“His thumbprint is an indelible part of the Whitesnake record he did. The fatness of that record and the rock integrity it had was all him”: Steve Vai followed John Sykes in Whitesnake – and he quickly decided what not to do when playing his parts

Before he pretty much permanently set down his own path, electric guitar hero Steve Vai's last stop was with the hugely successful Whitesnake.

Vai was following in the footsteps of John Sykes, who passed away earlier this week (January 20) at the age of 65.

In tandem with frontman David Coverdale, Sykes had pushed the already-successful band into more commercial territory, co-writing almost every track on their self-titled 1987 album.

The result was nothing short of a smash, a true-blue rock blockbuster that went Platinum many times over, and made Whitesnake one of the biggest bands in the world.

Before the album even came out, however, Sykes – seemingly at loggerheads with Coverdale – was out of the band, and left out of promoting the album he had done so much to help create.

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On the subsequent tour, Sykes' place was taken by both Adrian Vandenberg and Vivian Campbell, though within just a couple of years, they too would be out of the band – the former temporarily, due to injury, and the latter permanently, due to personal differences.

In, then, came Vai, who lent his signature flash to the band's next LP, 1989's Slip of the Tongue, which further transformed and evolved Whitesnake's sound.

Though multiple guitarists had come and gone in the years since the recording of the band's 1987 self-titled effort, Sykes had been the band's last player in the studio, and Vai saw himself as Sykes' direct successor.

Vai had great respect for Sykes' contributions, but immediately established a rule of thumb for himself when it came to his own approach with the band.

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“Whitesnake had gone through different permutations of guitar sounds throughout the years, and the previous one to me was John Sykes, and he absolutely had his own sound,” Vai told Guitar World in a 2020 interview.

“Sykes didn’t sound like any other previous Whitesnake guitarist, but his thumbprint is an indelible part of the Whitesnake record he did. The fatness of that record and the rock integrity it had was all Sykes. So I knew I wasn’t going to sound like Sykes and I wasn’t going to try to.

“You cheat yourself when you try to do that and play like someone else,” he continued. “And the audience is a lot smarter than you think; they’re very intuitive and perceptive and if you try to pull anything over on them – like biting someone else’s thing – you’ll get beat up for it.”

Despite his differences with the guitarist in the past, Coverdale was quick to pay tribute to Sykes in the wake of the latter's death, writing on Twitter, “Just heard the shocking news of John’s passing – my sincere condolences to his family, friends, and fans.”