Take a space suit — because he's gonna go all the way out.
That was the message guitar god Yngwie Malmsteen had for hard rock fans in advance of his Unleash the Fury World Tour, which hits the Taipei City Hall Auditorium next Saturday.
"People should realize that very rarely do I get the chance to come out so far away," Malmsteen, 43, said Monday in a phone interview from his Miami home. "I'm gonna make it count. I'm gonna make it really special."
PHOTO COURTESY OF LARRY MARANO
The Fender Stratocaster-wielding Swede — whose first name is pronounced Yng-vay — rewrote the rules on what was possible with the electric guitar when he stormed the US heavy metal scene in the early 1980s. Bedroom soloists the world over were floored by his signature shred, which combined the volume and pageantry of hard rock with the speed and virtuosity of classical music.
His first solo album, Rising Force, made No. 60 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart and remains the last word on neoclassical metal. His 1988 album Odyssey hit No. 40. Even after Seattle grunge made hairspray and extended solos decidedly un-hip in the early 1990s, Malmsteen continued to release albums — two-dozen at the last count — many of which went gold or platinum in Europe or Japan.
"What I do is give 5,000 percent. If it was two people or 200,000, I play everything I play like it was the last fucking note I was gong to play," Malmsteen said. Quoting his favorite musician, Italian violinist Nicolai Paganini, Malmsteen added: "'One must feel strongly to make others feel strongly.' And that's the truth. I believe that I take people with me when I go on stage … . I take them on a song through a journey, a space trip because it's all crazy, it's high energy."
Malmsteen has always been a controversial figure in heavy metal. He quickly outgrew his first two bands, Steeler and Alcatraz, because he had a vision that could only be realized if he had total control; former band members say he had an ego problem. Legions of fans never tired of Malmsteen's baroque tone and onstage antics: tossing his guitar over his shoulder, throwing it under his legs, playing it with his teeth. But critics have always dismissed him as a Guitar Magazine cover boy who indulges in theatrics and fancy picking at the expense of soul and originality.
"I think I was born into the wrong century," Malmsteen said. "I approach everything I do exactly like a classical composer would or a painter like Da Vinci or someone like that. I don't collaborate. I compose everything you hear, every word you hear. The reasons for this is not because I'm a control freak, it's because this is how I express myself. I have made records in the past where I allowed people to come in and add on lyrics or their ideas. Every time, without fail, I walked away from it unhappy."
“I've been doing this for more years than a lot of people in this business and I am pretty sure that the reason that I keep on doing this — and people keep on showing an interest in what I do — is that what I do is the real thing. I'm not copying anybody, I'm not trying to be anybody else, I'm not following trends. I found out that what I'm doing seems to work and I'm not going to change it. And I think that's why I'm still around. All the bands sold more records when I first came out. What are they doing now? I was there then and I'm here now, so go figure.”
In fact, as numerous Guitar Magazine articles and Youtube tributes reveal, Malmsteen and his fans were never irrelevant; the mainstream media just forget about them. Now, thanks to the Internet and a renewed interested in 1980s fashions and guitar rock, a new generation has discovered him. “I noticed it at a concert a few years ago,” he said. “I realized that people were going crazy. They don't just think its cool, they fucking love it.”
“The American market is very finicky. I'm not saying the people, I'm saying the media. They decide this is what's gonna happen and that's it ... . It's a lot more diverse now than it used to be.”
From the beginning, Malmsteen was known among journalists as being cocky and hard to interview. To avoid military service in Sweden he allegedly visited a recruiting office with a gun. He made the tabloids there in the early 1990s when his girlfriend's mom accused him of threatening her with a shotgun. A few years before he totaled his Jaguar in an accident that left his right arm temporarily paralyzed.
His new album, Unleash the Fury, which has not been released in Taiwan but will be on sale at the concert, is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to that image. The title comes from an incident in the late 1980s when Malmsteen and his band were trashed on board a flight to Japan. A fellow passenger threw water at him, prompting Malmsteen to launch into a diatribe that ended with the line: “You have unleashed the fucking fury!”
If Monday's interview was any judge, he's mellowed out. Fans see a change and say the new fit and trim Malmsteen is playing better than ever. “I'm in good shape. A year-and-a-half or two years ago I made drastic changes and tried to become more focused. No drinking, nothing.”
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and