On the Record: Classic Rock Albums Revisited, "Yngwie J. Malmsteen's Rising Force"
Guitar World, July 1999
Neoclassical rock guitar is generally regarded to have been born in 1984 with the release of the landmark instrumental guitar album Yngwie J. Malmsteen's Rising Force. Although Uli Jon Roth and Deep Purple's Ritchie Blackmore had introduced classically influenced riffs and motifs into their playing before Rising Force, their approach to soloing was mostly blues based. Malmsteen, on the other hand, broke out of the blues mold and introduced an exciting new stylistic vocabulary to players at a time when Eddie Van Halen's two-handed tapping and other technical innovations had become popular among guitarists. While Malmsteen didn't supplant Van Halen as the world's top shredder, his incredible speed, precision and strong melodic sense spawned legions of Yngwie wannabes.
"I was just a kid obsessed with playing guitar when I recorded Rising Force," says Malmsteen. "It wasn't until Trilogy [Polydor, 1986] that I became aware of what I was doing and started realizing the impact I was making."
A hit with both guitar fans and the music public at large, Yngwie J. Malmsteen's Rising Force spent 43 weeks on the Billboard Top 200 chart (peaking at No. 60) and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. Not bad for a guy who, just two years earlier, had emigrated to the U.S. from Sweden with nothing but a Strat and two pairs of jeans.
In the wake of his success with Rising Force, Malmsteen went on to influence more electric guitarists than perhaps any other rock solo artist of the Eighties. Yngwie-style guitarists were very much in demand, and most of the players signed to the legendary shredder label Shrapnel Records were heavily influenced by him.
"It may have appeared that we had a number of Yngwie clones on our label," laughs Shrapnel's Mike Varney, the man who introduced Malmsteen to the public with the Steeler album in 1983. "But Yngwie came along with something extra - his ferocious attitude and playing was second to none. I just wanted to get him out there so that people could hear him."
Varney himself first encountered Malmsteen in 1982 when he received a demo from the young Swede. The label head was impressed, to say the least. "Yngwie embodied the greatest attributes of my favorite guitarists," says Varney. "The picking of Al Di Meola, the classical sensibilities of Uli Roth and a killer vibrato that at times reminded me of Michael Schenker's - he had it all. To have that kind of grasp of the guitar at only 19 years of age was unheard-of! I used to play his demo for anybody that came in my house, point at my speakers and say in disbelief, 'Listen to this!' "
Some of the material from that demo appears on Yngwie J. Malmsteen's Rising Force. "Black Star," a neoclassical tour de force, is quintessential Yngwie.
" 'Black Star' was written unexpectedly when I was 17 years old," recalls Malmsteen. "I had just gotten a new mixer and some microphones and I was basically just checking out the sound. I didn't have a song in mind, so I sat behind the drum kit and laid down a groove. Then I added keyboards and bass and thought it would be cool to have a twin guitar melody on it.
"I borrow a lot of my vibrato and other techniques from classical violin," he continues. "My playing is largely inspired by classical music - J.S. Bach, Vivaldi and especially Paganini. When I played my music in Sweden, people were like, 'Yeah, right!' But people in the States really took notice, and my career took off."
All the solos on Rising Force were played on the same guitar that appears on the album's cover. It's Malmsteen's most recognized instrument - a battle-worn early Seventies Fender Strat dubbed "The Duck" because of the Donald Duck sticker on the headstock. [Now retired from road work, the guitar was Guitar World's August 1994 Collector's Choice centerfold - GW Ed.]
"Rising Force was put together very quickly," notes Malmsteen. "I was on tour with Alcatrazz at the time and given an offer to do a solo album. Oddly enough, it wasn't my decision to make it mostly instrumental. I fought to have more than two songs on it with vocals."
Malmsteen's next studio album, interestingly enough, will be entitled Rising Force 2000. [That title has since been changed before its Sept. '99 release - Fan Club webmaster.] "About half of the tracks will be instrumentals and the other half will feature vocals," he says. "The whole album will be extremely heavy, with lots of fast, neoclassical instrumental passages.
You never know - maybe I'll win a Grammy next time."
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