“Nobody was going to freak out. We said, ‘This is going to get done. We just need to find the right person to join the family.’ And we got Steve Vai, thank God”: How the virtuoso Vai put the sizzle into the last big hair metal album of the ’80s

Whitesnake in 1990.

When Whitesnake’s album Slip Of The Tongue was released in 1989, singer David Coverdale made an extraordinary claim about the band’s newest recruit Steve Vai — comparing him to the greatest guitarist of them all.

Referring to a masterpiece by The Jimi Hendrix Experience from 1967, Coverdale declared: “Steve Vai has woven the finest tapestries since Axis: Bold As Love.”