Steve Vai - Live at the Astoria London
Performance 
Production
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Steve Vai - Live at the Astoria London
Performance |
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I was introduced to Steve Vai for the first time via the 1986 movie Crossroads, which starred Ralph Macchio in an update to the famous story of a blues guitarist who sells his soul to the devil. In this version, Vai plays the devil's guitarist, who Macchio's character must duel in the end to win back his mentor's soul. Seeing Vai play in that movie was the first time I had been in total awe of a guitarist since Eddie Van Halen revolutionized rock guitar back in the late 70's. I immediately went out and got the album Vai made with the band Alcatraz, and then picked up his later work on David Lee Roth's first two solo albums, and the album he did with Whitesnake. His guitar playing was incredible on all of these albums, but the problem with Steve Vai has never been with his guitar playing, it has been with his songwriting skills. The guy just isn't much of a songwriter. His solo albums have been very hit and miss, and generally disappointing. Vai has never achieved the commercial appeal that his mentor and former guitar teacher Joe Satriani has achieved, and is doesn't appear that he has particularly tried to. His albums have been very eclectic, and esoteric collections of guitar wizardry that have great appeal to his devoted fans, and guitar fanatics in general, but provide little for the mainstream rock music fan to grasp on to. Live At The Astoria London is an overall excellent presentation of a rock guitar god in his prime. Vai is a guitarist's guitarist, whose virtuosity is almost unmatched. Professional and aspiring guitarists will watch this video and just shake their heads in amazement at his technique. Vai is able to create a symphony of sounds on his guitar using his fingers, tongue, whammy-bar, slide, and a variety of other tricks. His songs vary tremendously from delicate ballads, to quirky sound experiments, to jazz/rock fusion, as well as ferocious heavy metal assaults. You just never know what to expect. The DVD is a combination of two night's shows that have been seamlessly edited together to appear as one concert. His band for this tour is an all-star lineup featuring legendary bassist, and his partner from the David Lee Roth days, Billy Sheehan, as well as Tony Macalpine, who is a minor legendary shredder in his own right. Long time Vai drummer-extraordinaire Virgil Donati, and guitarist Dave Weiner fill out the rest of the band. Having two extra guitarists and a keyboardist in the band provide for a full and powerful sound, as well as accurate live reproductions of some of Vai's more complex and multi-layered songs. The concert begins on a high note with a smoking performance of the Sheehan-penned "Shyboy", from the fist David Lee Roth album. Vai takes the stage and performs the entire song blindfolded - one of his many gimmicks during this concert. From there, Vai tears through over two hours worth of songs from his solo albums, as well as faithful covers of Jimi Hendrix's "Fire" and "Little Wing". Vai is sort of a modern day Jimi Hendrix, without the prolific songwriting skills. He sounds stunning playing these great songs, which makes me wish he was in a band with songwriters who could feed him some worthy songs to perform. Unless you are intimately familiar with all of Vai's album, I admittedly am not, many of these songs will tend to all meld together and sound like one long jam. Vai has a good sense of humor, and appears very down to earth, which is very contrasting to his flamboyant, "guitar-god" persona. He interacts with the crowd a lot, joking and teasing throughout the show, and flaunts numerous costume changes including an oversized pimp hat, and a headset full of strobe and laser lights He does get a little annoying at times with the over the top flamboyance and nearly constant "look at how cool I am" facial expressions and mannerisms, but the crowd seems to eat it up. Vai is generous to his bandmates and allows them to share his limelight by giving them ample solo spots and featured performances. Some of the concert highlights feature frenzied guitar duals between Vai and Macalpine, where they match each other's fretboard attacks note for note, and also play impossibly fast runs in perfect harmony. Macalpine equals Vai's speed and proficiency, but is no match for his charismatic technique. The highlight of these duels was during "Down Deep", where they simultaneously fingered each other's guitars while the other person picked, all the while spinning around in a circle. It took almost until the end of the concert to hear my favorite Vai song, "For The Love Of God". This stunning song is possibly the finest instrumental rock song ever written. Although I preferred Vai's performance of this song on the G3 Live In Concert DVD, he still brought the house down with his intense and emotional performance at this concert. He always plays this song with a genuine emotion that is very moving. What is most disappointing about this DVD is the weak production quality. The camera work, in particular, was very amateurish looking. There was numerous shaky, and out of focus shots, and the camera would often be too close, or appear from a terrible angle. Some of the post production camera tricks were ridiculous as well, including cheesy spinning fade-outs, and making the picture look like a film negative. This is unfortunate because when the stage was shown using medium and long distance shots, without super-quick angle changes, it looked very good. The picture quality was only decent. It was soft and somewhat grainy, and the longer shots were often out of focus. The 5.1 surround mix was rather unique sounding in that all of the instruments were basically mixed equally amongst all of the speakers. The rear surrounds were virtually equal in output to the front speakers. The middle channel actually had the least output. I was not particularly crazy about this type of mix. It didn't sound like a true live environment. The real crime is that Sheehan's incredible bass playing was disrespected by a rather weak bass response. I only saw Steve Vai perform live once during the 2001 G3 tour with Satriani and John Petrucci of Dream Theater. His live performances have a unique dynamic that videos don't quite capture. The G3 format is the perfect setting for instrumental guitarists like Satriani and Vai because only the most die-hard, guitar fanatic is not going to get bored of two straight hours of guitar instrumentals from the same performer. The G3 tours smartly compact each guitarist's set into a fine tuned, hour long show that leaves you begging for more, instead of wanting to head for the door early. Reviewed by Paul M. Roy - July 2004 |
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Running Time: 141 Minutes |
DVD Release Date - December 2003 |