Steve Vai Says That He Welcomes Fans Recording Concerts on Cell Phones

Is Steve Vai the anti-Maynard? Okay, maybe that’s going too far, but the two vastly different metal icons from wildly different subgenres—who both happen to be in their 60s now—seem to have taken opposite sides on the issue of cell phones.

You’ll remember that Maynard James Keenan recently reconfirmed his policy of not allowing fans to record songs at the concerts of any of his three bands—with the exception of one song per concert—and even taking the arguably overzealous step of ejecting fans from concerts. Well, Steve Vai seems to be the one person in metal coming out on the opposite side of the issue. In a recent interview with Rick Beato (as reported on by Metal Injection) Vai explained why he welcomes cell phone recording at his concerts. “Those little concert clips, they’re very meaningful to fans,” said Vai. He went on to justify recording at concerts despite the potentially low-quality of the videos:

“But after a while… It really depends on how you choose to look at it, so the way I choose to look at it is — it’s great. Because now, it may not sound great when people are at the concerts, and then they post it… It would be nice if they sounded good, but there’s even a charm in the way that they don’t sound good, sometimes.”

Vai admitted in the interview that he had a different policy towards VHS cameras when that was the dominant technology, but considering how obnoxiously large those early VHS camcorders were, it’s understandable. I hate when the person in front of me at a concert tries to record it on a cell phone, but if someone in front of me at a concert pulled out a shoulder-mounted video camera that looks like something Egon would have invented in Ghostbusters, I’d probably use it to beat them to death.