"I worked on the music for Crossroads from day one. First of all, I wrote and played all of Macchio's parts right from the beginning, including teaching him 4 days a week, for 2 months even before we started filming. Almost all of his parts were played by me, and improvised on the spot, because I knew the "vocabulary" I had given him on the guitar, and what he could "fake" accurately.
I directed the guitar scenes, and the original "duel" at the end was musically different. It was a slide guitar duel between myself and Ry Cooder (made much more sense than this heavy metal nonsense!), it was real blues! Cooder was also supposed to play the evil part on screen. When he found out he'd been dropped by Walter Hill, he really got pissed off! So, in walked Vai, and then we re-recorded the ending. They actively pursued him, it wasn't some receptionist's "find".
We were all dead-set against this musical destruction of the film, but Walter Hill and Tim Zinneman had no idea what they were doing about music. That's why Walter let me sit in the Director's chair when the guitar scenes were shot!
The blues band and bar scene were actual re-creations of what I did in real life while we were on location in Mississippi! Ralph saw me do that, and said he wanted to do that in the film! He also chose "Landslide", an original piece from my first Rounder album as the piece he plays when standing at the "Crossroads!"
The end sequence actually features the playing of Vai (sped up sometimes) Bill Kanengiser (classical) Ry Cooder and me. Cooder only plays two parts for Ralph in the movie. The rest is all me, and the classical is played by Kanengiser (who has also made 2 instructional videos for my company, Hot Licks Video!)
After coaching Ralph and directing the guitar scenes for Crossroads, I was approached by Oliver Stone to do the same for "The Doors" movie. I turned it down though, the money was lousy, and Frank Whaley didn't want to bother with learning the guitar for his part of playing Robbie Krieger!"
The showdown in Crossroads with Steve Vai was pretty cool. I liked the beginning of the movie where whoever it was played the hell out of a classical guitar.
