Steve Vai was just 20 years old when he met one of his biggest heroes, Brian May, at the legendary Rainbow Bar & Grill in Los Angeles, a city he had only recently moved to. But when the young guitarist was given the chance to play May’s Red Special electric guitar, he discovered he was completely out of his depth.
Vai had earned his big break just two years earlier as Frank Zappa’s transcriptionist — a daunting role that required him to meticulously notate Zappa’s complex compositions. He excelled at it. After mastering the job, Vai was soon hired as Zappa’s lead guitarist and relocated from New York to Los Angeles as his career began accelerating at a dizzying pace.
Not long after arriving in California, he ran into his idol. May, he recalls, proved to be the quintessential English gentleman. But the Queen guitarist’s famously idiosyncratic instrument was one the young shredder simply couldn’t tame.
“Just a year before that, I was in my teenage bedroom with Queen posters and Led Zeppelin all over the walls,” Vai said in conversation with Q104.3. “I walk into the Rainbow, and there’s Brian May standing at the bar. And I just thought, How is this possible?”
It’s also a story he shared with followers on Instagram earlier this year while showing off a new custom-built tribute to the Red Special. Vai recalled how “time slowed down” when he was invited to a Queen rehearsal at Zoetrope Studios.
Even with Freddie Mercury in the room, his attention immediately fixed on May’s guitar — the instrument May famously built with his father from reclaimed wood and household materials.
“Is that it?” Vai remembered asking.
But when he finally picked it up, the experience wasn’t what he expected.
“I just remember thinking, ‘I can’t play this thing — the neck is like a baseball bat,’” he said. “It’s got, like, gauge .008 strings. It was a miracle to actually have the guitar under my fingers, and he allowed that.”
“After idolizing that guitar my whole youth, holding it was seismic,” Vai added on Instagram. “I thought, ‘This is it — I’m finally going to sound like Brian May.’ But much to my chagrin, I didn’t. I sounded like me. And between the gauge .008 strings, ultra-low action, and a neck the size of a small tree, I played it like a baby giraffe on roller skates.”
According to longtime Meat Loaf guitarist Paul Crook (via Ultimate Guitar), May once joked that the Red Special’s famously chunky neck partly came about because he simply grew tired of sanding it down. In reality, its dimensions were modeled on the neck of an old Egmond acoustic guitar he loved as a teenager.
Speaking at a fan event in late 2024, May explained, “I wanted the fingerboard to feel the same way that it did. So I measured it all up and fashioned it out of the 100-year-old fireplace. I pretty much matched the profile. And then, of course, I put the fingerboard on and the frets on. What I forgot was that the fingerboard had thickness as well. So that was a bit of an elementary mistake.
“At first I thought, ‘Oh, I’m not sure if I can handle this,’” he added. “But what I found was I really liked it — it seemed to sit in my hand better.”
It was a similar story for Tony Iommi, who was recently gifted a left-handed Red Special. The neck on the one-of-a-kind model was crafted to match his trusty JayDee Old Boy SG. The instrument was built by esteemed luthier John Diggins as a tribute to Iommi’s iconic SG, the guitar he turned to while recording Black Sabbath’s groundbreaking debut album.
Elsewhere, May has discussed clashing with Mercury over whether one of Queen’s biggest hits should include a guitar solo, arguing that their creative friction was key to the band’s success. Vai, meanwhile, has been reflecting on the radical guitar-mod ideas he absorbed from Zappa — concepts that eventually helped shape his signature Ibanez JEM.
