STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN

Stevie Ray Vaughan Statue, Austin, Texas
Photo © Steve Hopson, 2006

taken from http://stevehopson.com/index.htm

Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of Stevie Ray Vaughan's untimely death. Here's the entry from The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Vaughan, Stevie Ray [1954 - 1990]
Stevie Ray Vaughan was born in Dallas, Texas, on October 3, 1954, learnt guitar after growing to love his older brother JIMMIE’s blues-based record collection, dropped out of high school in 1972 and moved to Austin, where there was a vast student population and a burgeoning live music scene. He became a defining figure in 1980s Texas rock’n’roll (a kind of benign redneck R&B). A master of the Fender Stratocaster, with a unique tone and technique, he led the group Double Trouble. You might blame Stevie Ray Vaughan for the irritating riff on “Love and Theft”’s only weak track, ‘Honest With Me’.

Prior to Double Trouble, Vaughan had played with local Austin groups the Nightcrawlers and Paul Ray & The Cobras. In 1976, Vaughan formed his own band, the Triple Threat Revue, first re-named Triple Threat and then, when the vocalist quit in 1981, Double Trouble (though actually this remained a trio). In 1982 they played the Montreux Festival, Switzerland, where David Bowie asked Vaughan to play on what became his Let’s Dance album. This led to other stints as a sideman with the ROLLING STONES and Jackson Browne. Double Trouble’s 1983 début album Texas Flood was a critical success and sold half a million; they followed it with the far greater commerical successes of Couldn’t Stand the Weather (1984) and Soul to Soul (1985). These records were on Epic, but another album, Blues Explosion, on Atlantic, won a Grammy as Best Traditional Blues Record of the Year in 1984.

In 1986, after collapsing on stage in Germany, he checked into an Atlanta rehabilitation clinic. Two years later he seemed to be fully functioning again, performing an unplugged set on MTV and in 1989 touring with Jeff Beck and releasing the 5th Double Trouble album, In Step, which also gave him a no.1 radio hit, ‘Crossfire’.

In 1990 Vaughan recorded Family Style, an album made with brother Jimmie, co-headlined another tour, this time with Joe Cocker, and embarked on a headlining Double Trouble tour. That April 30 he laid down some guitar overdubs on tracks for Dylan’s Under The Red Sky album that Dylan had recorded that January 6th. He played on ‘Cat’s In The Well’ and ’10,000 Men’, and played lead guitar on ‘God Knows’.

Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash near East Troy, Wisconsin, on August 27, 1990 (having just performed as a guest at an ERIC CLAPTON concert in Alpine Valley). Bob Dylan first responded with appropriate restraint: ‘He was a sweet guy. Something else was coming through him besides his guitar playing and singing.’ Later, unfortunately, before a concert in Merrillville, Indiana, he added the vacuously inaccurate: ‘It’s almost like having to play the night that Kennedy died. He’ll probably be revered as much as and in the same way as Hank Williams’. More sweetly, he dedicated a performance of ‘Moon River’ to Vaughan that night.

Posthumous record releases are plentiful. One of the earliest was that recorded with brother Jimmie that same year; Family Style was released as by ‘the Vaughan Brothers’. There is now a ludicrous statue of Stevie Ray at Riverside Drive and South 1st Street in Austin.

[Double Trouble: Texas Flood, Epic FET/EK 38734, US, 1983; Blues Explosion, Atlantic 7 80149-1, US, 1984; Couldn’t Stand The Weather, Epic FET/EK 39304, US, 1984; Soul To Soul, Epic FET/EK 40036, US, 1985; Live Alive!, Epic, EGK/EGT 40511, US, 1986; In Step, Epic OET/EK 45024, US, 1989. The Vaughan Brothers: Family Style, Epic ZT/ZK 46225, US, 1990.]