Time is the fruit of patience

Continuing my trip back through the 1990 album charts.

27/05/90 : Passion And Warfare : Steve Vai

I know that Steve Vai is a highly respected guitarist, but I've got no more clue about him than that.  I also don't have a great history with albums from highly respected guitarists, so I'd have to say my confidence isn't sky high going in to this one (and nothing would have convinced me to buy it - 7/32).

Ohmigod, this is rubbish.  The guitar playing is indeed of a very high quality, but man cannot live on guitar playing alone and everything else about it is just pretentious bombast.  "The Audience Is Listening" deserves a specific mention for being particularly rubbish, with a teacher introducing "young Steve Vai" to the class to play a lovely tune and then providing an increasingly histrionic running commentary on how much she doesn't like it.  I can imagine he's very impressive live, but such virtuosity often doesn't translate onto an album - and it definitely doesn't here.

We're at #8 in the charts with a new entry this week on the start of an eight week run - it's more than I'd give it, I'll be honest.  The top five this week were Soul II Soul (a new entry), Madonna (another new entry - I enjoyed imagining how pissed off she was about being #2), The Carpenters best-of (just off a FIVE week run at the top spot and on a 52 week run!), a Big Country best-of (a fine collection of tracks in my somewhat biased opinion) and Phil Collins and the next highest new entry was En Vogue (#24).

Wikipedia has quite a few sentences on the album but they seem to bear little relation to each other - the only thing that jumped out at me is the random fact that David Coverdale and various other members of Whitesnake appear on the album, quite obviously doing small spoken parts.  There's no word on the critical reception but it did OK commercially getting to the top thirty in quite a few countries - the only place it did better than here though was in Finland where it got to #3.  His entry is more interesting - he was quite lucky there was an older pupil as his school to teach him guitar and he was even luckier that said pupil was one Joe Satriani.  He started his career transcribing music for Frank Zappa (obviously) and since then he's played with pretty much everyone...

"Customers also listened to" Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, John Petrucci and Paul Gilbert - I don't know anything about the last three but I'm guessing they might play the guitar.  As Steve Vai very much does, but I can't help but feel that songwriting isn't his forte - but maybe I'm just a heathen and best ignored in such matters.

20/05/90 - Astonishingly successful
03/06/90 - Doubly enjoyable