RAYSIN' A STORM

Rip It Up, Issue 87, 1 October 1984, Page 10

RAYSIN' A STORM

George Kay

STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN

At the start of last year the name of Stevie Ray Vaughan would scarcely have raised a yawn outside of his home

town, Austin, Texas. Since then things have changed; a starring guitar role on Bowie’s Let's Dance, two showcase

blues albums in Texas Fever and Couldn't Stand the Weather and a lot of hard roadwork have thrust Vaughan’s name to the top of the list of contenders for new guitar hero.

The line to Austin crackles and fades and Stevie Ray Vaughan, as he later tells me, lives beneath a main air route. But his Texas drawl comes across clear enough. As it

happens he’s a man of few words, typical for a guitarist whose playing is not only strongly rooted in past blues traditions but is also instinctive rather than intellectual.

His influences aren’t hard to pick. "Freddie King had a lot of influence and so did Albert King, Lonnie Mack, Hendrix and my brother Jimmy. At the time I grew up all these things were happening at the same time and that’s why they had such an influence on me."

Stevie's brother Jimmy is still playing for the Fabulous Thunderbirds (their albums The Fabulous Thunderbirds and What's the Word are worth chasing up) and he guests on Couldn't Stand the Weather. Did you ever feel as if you were in your brother’s shadow?

“No, actually he was always a good influence. He was the one that got me started playing and he always inspired me to play."

In an idiom so traditional as the blues it must be difficult to develop your own style?

" Yeah, it’s hard but at the same time it's a lot of fun, especially learning about what the great players have been doing. If you take them all and put them together then it’s gonna come out the only way you can play it anyway. Sometimes I think there’s a Stevie Ray Vaughan style but sometimes it leans towards other people’s, but that’s okay." Vaughan’s big break came at the 1982 Montreaux Jazz Festival, where Bowie saw him and asked him to do the Let's Dancesessions and Jackson Browne also saw him and offered him free recording time. Texas Flood was the result.

"It was done in two days. We played the songs one day and recorded them the next. We did it that way because that was all the time we had. It was fun and I like to record that way, but I like to record with a little more time too but I don't go for this six-months-to-a-year-in-

the-studio stuff. You’d beat your heart to death." Let's Dance was proof enough

that Vaughan could play guitar but Texas Flood showed he could also cut the mustard as a blues singer. There were flashes of Hendrix in the volatile playing of ’Testify’ but it was mostly Buddy Guy, Albert Collins and Jimmy Vaughan that oozed from ’Mary Had A Little Lamb’, ‘l’m Cryin’ ’ and the superb ‘Dirty Pool’, the best thing he’s written and performed to date. Couldn't Stand the Weather took a little longer and rumour was that half the songs were written in the studio:

“I finished the lyrics the day we went to record but I still had to learn how to sing them and I hadn’t worked out the melodies. In the studio we were quite rushed as we had just come off the road and we only had three weeks to write and record the album. Plus we were trying different things and I was incorporating my brother into it and originally he was gonna play steel guitar but it worked out better the way it is.”

Why tackle Hendrix’s 'Voodoo Chile’, a song that can hardly be improved upon? "I love the song and I love his music in fact there’s hardly any of his music that I don’t like."

Didn’t the Muddy Waters’ style of the song attract you?

“Yeah, it’s kinda Hendrix’s version of what Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Bo Diddley were doin'. ’’ You stuck pretty close to the original.

“Yeah, but to me that's how the song goes. You can change a lot of things but there’s certain things about certain songs that you’ve got to keep the same, or I do anyway." Although Vaughan’s name became known overnight, he had been paying his dues ever since he was a high-school student in his birthplace, Dallas, Texas. It smacks of myth-making but the story has it that he dropped out of high school and left home to play the blues in Austin. So what’s it like coping with success at age 29 in 1984? “Well the success has been 20 years in the cornin’. We just try to keep our head on our shoulders

screwed on tight, our hearts in the . right place and remember all of our real friends and keep on goin’. ” Why was Bowie only paying you S4OO a night? “That’s not what the price was and I didn't say that, that’s somebody else’s media crap. That’s not what the problem was, the problem was to do with promises made to us about opening up the show, plus I wanted to play with my own band in the first place.” Vaughan's recent fame has brought about the usual amount of attention in the shape of film offers and people like John McEnroe wanting to jam with him. “McEnroe’s a good friend, he’s alright, he’s a great guy. And the movie offers, well if a part came up that I thought I. could do then I’d take it. There's a part I’m looking at right now but I’m not sure of when I could do it so I can’t tell you about it.”

Do you see yourself as leading some sort of blues revival? “In a way. but there’s a lot of people like Buddy Guy, Albert King, Albert Collins and Magic Sam, who were the originals, who were shoved in the background and deserve the recognition. And if we can help get them recognised again then I’m really glad to be able to do it." Vaughan’s work-rate is hectic. In the near future he's down to produce Lonnie Mack’s and Albert King's next albums as well as fitting in something by Double Trouble. But that’s not all:

"We’re playing Carnegie Hall on the day after my birthday in October. It's gonna be a revue we start off as a trio, then after an hour we have an intermission and then we come back with the addition of my brother on guitar, Dr John on keyboards, a horn section and Angela Strehli, a friend of ours from Austin, on vocals. We're recording it and it will be telecast world-wide via satellite and a live album will probably result later on down the line.”

Stevie Ray Vaughan welcome to the American Dream.