Guitar legend Steve Vai is featured in a new interview with Guitar World, where he looks back on his days working with Frank Zappa at the start of his career. An excerpt is available below.

Guitar World: How did you get to know Zappa?

Vai: "I was so innocent and naïve. I was a kid that grew up in a teenage bedroom on Long Island listening to the progressive rock music of the '70s, but had an interest in composition from a very early age. And I discovered Frank. When I moved out to California, it was a bit of a shock. It was so exciting and so interesting. And then I got an apartment right down the street from Frank, so I was constantly in the Zappa world. A week later, I just started going up to the house and then that was it."

Guitar World: He was renowned for being very tough in the rehearsal room. Did you experience that? 

Vai: "The level of excellence that you needed to be at was such that if you didn’t have the goods, you didn’t last. And Frank expected everybody to rise to the occasion. One of the brilliant things about Frank was he had the ability to totally intuitively read your potential. And each musician that he hired for his band had to have something that they could do that was somewhat extraordinary. You had to be a great singer or a great player, whatever it was that you did. That’s what he expected from you. He wouldn’t expect you to do things that you couldn’t do because that wouldn’t work for him. So it didn’t work for you. So ‘tough’ is an interesting word to apply to Frank. He was demanding, but he didn’t demand things that you couldn’t do."

Guitar Wprld: You played on possibly the most technically difficult of all Zappa’s pieces, "The Black Page", earning you the title of "Stunt Guitarist" in the band. 

Vai: "I think he was just interested to see how far he could take me with playing crazy stuff on the guitar. But the things that I did with him that I think he got the biggest kick out of was 'The Jazz Discharge Party Hats' or 'The Dangerous Kitchen' or 'Moggio' or 'RDNZL' or 'Drowning Witch'. These are all pieces of music that just had an uncanny type of guitar expectations."

Read the complete interview here.

Earlier this year, Vai checked in with a Frank Zappa related update:

"Hey everybody, the book Frank & Co, written by my friend Co de Kloet about his friendship with Zappa, sold out fast and is going into second print! It's available worldwide and for US fans, there is a special USA section on FrankAndCo.nl. Dweezil Zappa wrote the foreword, and I did the cover text. You may also want to check this little one minute film! Hotcha!"

Frank & Co, by Co de Kloet, contains 460 pages of unique material about Frank Zappa, based on over 25 hours of tape recorded between 1977 and 1990.

Co de Kloet and Frank Zappa were friends for many years. Co, a Zappa music expert, recorded nearly every conversation. The two men also corresponded frequently. This unique material, which has never been published before as a book, is now available. However, Frank & Co is more than a book about Zappa’s music. It also includes Co’s favorite memories of Frank as well as interviews about Zappa with, among others, Flo & Eddie, Jimmy Carl Black and Pamela Zarubica.

Australian Musician editor Greg Phillips recently caught up with Vai to chat about the new Frank Zappa documentary, Steve's time in Frank's band, transcribing Zappa's music and much more. Check out the interview below.

Vai: "Frank Zappa never did the same show. We had about 80 songs that we had to know which was death-defying, and he would write the setlist right before we went on stage every night. It was different every night and you just never knew what he was gonna do. I'd forget there was an audience because you have to have the bulletproof focus on Frank at all times. And he heard everything. He was very critical because he was always trying to improve it. And he heard everything but I think at times you can tell... I think what he enjoyed the most was the actual compositional process."

"For most of the rehearsals, Frank was just building, changing, laughing. He'd do things to laugh at you, it was just fantastic. I guess probably his biggest obstacle was the limitations of the musicians because he would always try to get them to go further. But the brilliant thing about Frank was his ability to see your potential and to pull it out of you, in a setting that was unique because most of the musicians that I even knew that worked with Frank, you have to have something that he could use as a color in his musical creative palette."

Umbrella Entertainment proudly presents Zappa, the first all-access documentary on the life and times of iconoclastic musician Frank Zappa. Directed by Alex Winter (Bill of Bill & Ted, acclaimed maker of The Panama Papers, Deep Web and more), and produced by Winter and Glen Zipper (George Harrison: Living In the Material World, What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali and more), Zappa presents an intimate portrait of a late 20th Century iconoclast; a man whose prolific and brilliant work changed music and the music industry for ever, and whose cultural impact is far-reaching and enduring. With exclusive interviews and eye-popping unseen live and behind-the-scenes footage,  Zappa will open your mind to the creativity and fearlessness of a man whose "worldview, art and politics were," in Winter’s words, "far ahead of their time, and profoundly relevant in our challenging times."

Check out the trailer below.