Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Johan Malmsteen is a Swedish-American guitarist. He first became known in the 1980s for his neoclassical playing style in heavy metal, and has released 22 studio albums in a career spanning over 40 years.
Early life
Malmsteen was born Lars Johan Yngve Lannerbäck in Stockholm, Sweden, the third child of a musical family. In 1975, his mother reverted to her mother's maiden name Malmsten, which Yngve promptly also started using as his surname. Later he slightly changed it to Malmsteen and altered his third given name Yngve to "Yngwie". Malmsteen played his first show on May 11, 1976 with his first band, Track on Earth, consisting of himself, his cousin Erik Lannerbäck and a friend from school playing the drums. Later his brother Björn joined on drums.As a teenager he was heavily influenced by classical music, particularly 19th century Italian virtuoso violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini as well as Johann Sebastian Bach. Yngwie Malmsteen has publicly stated that he is not influenced by the blues or the style of Ritchie Blackmore, the virtuoso claims that his guitar playing is inspired by classical violin, not classical guitar. Malmsteen has stated that Jimi Hendrix had no musical impact on him and did not contribute to his style. However watching the TV news reports on 18 September 1970 of Hendrix's death, which included footage of Hendrix smashing and burning his guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967, made Malmsteen think, "This is really cool."
Career
1980s
From the late 1970s, Malmsteen played in local bands, sometimes together with future Talisman bassist Marcel Jacob, Europe bassist John Levén and architect Eero Koivisto. They recorded various demos and a single for CBS Records but nothing was officially released from this era until the 2002 releases of Rising Force - Birth of the Sun and Yngwie's own The Genesis album.In early 1982, Mike Varney of Shrapnel Records first heard Yngwie Malmsteen's music through record store owner Bill Burkard, who played for him a demo tape of Malmsteen's early work recorded when Yngwie was 15. Later in 1982, Malmsteen sent to Varney an untitled demo recording as a submission for Varney's Guitar Player magazine column. Guitar Player published this demo for the February 1983 edition of the magazine.
In 1983, Varney brought Malmsteen to the United States to play on the recording of Shrapnel recording artist Steeler, also featuring singer Ron Keel and bassist Rik Fox for its self-titled album. He then appeared with Graham Bonnet in the band Alcatrazz, playing on its 1983 debut No Parole from Rock 'n' Roll and the 1984 live album Live Sentence. In July 1984, Bonnet and Malmsteen clashed about who was the frontman and had a fight during a show. Malmsteen was fired on the spot from Alcatrazz and replaced by Steve Vai. Vai had one day to learn the songs for the ongoing tour.
In 1984, Malmsteen released his first solo album Rising Force, which featured Barrie Barlow of Jethro Tull on drums and keyboard player Jens Johansson. His album was meant to be an instrumental side-project of Alcatrazz, but it ended up featuring vocals by Jeff Scott Soto before the release of Rising Force.
Rising Force won Guitar Player's award for Best Rock Album and was nominated for a Grammy Award for 'Best Rock Instrumental', reaching no. 60 on the Billboard album chart. Yngwie J. Malmsteen's Rising Force next released Marching Out. Then he recruited Jens Johansson's brother Anders to play drums and bassist Marcel Jacob to record and tour with the band. Jacob left in the middle of a tour and was replaced by Wally Voss. Malmsteen's third album, Trilogy, featuring the vocals of Mark Boals, was released in 1986. Boals left the band in the middle of the tour and was replaced by the former singer Jeff Scott Soto. The tour was cancelled after Malmsteen was involved in a serious car accident, smashing his V12 Jaguar E-Type into a tree, which put him in a coma for a week. Nerve damage to his right hand was reported. During this time, Malmsteen's mother died from cancer. New line-up changes for the next album included former Rainbow vocalist Joe Lynn Turner joining the band, along with session bassist Bob Daisley, who was hired to record some bass parts and help with the lyrics. In April 1988, he released his fourth album Odyssey. Odyssey was his most successful album, in part due to the success of its first single "Heaven Tonight". Shows in the Soviet Union during the Odyssey tour were recorded and released in 1989 as a fifth album Trial by Fire: Live in Leningrad. The classic Rising Force line-up with Malmsteen and the Johansson brothers was dissolved in 1989 when both Anders and Jens left. That year later, Jens joined Dio replacing keyboardist Claude Schnell.
Malmsteen's neoclassical style of metal became popular among hordes of guitarists during the mid-1980s, with contemporaries such as Jason Becker, Marty Friedman, Paul Gilbert, Tony MacAlpine, and Vinnie Moore becoming prominent. In late 1988, Malmsteen's signature Fender Stratocaster guitar was released, making him and Eric Clapton the first artists to be honored by Fender.
1990s
In the early 1990s, Malmsteen released two albums, Eclipse and Fire & Ice, with the singer Göran Edman, followed by The Seventh Sign and Magnum Opus with former Loudness singer Mike Vescera. Despite his early and continuous success in Europe and Asia, by the early 1990s heavy metal styles such as neoclassical metal and shredding had gone out of fashion in the US.Around 1993, Malmsteen's future mother-in-law – who opposed his engagement to her daughter – had him arrested for allegedly holding her daughter hostage with a gun. The charges were later dropped. Malmsteen continued to record and release albums under the Japanese record label Pony Canyon and maintained a devoted following with fans in Europe and Japan and to a lesser extent in the US.
In the mid 1990s, Malmsteen released the albums Inspiration featuring three of his former singers Soto, Boals and Turner, Facing the Animal featuring Mats Levén on vocals and Cozy Powell on drums, followed by a live record Double Live! and another studio recording Alchemy featuring once again Mark Boals on vocals.
Special guest appearances and side projects
In 1996, Malmsteen joined forces with former band members Jeff Scott Soto and Marcel Jacob on the album Human Clay where he played lead guitar on the track "Jealousy". In the same year, Malmsteen recorded guitar solos for two different Deep Purple tribute albums, Smoke on the Water and Black Night – Deep Purple Tribute According to New York, using the alias "Lars Y. Loudamp" on the latter to avoid contractual conflicts. He also guested with Saxon on the song "Denim And Leather" on their live album The Eagle Has Landed – Part II. Later that year, Malmsteen recorded the tracks "Enigma suite" and "All opposable thumbs" with his former band members Jens Johansson and Anders Johansson on their album Johansson/Sonic Winter.2000s
In 2000, he signed a contract with the US record label Spitfire and released his 1990s catalog on the US market for the first time, including what he regards as his masterpiece, Concerto Suite for Electric Guitar and Orchestra, recorded with the Czech Philharmonic in Prague.After the release of War to End All Wars in 2000, singer Mark Boals left the band. He was replaced by former Rainbow vocalist Doogie White, whose vocals were well received by fans. In 2003, Malmsteen joined Joe Satriani and Steve Vai as part of the G3 supergroup, a tour showcasing guitar performances. Malmsteen made two guest appearances on keyboardist Derek Sherinian's albums Black Utopia and Blood of the Snake, where Malmsteen plays on the same tracks as Al Di Meola and Zakk Wylde. In 2004, Malmsteen made two cameo appearances on Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. In 2005 Unleash the Fury was released through Spitfire Records. As stated in an issue of Guitar World magazine, he titled this album after an infamous 'airline incident', which occurred on a flight to Japan during a 1988 tour. He was drunk and behaving obnoxiously, until he fell asleep and was roused by a woman pouring a jug of iced water on him. Enraged, he shouted, "You've released the fucking fury!" The audio from this incident was caught on tape by a fellow band member. Malmsteen says that the name of the album refers to both the energy of the album and the incident. The release of Unleash the Fury was followed by a DVD release of Concerto Suite For Electric Guitar And Orchestra in E Flat Minor, Op. 1 – With The New Japan Philharmonic Live. The DVD chronicles Malmsteen's first time playing in front of a live audience with an orchestra, an experience that he describes as "fun but also extremely scary".
In 2007, Malmsteen was honored in the Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero II. Players can receive the "Yngwie Malmsteen" award by hitting 1000 or more notes in succession. February 2008 saw the replacement of singer Doogie White with former Iced Earth and Judas Priest and current Beyond Fear singer Tim "Ripper" Owens, with whom Malmsteen had once recorded a cover of Ozzy Osbourne's song "Mr. Crowley", for the 2000 Osbourne tribute album Bat Head Soup: A Tribute to Ozzy. The first Malmsteen album to feature Owens is titled Perpetual Flame and was released on 4 October. On 25 November 2008, Malmsteen had three of his songs released as downloadable content for the video games Rock Band and Rock Band 2, and later for Rock Band 3.
In 2008, Malmsteen was a special guest on the VH1 Classic show That Metal Show. On 10 March 2009, Malmsteen's label Rising Force released Angels of Love, an all-instrumental album, which featured acoustic arrangements of some of his best-known ballads. Malmsteen released a compilation album entitled High Impact on 8 December 2009.