Yngwie Malmsteen is about to hit the road on the Guitar Gods 2014 tour, with Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal (Guns N' Roses), Uli Jon Roth (Scorpions) and Gary Hoey in tow. Legendary Rock Interviews' John Parks caught up with Malmsteen recently for a chat.

Speaking about Relentless, Yngwie's autobiography which was released last year, Parks asks: There are quite a few things in the book that I never knew about you or knew but didn’t understand including your really early years in Sweden as a kid. Do you think a lot of Americans have some misconceptions about your homeland or you as a kid?

Malmsteen: "Yeah. Coming from a very obscure place to begin with and growing up in an environment much different from that in America. Most Americans I don’t think could fathom the society that I grew up in. It is a completely different philosophy from America’s. You are basically told what you can be by the educational system. They would look at you in the United States and say, 'OK, little Johnny, you can be a doctor or a musician or the President', but in Sweden they would look at you and say, 'You are nothing, you are never going to be anything, you’re a piece of shit now shut-up and stay in your fucking place'. That’s the way they did things but that didn’t work on me. I’m a very bombastic kind of person and very strong-willed, I’m relentless basically and the more they pushed me, the harder I pushed back so obviously I needed to get outta there. The whole thing, which I discuss so much in the book, is that what I was looking to do was basically impossible to do there in Sweden which is why I have so much love for America. My book is basically a love letter to America. I love this country more than anything in the fucking world, you can’t even imagine how much I love America."

Read the full interview at this location.

Dates:

June

13 - Paramount Theatre - Huntington, NY
14 - Starland Ballroom - Sayreville, NJ
17 - Bergen Performing Arts Center- Englewood, NJ
20 - Arcada Theatre - St. Charles, IL
21 - Phoenix Theatre - Toronto, ON
26 - Showbox Theatre - Seattle, WA
27 - Roseland Theater - Portland, OR

July

3 - Saban Theatre - Beverly Hills, CA
8 - Rialto Theatre - Tucson, AZ

Promo video: