My Jam with Steve Vai at Vai Academy 6.0

I thought I’d share a little video of me cuttin’ heads with Jack Butler himself. STEVE F*$@^ING VAI and his amazing band! SPOILER ALERT! I Lost! haha Initially, I signed up late for this event and the company never announced that there would be a cutoff as to who could jam with Steve because they had so many people this time around and time limitations. About 60 of us were left off. I told them during the camp that it was just “a little Soul Crushing“. But as it turned out I met a dad and his son attending while checking into the hotel. We were chatting and I told them I just found out about not being able to do the jam. But a couple days later, the kid comes and finds me and says. “I want to give my pass to you so you can take my place and jam with Steve.“ I’m like, WHAT? Turns out he had to leave super early the next day to catch a very early flight and probably couldn’t even be there for it anyway. So grateful to that Father/son. But now I’m like, DAMN! I didn’t prepare anything! So I quickly looked for an easy jam and found Steve’s version of Frank Zappa’s “My Guitar Killed Your Mama“ from back in the G3 days with Satch and Eric Johnson. Ran through it a few times (Ok, maybe like a dozen) around 1:30am Saturday and hoped to remember it enough to not embarrass myself Sunday around 9pm. Too bad the Sound guy was about as asleep as I was feeling for my set, but that too is Rock and Roll. I couldn’t hear much of what I was playing. But still, all fun! I think Steve liked the jam because he gave me an extra minute and half. lol Just a surreal experience.