Jake E. Lee Calls Yngwie Malmsteen an ‘Arrogant F—ing A–hole’
Former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Jake E. Lee has unearthed a longstanding beef with Yngwie Malmsteen.
In a new interview, Lee went on a profanity-filled rant about Malmsteen as both a person and a musician.
"He's a dick — that's my main problem with him," he said on the Talk Toomey podcast. "He's an arrogant fucking asshole, and he always has been. I don't know if he is right now, to be honest — I haven't seen him in forever. But I can only assume that if when you're younger, you're that arrogant and that big of a dick, that you really never change. So I assume he still is. But no, he was just — he was a dick."
Even though Lee admitted that Malmsteen was a "great guitar player," he qualified it by pointing out that "he was really good at one little thing that he does — doing the sweeps and arpeggios and playing fast — and that's all he could do. That's one of my problems with him — it's a very narrow band of guitar playing. He just focuses on this one part. He's a shitty rhythm player; he can't write a song worth a fuck. And I'm saying this, and this sounds bad — I feel a little bit bad — but knowing what an asshole he is, I don't feel that bad. You can't be that arrogant if you're only really good at one minute aspect of the art of playing guitar. And that's all he was … And … yeah, fuck him."
Lee is two weeks away from the release of Patina, the second album by his band Red Dragon Cartel. Earlier this week, he revealed that Osbourne was looking to bring him back into the fold for 2010's Scream. But the discussion ended after Lee wanted to fix some issues regarding his mid-'80s tenure with Osbourne.
“Those talks didn’t last long,” the guitarist said. “I mean, basically I said, ‘Look, all I want is songwriting credit for the stuff I wrote on Bark at the Moon, that’s all. … If they do that, I’d be happy to, you know see what could happen with Ozzy and me, all these years later. But, yeah, that was never going to happen.”