During a new interview with VRP Rocks, the musician recalled the day Alice Cooper gifted him a motorcycle, which Child did not know how to ride. As a result, the guitar virtuoso Steve Vai wanted to give him lessons. However, the accident he had been into almost marked the end of his life. The singer recalled:
“Alice Cooper had given me a motorcycle. Steve is a big motorcycle enthusiast. I didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle, the gas tank had Alice Cooper’s skull with the spider eyes, and it’s a demon bike. It said ‘Demon Child’ on the side; I still have the gas tank. So Steve Vai took me out to teach me how to ride a motorcycle. I almost killed myself.”
Child explained how he lost control of the motorcycle and what happened next:
“I lost the control of the bike very early on, rode up on somebody’s yard, it looked like I was going 60 miles an hour into somebody’s plank glass window, and at the last minute, I don’t know how I did it, I stopped. I was able to stop it. I was so frightened I walked the motorcycle back. I killed myself. It was four blocks, I walked it back. So, that’s always a funny story with Steve Vai, but he’s totally on another level.”
Child’s Thoughts On Steve Vai
Whether they work together or not, Child has some thoughts about the guitar virtuoso. In an earlier interview, the discussion touched upon the style of music that appeared to momentarily overshadow Desmond Child’s radio-friendly rock: grunge. From Child’s perspective, he highlighted a particular deficiency in grunge, emphasizing the absence of a guitar hero element in that genre. While touching on the impact of grunge, he mentioned Vai and compared the two:
“That kind of music was overshadowed by Nirvana, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ and the whole Seattle sound, which brought in grunge. It was the complete opposite of the extroverted presentations: chest out, reaching out, looking up. The new generation were what we’d call ‘shoegazers’ – they just looked down because they had to because they weren’t really guitarists and couldn’t really play.”
Apparently, those who make grunge music were not ‘extraordinary’ players such as Vai:
“They could play three or four chords and had trouble with that. They were not virtuosos like Joe Perry, Richie Sambora, Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai, who could light up the stage with their extraordinary playing.”
You can see the interview below.
