'd replaced. But rather than becoming rivals, Vai and Eddie would develop a close friendship that lasted decades.
It's well documented that, after leaving Van Halen, Roth turned to Vai to launch his solo career — and, perhaps more importantly, make a play for Eddie's guitar-hero throne. Vai, however, has consistently maintained that he approached the job with respect, not competition.
Speaking with wrestler-turned-podcaster Chris Jericho alongside Joe Satriani — with whom Vai has just released the debut SatchVai album, The Sea of Emotion — Vai looked back on how he approached the high-profile assignment.
“I sharpened my knives,” he jokes when asked about joining Roth. “When Edward hit the scene and that first record came out, I remember thinking, ‘game on.’ He raised the bar for all of us.”
Still, Vai says he was nervous about joining Roth's band for only about a minute before embracing what was a hugely intimidating job. The partnership proved successful, even if Vai has since acknowledged that he was relatively inexperienced at the time.
Their debut, Eat 'Em and Smile, turned 40 this year and went platinum, as did its 1988 follow-up, Skyscraper. But that marked the end of Vai's time with Roth — and the beginning of an unexpected friendship.
How Eddie knew Vai had left Roth's band remains a mystery. Maybe it was coincidence, but the timing was extraordinary: On the very day Vai's tenure with Roth ended, his supposed rival reached out to welcome him into his world. Whatever tension might have existed between them gave way to a remarkably close friendship.
That friendship also gave Vai a rare opportunity to hear guitar riffs and solos that have yet to see the light of day — although Alex Van Halen and Steve Lukather are working to change that.
“During that period, I’d go up to his house and he would play me this amazing stuff because Edward was like an audio pack rat,” Vai continues. “He was showing me the studio that was being built at the time and he would just go in there and he'd record by himself all you know tons and tons of stuff. I just thought, ‘Make a solo record,’ but [he’d say], ‘No, I’m Van Halen.’”
Satriani, whom Roth touted in the 1990s, has since taken on an Eddie Van Halen-adjacent role in Sammy Hagar's Best of All Worlds band. Hagar has been full of praise for the way Satriani has approached the job. But Vai isn't convinced anyone can truly replicate his late friend's magic.
“I've heard so many people play his songs, play his parts, some people more authentically than others, some people more personally like themselves, and some people it's just an abysmal disaster,” he laughs. “But I’m yet to hear anybody, especially myself, have that DNA in their fingers.”
It's a big part of why Vai has refused to reproduce Eddie's solos note for note.
Meanwhile, after reports emerged that a second Crossroads film was in the works, with Vai potentially reprising his infamous shredding role, the guitarist has since shut down the rumors, explaining how a misunderstanding sparked the story.
