NINETEEN ’87
Joe Perry gets sober, Steve Vai and Billy Sheehan
team up with David Lee Roth and Randy Rhoads is
honored with a special collector’s edition.
Dear Guitar World,
My wife and I have to number as one of our great thrills in our son Steve’s musical career the cover story of your March 1987 issue. Both of your interviews—Steve’s and Billy Sheehan’s—were outstandingly written. You people are absolutely great. We have had the pleasure of meeting David Lee Roth, Billy and Greg Bissonette—we would take them as “sons” any day. We are very proud that our son Steve is in such fine and great company. Frank Zappa is a friend of ours, too—and it was he who told us that Steve was great. Steve was only 19 then. But, of course, you know that when Frank speaks, the music world stands up and listens. We read your magazine faithfully, picking up copies at Focus II Guitars. Thank you for your respect—we hope someday to meet you.
—Theresa and Johnny Vai, Carle Place, NY
JUNE Guitar World’s first ever tribute to Randy Rhoads features reminiscences from Sharon Osbourne, former Quiet Riot bandmates and pictures from the guitarist’s last photo shoot. On the subject of the newly discovered Tribute live album, Ozzy Osbourne says, “When we found the tapes, we were devastated. The tape was only on for a minute or so and all I could say was, ‘My God!’ It’s that good.”
COVER STORIES BY JOSEPH BOSSO, JOE LALAINA. BILLY CIOFFI AND JOHN STIX; PHOTO BY JOHN LIVZEY
JANUARY As his Trilogy album hits store shelves, Yngwie Malmsteen takes time out to talk gear, his approach to guitar, and the impact of his playing on a generation of new guitarists.
COVER STORY BY JOE LALAINA PHOTO BY JOHN PEDEN
MARCH Bassist Billy Sheehan and guitarist Steve Vai join forces and provide a shedderific foundation for David Lee Roth’s Eat ’Em and Smile album.
COVER STORIES BY BILL MILKOWSKI AND JOE LALAINA PHOTO BY GLEN LA FERMAN
APRIL Police guitarist Andy Summers breaks out with Quark, his first solo album—his latest in a string of guitar-playing activities.
COVER STORIES BY GENE SANTORO PHOTO BY JOHN PEDEN
DECEMBER Aerosmith return after four years with Permanent Vacation, their strongest album in years and the first to reflect a newly clean and sober Aerosmith. “I’m so much more aware now, so much freer,” says Joe Perry. “Drinking blocked so many areas, and though I could occasionally ‘throw a few back’ and get to that place, the more you drink the harder it gets. There were things I felt that I couldn’t tap into, but I can now.”
COVER STORY BY STEVEN ROSEN : PHOTO BY GLEN LA FERMAN
JULY As The Joshua Tree propels U2 to new levels of rock superstardom, The Edge talks to Guitar World about the progression from The Unforgettable Fire to the new album.
COVER STORY BY JOSEPH BOSSO PHOTO BY ANTON CORBIJN
SEPTEMBER Yes bassist Chris Squire sings the praises of Trevor Rabin, the South African hotshot who revitalized the Yes formula in the mid Eighties, and reflects on the success of “Owner of a Lonely Heart.”
COVER STORY BY BUD SCOPPA PHOTO BY NEAL PRESTON
NOVEMBER With Dire Straits on top of the world, Mark Knopfler takes time out to reflect on his band’s recent mass success and various side projects, including performing with Eric Clapton.
COVER STORY BY GENE SANTORO PHOTO BY ANN SUMMA
JAN. 1987
VOL. 8 / NO. 1
Steve Vai
With the David Lee Roth world tour just weeks away, Steve Vai falls victim to a major guitar and amp robbery. Guitar World spreads the word about the missing gear with this special report by Pierre de Beauport.
It is late July 1986. Los Angeles. At Steve Vai’s recording studio. The same studio that produced the solo albums that have haunted guitarists since their release. Through the glass I could see Steve playing furiously and I was in a position to do my hero a favor. I entered the room and heard the squealing licks that filled the air. I listened, awestruck, and hesitated to interrupt. I wasn’t simply an admirer; I had a purpose as well. I then presented Steve with the custom 30-fret Guild I had designed for him.
Rumor had it that all his equipment had been stolen just three weeks before the 12- to 18-month world tour began. Speaking to Steve, I found rumor to be fact: nearly all his gear had been stolen from the theater in Pasadena where the David Lee Roth band had been rehearsing. He was in trouble and somehow I was there at the right time to be of some help. Steve smiled, and immediately began introducing his fingers to their new friend. Vai unleashed his maniacal licks on the ax and seemed at home with his new mistress. It sounded like the trouble just disappeared. He turned the whole bad scene into something to get inspired about. Although, in later conversation, he was evidently apoplectic about his stolen harem of axes.
Missing were five custom guitars and two custom amplifiers. All of the axes are easily recognizable and two were featured in the band’s video, “Yankee Rose.” Both Steve and his longtime guitar tech, Elwood Francis, filled me in on the details of each missing ax.
First up was the eyeball, or “Steve Eye,” yellow Jackson Soloist. The finish has Steve’s personal design of a pyramid with an eye in the middle and the number seven on each outside corner. Loaded with a Floyd Rose tremolo and custom-wound DiMarzio pickups, this is one of the axes seen in the “Yankee Rose” video.
The second was a custom-designed green Swiss-cheese guitar built for Steve by his childhood friend Joe Despagni. The body was metallic green with holes carved through the body of various sizes and colors. There’s a handle carved in the body as well, to enable Steve to hold the ax and play with one hand. Loaded with a gold Floyd Rose and one humbucker, this beauty also shares spotlight in the “Yankee Rose” video.
Third: a pink and black tiger-striped Guild 284 Avatar with left-handed headstock. The ax had a Floyd Rose, two EMG humbuckers and one EMG single-coil in the middle position. The serial number is HC100788.
Fourth: a white Guild 281 Flyer, serial number HC101025. This guitar was built for Steve to use while touring with Alcatrazz. It’s loaded with a Floyd Rose, two EMG humbuckers and one EMG single-coil.
Fifth: an Ibanez two-humbucker Strat-styled ax with a fluorescent snakeskin print for a finish. No further descriptions were given. This ax was used as a backup.
Steve’s custom rebuilt Marshalls were missing as well. Two 100-watt heads rebuilt by Jose Arredondo. Says Vai, “Those amps were especially loud, but they had a great tone; they won’t be easily replaced.”
“We want that gear back,” says tech Elwood Francis. “I can’t imagine what someone’s doing with that gear except playing it in their house and looking at pictures of Steve. That gear is so recognizable, there’s no way it could be used by anyone else. I mean, who else would play anything like that except Steve Vai?”
Steve was not alone this past summer. Stevie Ray Vaughan, Missing Persons and Kiss’ Bruce Kulick had the exact same misfortunes. Further details of each incident will be published in Guitar World. If anyone knows of any further information concerning the location of any of the missing gear, please contact the magazine. 
UPDATE In June 2010 we asked Steve to comment on the guitars that were stolen in 1986. Here is his response:
“The Jackson ‘eyeball’ guitar actually showed up a few months later. For some reason it was taken from the venue prior to the theft and was not actually stolen; it is now the property of the Hard Rock Café. In general, the guitars that were stolen didn’t mean that much to me, with the exception of the ‘Swiss-cheese’ guitar. Joe Despagni was my best friend since before Kindergarten and he made that guitar for me from scratch. The other guitars were spares and I got them all for free, and even collected $20,000 in insurance money after the theft, which I felt weird about.
“While I was on the Skyscraper tour with David Lee Roth in 1988 I had two other valuable guitars stolen. One was a 1967 Sunburst Stratocaster and the other was the first floral pattern Jem ever made. The Strat was the first very expensive guitar I ever purchased–I had looked forward to getting one for like 20 years–and the Jem was a tremendous ax. They were both priceless to me. A year or so later we got a call from someone who found the Jem and bought it for $1,500 just so he could return it to me. I arranged for him to meet me so I could verify that it was my darling floral guitar, and I ended up letting him keep it because I felt bad about him paying for it just to get it back to me. I even canceled the insurance claim. I felt a lot of karma was cleaned up through this whole thing, and I’m at peace with it all now.”
Michael Angelo Batio Makes His GW Debut
Before joining Nitro and becoming known to the Headbangers Ball masses for his quadruple-neck guitar pyrotechnics, Michael Angelo Batio was a relative unknown playing with the Chicago metal band Holland. Guitar World took notice of the up-and-coming shredder in its January 1987 issue, noting that the guitarist “has been strutting his stuff on an asymmetrical double-necked custom Dean guitar by playing both necks simultaneously, criss-crossing hands and Lord-knows-what! Michael, the GW staff acknowledges your talents and applauds your handy fretwork.” In the following issue, the magazine acknowledged that the guitar ace was misidentified as Michael Batio “due to the insidious rattlings of an overzealous proofreader, who dug into the guitarist’s discology to produce his given name rather than his stage name.”
MARCH / VOL. 8 / NO. 3
TED NUGEN
The Motor City Madman takes aim and fires at a slew of his contemporaries.
Jeff Beck:“An innovator—a master toucher and emoter of guitar fluidity.”
Jimmy Page: “Grossly overrated, a real fumble-finger, a guitar player who obviously aspired to be as colorful and lyrical as Jeff Beck but fell flat on his stoned face.”
Jimi Hendrix: “A master craftsman, a pilot of an emotional roller coaster who came the closest to anyone in the history of the guitar to master the unlimited dimensions of the tonal and lyrical capabilities of the instrument.”
Eddie Van Halen: “A contemporary leader of the pack with as much impact as any individual guitar player who ever lived—an innovator when innovation seemed to be attacked, an inspiration to every guitar player who wants to take the lyrical interpretation of the instrument beyond its confines.”
Billy Gibbons: “My favorite guitar player in the whole world. He’s got more soul than any black guitarist I’ve ever heard.”
Stevie Ray Vaughan: “I love his style, but I don’t see the correlation between him and Jimi Hendrix that everybody tries to make.”
Ace Frehley: “He was always so stoned that I couldn’t decipher a lot of his playing. But the nights he shined, he shined fantastically.”
Keith Richards: “The all-time slop master—the most grunting, groaning, soulful, blues-oriented guitarist who ever lived. He plays Chuck Berry music so much like Chuck Berry that he should get a Nobel Peace Prize. Keith Richards is probably the single most influential guitarist I’ve ever heard.” Jake E. Lee: “He’s very good, but a real standard player.”
Ted Nugent: “An uninhibited, Chuck Berry devotee but experimented with and broke a lot of ground on feedback techniques and solid variations in tonal and dissonant utilizations. I’m one of the best guitarists in the world, and I play with great emotion.”
APRIL / VOL. 8 / NO. 4
BUDDY GUY
The blues legend recounts the night he performed with Jimi Hendrix in New York City–as word of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination shook the world.
“THE MOST MEMORABLE night I had with Jimi was the night Dr. King got assassinated,” Guy told Gene Santoro. “I was playing down in the Village in a place called the Generation Club, and all of a sudden they say Dr. King got shot. Then a few hours or so later they say he’s dead. Then the mayor closed all the bars because the rioting was really starting to tee off. So B.B. King couldn’t play, ’cause where he was playing they served booze, and Janis Joplin was there ’cause she had to close. And Hendrix was there. At the time I didn’t know who he was; my manager knew him, y’know. So I was up onstage really putting on this show when somebody came up and whispered right behind and said, ‘Just don’t quit doing what you doing; can I tape it?’ So that night I had the chance to play with Hendrix, B.B. King and Janis Joplin. If I just only had any kind of tape of that...
“That was one of those nights, I think we were all primed, too, playing blues on a sad day—it was a good mixture. After that Hendrix used to come in whenever I was playing: I remember on several occasions he’d have a gig somewhere and find out I was playing in New York and cancel. He’d come tell me, ‘I canceled a gig just to catch you, man.’ Oh yeah, he was a good guy.”
Guitar Sam Begins His Long GW Career
Of all the departments that have graced the pages of Guitar World throughout the years, our Guitar Sam comic strip by Jim Ryan was among the most beloved and longest running. The strip featured the amusing misadventures of Sam Barker, an uncomplicated but musically consumed young dude who wandered through life clinging to his one true love, his guitar. Guitar Sam debuted in the March 1987 issue and appeared in the magazine until the September 2004 issue, coming to an end with Sam being goofed on by yet another female for his six-string infatuation. For 16 years of loyal service, Jim Ryan, we salute you.
SEPT. 1987
VOL. 8 / NO. 9
Metallica’s James Hetfield & Kirk Hammett
Guitar World’s first coverage of Metallica appeared in the September 1987 issue. In the following excerpt, the two guitarists talk to writer Deborah Frost about the circumstances surrounding Hammett’s hiring.
By 1984, Metallica had relocated to San Francisco, where they became kings of a burgeoning metal scene. After crossing the country in a U-Haul, they were ready to record their debut album, Kill ’Em All, for Mega-force Records in New York, when they decided lead guitarist Dave Mustaine had to go. “We wanted someone with more feeling,” explains James Hetfield. Enter Kirk Hammett, lead guitarist for Exodus, whose former manager was Metallica’s soundman.
“If Kirk hadn’t worked out,” says Hetfield, “I don’t know what we would have done. We flew him out and we had no money to send him home. I look back now, it’s like, whoa. He plugged in, me and Lars [Ulrich, drums] just looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah! It’s a lead instead of that doodling.’ Dave always seemed to go on and on.”
For Hammett, Metallica’s offer was “a huge risk that paid off,” says Hammett. “I never was 100 percent sure I’d get the success we have now.” A pre-schooler in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, Hammett was surrounded by the music of his teenaged brother. “I knew all about Jimi Hendrix and Cream and Santana, the Beatles, Grateful Dead, Rolling Stones, Jethro Tull, Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane. All that music was very influential to me.” Then, Hammett says, in a confession that may blow all of the PMRC theories straight to hell, “I started listening to all this stuff that kids listened to back then—the Partridge Family, Jackson Five, the Osmonds.” At 15, he traded a Kiss album and 10 bucks for “some Montgomery Ward special that had weird gold cellophane pickups.”
Unlike Hetfield, whose family was his first fan club, Hammett was discouraged from playing.
“When I started to cut school, they associated it with my guitar playing. They thought it was going nowhere. It was a constant battle. All the equipment I ever got, I had to pay for by working in places like Burger King and washing dishes.”
Eventually he scrounged up enough money to buy a white Stratocaster. I never knew when I first started playing guitar why he did that. The reason I do it now is because it’s easier to change strings. I played that for a while. It used to have a different pickup in it every other month.”
When he first heard UFO’s “Mother Mary,” he was “blown away” and soon traded the Strat for a Flying V. In addition to Hendrix and UFO guitarist Michael Schenker, he listened to Pat Travers, Ritchie Blackmore, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Eddie Van Halen and Blue Oyster Cult’s Buck Dharma.
In 1980, Hammett was wandering around a record store with his friend John Marshall (who became his guitar roadie in Exodus and Metallica, eventually playing onstage when Hetfield broke his wrist) and was attracted to the illustration on the cover of the first Iron Maiden record. “All the heavy stuff that was out—UFO, Judas Priest, Scorpions—was a bit faster, the guitar changes were heavier, the vocals raunchier,” says Hammett. Like Lars Ulrich in his native Denmark, Hammett became obsessed with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and English bands like Angel Witch and the Tygers of Pan Tang.
When he formed his “first real professional band,” Exodus, he wanted it to sound like a combination of his favorites—Motörhead, Tygers, Iron Maiden and UFO. He had learned to read music and played Bach and Haydn in a classical guitar trio in high school. But just before joining Metallica, he took lessons from Joe Satriani (who also taught Steve Vai), whom Hammett describes as “absolutely brilliant. He’s the best guitar player I know. He taught me a lot about scales, three-octave scales, arpeggios, basic theory, modes, cycle of fifths and how to make a guitar solo harmonically tight, basically how to fit in best with the chords I’m working with.”
Instead of continuing lessons, as he would have liked, Hammett flew to New York, had a week of rehearsals and played his first gig with Metallica. Three weeks later, he was in a recording studio for the first time in his life—and, as he adds, “to make an album, on top of that.”
“I was extremely nervous when it came time to put down leads,” says Hammett.
Despite his obvious facility, Hammett doesn’t see himself as a guitar hero. “Jimi Hendrix is like a god to me. I don’t see myself in the same light; I’m just another guitar player.”
