It's now the stuff of legend (among guitar fanboys at least) how Steve Vai was hired out of Berklee by Frank Zappa, and given the job of "transcribing" his guitar music. Perusing pages of the above book, you'll get a feel for what a super-human feat of musicality this was on the part of the young Vai. Check out the freakish rhythmic groupings (with ratios like 7:4, 6:5 all over the place). He even transcribes the feedback notes for goodness' sake! And there's not a hint of guitar tablature -- just traditional notation.
It's a feat that seems all the more hardcore -- and therefore cool, in a way -- because it is presumably so pointless: there are probably a handful of guitarists in the world, if any, who would have the ability, much less the inclination, to attempt to perform these songs based on the sheet music. Surely it would be easier to just listen to the original recording to work out the phrasing -- and to hell with trying to parse all those hemi-demi-semi-quavers!
I read on Vai's wikipedia site that during some early live performances with Zappa he would challenge the audience to produce sheet music for him to sight-read on the spot; scrolling through the above book it's hard to imagine that anyone would have been able to stump him.
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