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With the Hank Garland biopic Crazy under his belt, guitar god Steve Vai is now a movie mogul (© RADU SIGHETI/Reuters/Corbis)

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Steve Vai admits that becoming a movie producer was never high on his things-to-do list. But the celebrated, Grammy Award-winning guitar virtuoso is one of the executive producers of the film Crazy, which tells the story of guitar legend Hank Garland, one of the most influential session men who emerged from Nashville during the 1950s.

"I've certainly been familiar with Hank Garland's music," says Vai, "but I didn't really know a lot about his story. What I discovered was what an important figure he was. He introduced jazz to the Nashville scene, and he was one of the first guitarists to confront racial stereotypes by playing with black musicians, which rattled a lot of cages back then. When my partner, Ray Scherr, brought me the project, I was drawn right in."

Waylon Payne, an actor as well as a musician, nails the role of the freakishly gifted Garland, who rose to fame by playing on hits by artists such as Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Patsy Cline and The Everly Brothers, among others. But Crazy isn't merely the story of a musician and his guitar; it captures the milieu of the '50s Nashville studio scene, a time when the fabled 'Nashville Mafia' controlled the record-making process to the point of ostracizing anyone who attempted to buck the system.

"Hank was seen as a bit of a troublemaker, says Vai, "somebody who wasn't satisfied with the status quo. But he was also a visionary, and among his contributions was the design and creation of the Gibson Byrdland guitar."

In 1961, Garland was critically injured in a car accident - in the film, the Nashville mob is seen as having caused the crash - and later, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he received numerous electroconvulsive therapies. He never regained his guitar playing prowess, and spent the last decades of his life in virtual solitude in Florida. He died just as Crazy was going into production.

MusicRadar sat down with Vai to discuss Hank Garland and the making of Crazy (available now on DVD and Blu-ray). "It was quite an experience putting the picture together," he says. "I learned so much about movies and how and why they get made, I think I could write a book about it all."

Your partner, Ray Scherr, presented the idea of the movie Crazy to you. How involved did you get with its actual making?

"In some ways, I was very involved, and in others I wasn't. Ray came across this story, which was based on true events, and he loved it. Ray is the founder of the Guitar Center. He's a real guitar lover, and he likes the style of music that Hank Garland played. Ray has what is probably the premier archtop guitar collections in the world. I got very interested in the story, and he asked me if I wanted to work on the project. I'm a pretty resourceful guy, and I felt like it was the right time to get involved with a lot of the behind-the-scenes aspects of the film industry. Everything felt right.

"I didn't have a lot to do with the story and the writing, but when it came down to the production elements, I was very hands-on. I watched the budgets and facilitated certain aspects of the filming and the editing. We had a great director, Rick Bieber, and he produced the film, as well. You know how it is - with films, there's a lot of people who are listed as 'executive producers' and 'associate producers,' and not to say that you don't need everybody to do their jobs, but Rick is the true producer and director, and he worked on the screenplay, too. He did a marvelous job."

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