EVEN STEVEN
BY THE STANDARDS TO WHICH WE USUALLY tend to hold rock stars, Steve Vai doesn’t quite fit: He’s never been arrested. He’s never punched anybody out. He doesn’t have a drug or alcohol problem. He’s never wrecked a hotel room or driven a car into a swimming pool. He doesn’t engage in Twitter wars with fellow musicians (in fact, he routinely offers kind words for anybody he’s ever played with, and those compliments are summarily returned). He’s never released a sex tape, nor does he have a string of ex-wives dishing dirt on him. Truth is, his home life could be described as a model of everyday suburban stability: He’s been married to the same woman, Pia, for 31 years, and the couple have two great kids, Fire and Julian Angel.
So how is it, then, that Steve Vai is a rock star? “Well, I would hope the answer lies in the music itself,” he replies. “You can make the music without all that other stuff. See, I fell in love with rock ‘n’ roll as a kid, and it’s stayed with me ever since. The energy of it, the sound, the melodies, the freedom — it got in my blood. I knew at a very young age that I wanted to play this kind of music — well, of course, in my own way — and that’s really been what’s guided me throughout my life. When I think about people I know or have met who are quote-unquote ‘rock stars,’ their temperaments vary greatly — they’re everything from really depressed people to very centered and happy people. And it’s not uncommon to dabble in various vices — drugs, sex, money. But for me, those things never really had much of an attraction. There was always something in me that never let me take things too far.”
For Vai, the secret to avoiding some of the pitfalls that have crippled a few of his contemporaries lies in a carefully considered choice between impulses. “It really comes down to two options,” he says. “There are bad ideas, which are the dangerous indulgences — having a drug monkey on your back or complicating your life with affairs — and all those things can destroy your creativity. I was always drawn to the power of a really good idea,
