Yngwie Malmsteen Live, Tokyo, 1985

In 1984 I got to see these guys open for AC/DC.

  • At 4:23 the band starts.
  • The first guitar solo is at 6:07.
  • The keyboards and guitar do a high-speed Baroque-thing simultaneously at 9:55.
  • 35:00 is the beginning of I am a Viking. Watch that.
  • 44:47 begins an almost 10 minute long guitar solo.

Unfortunately the video’s audio quality is not best, but you can still get the idea of what this was like.

They Were The Opening Act

Almost everyone came for AC/DC, and AC/DC brought everything they had:

  • Fake cannons? Check. (They sounded real, and fire shot out of them, until the cannons’ amp blew a fuse, then it was quiet fire shooting out of them.)
  • Fake bells? Check.
  • Fake TNT? Yes.
  • Angus’ school uniform. Yep.
  • Angus plays a solo off-the-stage, and in-the-crowd, on some guy’s back? Check.

Yngwie Malmsteen’s band’s props? They have long hair, and he has a piece of tape on his guitar that says “PLAY LOUD” on it.

After That Concert They Were Off The Tour

Something really weird happened; after each AC/DC song there were fewer people in the stadium. The place was almost empty by the time Angus played his solo.

This was a time when Heavy Metal wasn’t played on much of the radio. In my town, major bands played shows at a loss (according to a local union roady). The shows existed to sell records; these days the records exist to sell concert tickets.

There Was Magic At That Concert, And This Video Shows Us How The Magician Does Some Of It

Note: there are some guesses here. If you know more details, then please comment below.

He Played A Solo With His Teeth!

Yeah, but here we can see that he is actually using hammer-ons. There were no teeth harmed in the making of that solo.

His Feedback Moved Through Each Row Of The Crowd!

There appeared to be a standing wave that moved through the crowd from the front of the stage to the back, slowly. In the video, during that sound, the camera focused on the keyboard player. He was slowly twisting a potentiometer. A synthesizer can slowly change the pitch, in a more consistent way, than a guitar player can, but we were all looking at the guitar! (Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!)

This part is a guess. I can’t tell the difference between a mode, where a standing wave creates more volume, and someone cranking up the volume when a specific note plays. One would need to make measurements in different places.

Then At One Point He Held The Guitar In A Specific Spot, And The Feedback Made It Sound Like A UFO!

In this video, Malmsteen holds up the guitar, then looks at the audience, then looks at the guitar. While we are all looking that the guitar (see 55:49), he tweaks a potentiometer on a piece of equipment (see 55:53). Maybe he was tweaking a digital delay.

Weird

We can see Moog Taurus Bass Pedals at the edge of the stage, but I didn’t see him play them during this video, or during the other concert. A Taurus-like analog synthesizer would make an awesome guitar effects device, but they can’t do that out-of-the-box, because they don’t have a place to plug-in a replacement oscillator.

Since the 1980s, I wondered why guitar synths were designed as (mistakenly) glitchy MIDI controllers, when the guitar itself could replace the oscillator, in an analog synth, or a digital representation of one, and that would have no tracking problems at all. I thought that this was my idea, but Wikipedia now tells me that these existed in the 1070′s. They are coming back in style in recent days: the guitar gets digitized, and that gets sent to a digital emulation of an analog-synth.


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