Hi, I’ll try to be as brief as I can, but I’m dying to share with you what happened to me in 1993…
We went to Mulhouse (a town on the North-East of France) in November 1993 to see Steve Vai performing during the ‘Sex & Religion’ tour. The musicians were Steve, Scott Thunes on bass, Devin Townsend on vocals AND guitar (and I mean Guitar), along with a keyboard player and a drummer whose name I didn’t catch. The show was absolutely fantastic and astonishing.
After the show we waited near the tour buses for about 2 hours, when Steve came to us, quite simply I must say, and he was absolutely kind, warm and friendly. I couldn’t believe that this was the same man as the crazy maniac we’ve just saw on stage 2 hours before! As a welcome message to Steve I started to sing ‘Stevie’s in town…’ (an adaptation of ‘Frankie’s in town’, a song about Zappa I heard on a bootleg). Steve immediatly recognized this one and asked: ‘Where did you get that?’ I was embarassed when I mumbled the word ‘bootleg’. We discussed a little about further projects, I told him it was me who shouted ‘Salamanders in the Sun’ between two songs during the show, and I made him sign on my score of ‘Answers’ along with my personal copy of ‘Flex-able Leftovers’ (the original small vinyl record – how proud was I to handle it to him!). We did more chatting and then he said goodbye and we let him go… Unfortunately, nobody had taken any photograph, so the only links I have to this moment is my memory (and the autographs, of course).
Needless to say I was feeling very, very happy the next days…