Some years back a recording appeared online, supposedly of Swedish guitar maestro Yngwie Malmsteen launching into a furious tirade on a plane.
Initially, it was largely dismissed as a fake, but when Malmsteen’s band mates at the time were asked about the incident they confirmed the story.
The clip was presented gloriously out of context, and nobody knew quite what brought the tirade on, so it was hard to know what to make of it when you heard Malmsteen yell:
“Look at this! Look at me! Excuse me! I don’t fucking deserve this shit! I’ve paid for a first-class ticket, I don’t need a fucking cunt come up to me and do that shit! See you in Tokyo, bitch! [Cursing in Swedish] You released the fucking fury! You – released – the – fucking – fury! Forget about it! I was sitting here, and all of a sudden this bitch comes and just fucking pours this water over us! I didn’t do nothing! I kill the fucking mother… I kill the motherfucker, I kill the motherfucker… kill that motherfucker… Come on!”
While Malmsteen clearly says “released” in this tirade, it is often misquoted as “unleashed” by just about everyone, including Malmsteen himself. It does seem to fit his melodramatic personality a bit more. And, it’s funnier!
These days, several decades removed from the incident, Malmsteen is able to look back at it with a good portion of humour. “There’s no doubt I’d react differently now,” he told Guitar World in 2021, “but the ‘air rage’ incident of 1988 is still funny as shit. Here’s the part that people might not know. I fly first-class and the band and crew fly coach – that’s the way it is. But back then, some knucklehead decided to put everybody in first class. The flight to Japan is 16 hours and everybody gets shit-faced. I was drinking then, too, and I’m sure I wasn’t perfect, but I definitely wasn’t the biggest problem, either. So I fall asleep and this woman decides to take a pitcher of iced water and pour it over me, saying, ‘Cool down, boys!’ So I totally lose it. But it’s always the same. One time, I was in a bar and the drummer starts throwing beer at people, but they threw my ass out – because I’m the face of the band.”
So what actually happened on the flight?
The story takes us back to August 1988. The band had been touring behind the successful Odyssey album, on which Malmsteen was joined by vocalist Joe Lynn Turner and the notorious Swedish Johansson brothers Jens (keyboards) and Anders (drums) as well as live bass player Barry Dunaway (Malmsteen plays all bass guitars in the studio). The band were embarking for a tour of Japan, and had entered a plane in New York for a flight to Tokyo. The band had six gigs lined up in Japan, from 16-25 August, so they were likely flying in a day or two ahead of their first show, likely no later than the 14th due to the time difference.
It was a long flight, 14 hours non-stop, so the band was looking for ways to entertain themselves. With “the band,” all eyes are on the Johansson brothers.
Anders Johansson told Shockwaves the full story in 2009: “We started drinking right away. We were in first class that time – the first and only time, as a matter of fact. I think the Japanese promoter paid for it. The other passengers started getting ticked off at us pretty early because we were loud, yelling and throwing things around. At one point, my brother [Jens Johansson] found a sanitary napkin in the flight seat in front of him and poured a Bloody Mary on it, making it look like huge blood-stain and then he threw it on some other passenger’s food tray as he was trying to eat. That was the final straw for the other passengers, and when I got back from the bathroom, a big fight broke out between Yngwie and our boys and the other passengers and the flight staff.”
A bit of turmoil had been building between members of the band and the other passengers at that point, and a lady who was also sitting in first class felt the way to end it was to take an entire pitcher of water and pour it over the band to cool them down. Unfortunately, she did not distinguish between them – one long-haired rock star is as good as another, after all – and so she focused her revenge on the easier targets: a half-sleeping Malmsteen and the totally calm and non-participating Joe Lynn Turner. They had at best been bit players in the rowdiness up to that point, but still ended up on the receiving end of the woman’s frustrations as they were thoroughly soaked.
In a conversation with Miami News Times in 2018, Malmsteen remembers that moment: “Everyone was rowdy in first class. I fell asleep, and a lady had taken a pitcher of ice water and just poured it over my head. Not anyone else, just me. And I freaked out and started screaming.”
The emptying of that pitcher led Yngwie Malmsteen to release, or unleash, the fucking fury.
“They went nuts, of course, and Yngwie wanted to kill her” says Anders Johansson. “It was chaos – somebody’s shirt got ripped to shreds, people were wrestling on the floor… It was probably not what people had expected when they bought their first-class tickets!”
A farce could not have planned things better, as this was the point when the pilot decided to show up. He left the cockpit to see what was going on and was stunned at the scenes of mayhem that met him. He then decided to join the fight.
Anders Johansson: ”When he heard all the turmoil and fighting going on, he came out and yelled, ‘What the hell is going on on my ship’ and joined in the brawl and just happened to grab my arm. I got really pissed and thought to myself ‘Get away from me, fucker!’ so I back-fisted him in the stomach and watched him go down. Hey — he grabbed me first!”
It is a good thing that this happened in 1988, before there was talk of terrorist acts or even threats. It was before the Lockerbie bombing as well, so the personnel was likely not too prepared for anything out of the ordinary. Fortunately for Johansson, his suckerpunching of the pilot probably got a bit lost in everything else that was going on.
Anders Johansson: ”At one point, two people were holding Yngwie to try to calm him down. We had one bodyguard there with us, and one really big sound engineer, but, I mean, almost 45 minutes went by and Yngwie was just as pissed as he was when they first started holding him down! Meanwhile, my brother had taken off all his clothes and was running around naked on the plane, leaving little red pubic hairs all over the carpet as the Japanese staff attempted to put several kimonos on him to cover him up. He didn’t want that, so he just ripped them to shreds when they tried.”
Malmsteen was still unleashing the fury, and in a shocking twist of fate and reversal of roles, it was the drummer who got through to him with an acceptable alternative of getting even. “Eventually, I got myself together,” Anders Johansson said, ”and I tried to talk to Yngwie. I said, ‘Hey, Yngwie, you can’t kill people. It’s, like, not allowed!’ He was just screaming, ‘Kill, kill, kill’ in Swedish as they were holding him down, so I didn’t know what else to tell him. But eventually we calmed him down by evolving on an idea. We said, ‘Sure, that lady poured water on us, but how about you piss in that pitcher and pour THAT on her? That’ll be 2-1 to your favour,’ and Yngwie replied: ‘Hey, that’s a great idea!’ and so he did and ended the whole thing. She got the piss poured all over her. It went in her hair, in her mouth…everywhere. Strangely enough, that kind of put the end to the whole thing and the other passengers and the staff surrendered. The staff, especially, were really scared. I don’t think they had ever experienced anything like that!”
Things might have calmed down on the plane, but the staff was not going to let things slide as easy as that. There was talk about turning the airplane around to go back to Alaska at one point, but complaints about this from the passengers who weren’t involved in the turmoil made the pilot decide to continue to Tokyo. Authorities were however notified, and the police were waiting for the band as the plane touched down.
The band had a plan, though. Anders Johansson: “We went one by one, so since they were expecting a whole band of long-haired guys, we slid under the radar and got out of the airport without being arrested. I remember the cops staring us down, though, and that they were looking real hard at me when I passed them. Really strange they didn’t put two and two together just because we weren’t walking next to each other. I was lucky, though, because it was such chaos and I don’t think they knew who did what, afterwards. I did have a camcorder going most of the fight, though, so if you look for it on the Internet, it’s there somewhere.”
We have heard very little about Joe Lynn Turner throughout this story. What was he doing while the rest of the band were fighting other passengers and the airplane staff? Anders Johansson pretty much clears him of any ill-doing: ”He was just trying to wring out his clothes that were soaked from water by the pitcher attack by that woman. He was more or less staying out of it, I think.”
Over the years, this incident has gone down in legend and become subject to myth spinning. What led to the incident has been widely postulated. As is to be expected, Malmsteen is usually cast as the out-of-control villain of the story, with things added for good measure. Some reports say Malmsteen was spewing incendiary comments about homosexuals. Others say he poured ketchup on a sanitary napkin and put it on a seat by the female passenger.
“None of those are true,” Malmsteen told the Miami New Times in 2018. “I never said anything about gay people, ever. I don’t know how that came up.” He would however confirm that the ketchup story is partially true, except for one detail: “That was not me. That was the keyboard player in my band that did it.”
Malmsteen is quick to dismiss the incident as “different times” and says that today, his focus is on music, family, the occasional game of tennis, and, of course, playing with his cherished cars. He is at peace with the airplane incident today and can even laugh at it – to the point that he named his 2005 album after it. Its name? Unleash the Fury, of course.
Facebook Comments