Yngwie Malmsteen hits Tupelo
When he’s not revving his Fender Stratocaster at impossible speeds, shredding with a fury that other guitarists aspire to, Yngwie Malmsteen likes to drive Ferraris — he owns five, all of them red. During the pandemic Malmsteen had a lot of time for both endeavors. What resulted was a tour de force album, Parabellum.
Like his fiery playing and his fast cars, Malmsteen’s mind moves at a frenetic pace. A year in the studio, something he hadn’t experienced in decades, was a unique challenge.
“I learned a long time ago to be careful with having too much time,” he said from his home in Miami. “I had 80, 90, 100 ideas; I only took the most inspired things and refined them.”
Malmsteen pointed to Van Halen’s early albums as a source of inspiration.
“They were done very spontaneously in the beginning,” he said. “I keep that spontaneity. … Every time I come up with something new I record it right away, and usually I keep that take.”
Malmsteen played every instrument on Parabellum and sang on the non-instrumental tracks. He once hired guest singers but stopped using them a few records ago.
“That’s definitely a thing of the past,” he said.
When Malmsteen’s first tour since early 2020 begins, a band he calls “a good group of guys” is expected to learn the new songs, and expect surprises.
“We go through the songs at soundcheck; that’s all they get,” he said. “Here’s another thing I do — half an hour before show time, I call them in and we put a setlist together. Then we go on stage and I play different songs anyway! They just gotta know it.”
Malmsteen has long sneered at the idea of collaborating with other musicians, and his history helps explain why. Swedish-born, he grew up in a musical family.
“Everybody was very artistic, which was unusual there in the ’70s, because it was a socialist country [that] didn’t allow that. God bless America, man,” he said.
Classically trained from the age of 5, Malmsteen discovered rock music when he saw a clip of Jimi Hendrix smashing his guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival that accompanied a news report of his death in 1970. Later came blues from John Mayall, and hard rock via Deep Purple.
As soon as he could, Malmsteen headed to the United States.
“I took my guitar, my toothbrush, and I got on the plane,” he said. “I had a plan — my plan was to not live in a socialist welfare Marxist bull—- country.”
Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, he joined Steeler, a rising glam rock band. His first gig with them attracted a small crowd, but the following week at L.A.’s Troubadour, Malmsteen looked from his dressing room and saw a line stretched around the block.
“I said to someone working there, ‘Who’s playing tonight?’ He points at me and says, ‘You are.’ It was pretty crazy,” he said. “I was 18 years old, and all of a sudden people were digging it.”
He was in Steeler long enough to appear on their lone album, then joined another metal band, Alcatrazz. His stint there lasted less than a year, an exit hastened by onstage clashes with singer Graham Bonnet after Malmsteen received a solo offer while the group was on tour in Japan.
A reunion is, emphatically, not in the cards.
“When I left, they fell into obscurity, but I kept on going, kind of like rising up, I never stopped,” he said. “These guys … they’re selling car insurance; I don’t know what they’re doing. They asked me so many times to join, and I’m, ‘No, I didn’t sit on my ass for 40 years.’”
Malmsteen insists, “I don’t have a chip on my shoulder; the only person I feel have to prove something to is myself,” and on one of Parabellum’s standout cuts, “Eternal Bliss,” he expresses gratitude for his continued success and life’s blessings.
“I have the most beautiful wife in the world, I have a great son, nice house, I’ve played music I want to play and I never compromise,” he said, citing two reasons for his longevity. “One, I find it exciting and challenging, and only because I improvise all the time. If I were to play the same thing over and over that wouldn’t do it. Also, to quote Paganini … one must feel strongly to make others feel strongly.”
Yngwie Malmsteen w/ Images of Eden and Sunlord
When: Friday, Nov. 26, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $45 and up at tupelohall.com
Featured photo: Yngwie Malmsteen. Photo by Austin Hargraves.
