05STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN AND DOUBLE TROUBLE TEXAS FLOOD

(1983)

Stevie’s guitar sounded so good on Texasflood that he single-handedly changed the conventional wisdom about guitar strings. Despite most of the other records on this list being recorded with strings so thin you could barely see them, SRV convinced a generation to string their axes with suspension bridge cables in a quest for tone.

It was the ferocity of Vaughan’s attack and his unbelievable swing that mattered, though. The heavy strings were just there to take the punishment from his picking hand. In a regular blues shuffle, the second eighth note comes slightly late, perhaps 60 per cent of the way through the beat, creating the bounce. Stevie, though, would hit it 70 per cent of the way through the beat, for a driving hard swing that few guitarists can replicate. Combined with his ability to rake through every note of a riff, it was an extremely aggressive take on the Texas shuffle that immediately converted rock fans.

Guitarists sometimes imagine that the hallowed SRV tone is in the gear. It doesn’t help that one of the amps was an unobtainable Dumbleland Special (if you can find one for sale, expect a £50k price tag). The Stevie connection also saw the prices of 1980s Ibanez Tube Screamers skyrocket, prompting Ibanez to reissue them. As with all these sounds, it’s much more about how you play. Who do you imagine would sound more like SRV – you playing through his rig, or him playing through a cheap amp?

Extreme volume definitely helps though, and Stevie’s Strat was able to sustain so much because of the coupling of the amp and pickups at intense levels. Although his amps’ tones were quite clean, his Fender Vibroverb amps were adding some breakup and a lot of valve compression. Conventional wisdom is that Stevie used the Tube Screamer as a clean boost, with the drive at or close to zero and the level cranked. That does sound great, but it’s not the only way he used them: he often had two running at once, which would inevitably add dirt, and with high-headroom amps he would sometimes increase the drive on one or both of them.

Stevie’s influences were not hard to spot – Hendrix, Albert King and Lonnie Mack chief among them. Such was the fire, passion, and sheer quality of Vaughan’s delivery, though, that no one could dismiss him as a mere imitator. Testify, an Isley Brothers song that Hendrix had played during his stint with the group, became an earth-shaking instrumental in Stevie’s hands. Buddy Guy’s Mary Hada Littlelamb was similarly beefed up, and the fact the young Vaughan’s playing easily stood comparison to those giants showed how special he was.

At the close came Lenny, an instrumental for his wife that was as delicate and subtle as Rude Mood was raw and aggressive. That Vaughan was capable of such contrast signalled his depth. Here was a new talent with the range, skill, and excitement to bring blues to an entirely new audience.