| abstract | - In his autobiography "Much ado about Malmsteen", Yngwie relates the story of the early days of Malm Fu. During his time spent in Alcatrazz (having been convicted from the future for writing the song "Teaser") the young Malmsteen had a lot of time to think up devious escape plans and soon realised success hinged on honing his skills as a fighter as well as those of a guitar player. With this in mind he trained his body to breaking point - often for 56-57 hours a day - with the goal of avenging the death of his former teacher and 18th Century violinist extroadinaire, Nicolo Paganini. Paganini had died at the hands of Yngwie's evil half-brother Steve Vai, who allegedly produced noises so uncouth and strange that Paganini's kidneys imploded. Vai was always scheming to get one up on Yngwie because he was jealous that Yngwie could play guitar, and he could not. To this day Vai's greatest achievement has been to trick pretty much everyone in the world that he is a great guitarist. No one is quite sure how he has perpetuated this blatant lie, since if you listen to anything he has written you can see it's rubbish and is just a lot of strange noises strung together to form something barely resembling a "song". A popular theory states that Vai sold his soul to Joe Satriani in exchange for popularity by association, who later traded it with Satan for a pair of sunglasses and a hat (although this certainly begs the question of how Satch himself became popular). Breaking out of Alcatrazz, Yngwie took the world by storm with his debut solo album Rising Force which he used as a platform to spread word of his pioneering neo-classical guitar playing and arpeggiated combat skills.
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