By Ben Richardson
If you’re not a guitarist guitar nerd or a heavy metal aficionado, you’ve probably never heard of Yngwie Malmsteen. After seeing this picture, though, you’ve learned one thing about him: the man is a complete and total megalomaniac. Born into a musically gifted family in Sweden, Malmsteen (ne Lars Johan Yngve Lannerbäck) got his start as a 10-year-old guitar prodigy, honing his chops by cultivating a bizarrely retrograde obsession with virtuoso 19th-century Italian violinist and purported devil-in-disguise Niccolo Paganini.
Malmsteen arrived on the American hard rock scene in 1984, in those bygone days when neo-classical shredding was way cool. His debut with his band Rising Force was nominated for a Grammy and enjoyed considerable retail success, and he soon became convinced that he was some kind of rock star, a notion that he has apparently been unable to shake.
Marrying the ego that resulted from his impossibly fast playing to a kind of hairspray-diva complex that would put some of the ’80s most overamplified misanthropes to shame, Malmsteen indulged in all of the usual buffoonery, rashing an expensive sports car, buying lots of gold jewelry, and never, ever buttoning his shirt higher than his navel.