Two dates into 2024’s headline-grabbing Beat tour, Steve Vai received some helpful advice on how to play a King Crimson song. It came from a reliable source: Robert Fripp.
Vai has of course made no bones about the size of the task he accepted when he signed up to play Fripp's parts in Beat, the all-star King Crimson tribute band featuring Adrian Belew, bassist Tony Levin and drummer Danny Carey. The “relentlessness” of Fripp’s picking style was the biggest mountain he had to climb as he prepared for last year’s 65-date tour.
Belew, who joined King Crimson in 1981 and recorded six albums with the group, was sympathetic to Vai's woes, having experienced similar struggles himself.
“It took me quite a while to be able to lock in with him,” he's said of working with Fripp. “Robert told me I don’t hold my pick correctly. Which is true. I never concentrated on that. There are other things about the instrument that I preferred.”
While Belew was forthcoming with tips and tricks for his new guitar partner, Fripp had left him to his own devices. Until two nights into the tour, that is.
“We get to our second show and I get an email from Robert,” Vai says in a newly released mini-film made by Sweetwater to document the tour. “He was commenting on some of the clips he saw, which was very nice and constructive. And then he said at the end, 'Can I make a suggestion for 'Frame by Frame'?’”
"Frame by Frame" is one of two songs Vai described as the biggest challenges in the set ("Elephant Talk" is the other). It proved especially difficult for Vai due to shoulder surgery he had in 2021, and Fripp had seen something in a video of the show that he didn't like.
"He said, ‘Why don’t you hammer 'Frame by Frame'? Grab the initial notes and then improvise on it. Then go to the next chord and do that.’
“This was something I kind of thought of in the beginning, but I thought it would be so far from the original that it was maybe crossing a line,” Vai explains. “But here it is; he's recommending it.”
The suggestion was spot on. “I did it that night at the show, and it worked beautifully," he told Guitar World. "It’s unique to me — yet it was birthed by Robert and Adrian.”
Vai will reprise his Beat role at a show in Chile this May before embarking on a tour with the SatchVai band.
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