Yngwie Malmsteen For more than 40 years, Yngwie Malmsteen has stood as rock's supreme neoclassical shredder. In that time – since bursting onto the scene with Steeler and Alcatrazz in the early 1980s, before beginning his now-22-album-strong solo career – the Swedish guitarist has crossed paths with virtually every major rock and metal figure of the era. Malmsteen's rock-star address book began filling up literally the first night he touched down in America, when his new bandmates in Steeler whisked him straight to the legendary Rainbow Bar & Grill in Los Angeles. Within hours the newcomer was chatting away with one of his idols, Ronnie James Dio, kicking off what would become four decades of "happy moods" (as he puts it diplomatically) with music's elite. Chatting to Classic Rock, he runs us through some of the famous figures he's rubbed shoulders with over the years. Ritchie Blackmore I first met Ritchie Blackmore at the Rainbow, too, believe it or not. I was in Alcatrazz at the time, and I saw him sitting there in a booth by himself. I was just a little boisterous kid then, nineteen years old. I went up to him and said: "Hey man, I'm playing tonight. I have your old singer [Graham Bonnet] in my band." And he's looking at me like I probably would look at somebody coming up to me now, like: "Yeah. Can't you see I'm having some food here?" About a year and a half later I ended up getting the same guitar tech as Ritchie had back in the day. He told me: "Hey, Ritchie's playing Long Beach Arena with Deep Purple." So I went and saw the show. Then I went backstage and asked somebody if I could say hi to Ritchie. They laughed and said: "No one says hi to Ritchie." So I started walking back to my car, and this guy started running after me with a camera, yelling, "Hey, hey, hey, Ritchie wants to see you! Ritchie wants to see you! Can you believe this?" Like it was a big deal. But he takes me to see him, and I walk into Ritchie's dressing room and he's lying on the table in his black trench coat – lying like Burt Reynolds, up on his elbow. He's looking at me, trying to intimidate me. I said: "Hey, dude, what's going on?" and I took his soccer ball that was in the room and started bouncing it around. He asked: "You play soccer?" All of a sudden he was like a little kid. We hung out the entire night, just talked about music. He gave me one of his bracelets and said: "This is good if you get bad tendonitis," because I had some tendonitis in my hand. He told me all the tricks about eating bananas and drinking Gatorade and everything. We had the greatest time. A couple years later, he's playing again. I come to see him and he didn't want to know me. But it's okay. People have to be in the mood. I mean, people come up to me and I don't feel like it sometimes, too. So I'm not knocking him. Ritchie is awesome. I love him. Ronnie James Dio I had just landed in America, and the guys in Steeler said: "Hey, let's go to the Rainbow." I said: "Where's that?" This was 1982, so it was at, like, the height of the scene. When I was twelve years old I saw my very first concert. It was at the Stockholm Concert Hall, which is a classical theatre. For some reason they put a rock band there, and it was Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow. And it was Ronnie Dio, Ritchie Blackmore, Cozy Powell… so it was pretty surreal for me to see Ronnie there at the Rainbow. We started talking and everything, and he was very friendly. A very nice guy. We became friends right there and then. Later on we ended up living next to each other. There was an Indian restaurant nearby, called Star Of India, that we used to sit in. I recorded with him, I have hundreds of pictures of me and him playing on stage, all that stuff. We were very close. Me and Ronnie hung out a lot. Probably the most out of all those people. © Classic Rock - June 4, 2025