Stevie Ray Vaughan

Told to get clean or he had two weeks to live, guitar great Stevie Ray Vaughan did, and recorded his greatest album, only for death to then strike from a different direction.

How he got clean and made his greatest album. Chosen by Joanne Shaw Taylor

There’s a heart-stopping moment in the film The Shawshank Redemption when Andy Dufresne crawls to freedom through what Morgan Freeman’s character Red narrates as “five-hundred yards of shit-smelling foulness I can’t even imagine”. Then redemption comes as he’s cleansed, arms outstretched, by the falling rain.

The scene sums up neatly the final few years of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s life. The shit-smelling foulness of his drug and alcohol addiction, near-death experiences and the toxic relationships few of us could even imagine. Then redemption for SRV comes with the recording of his final, addiction-free album, 1989’s In Step. To paraphrase Red: Stevie Ray Vaughan crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.

In Step isn’t just Stevie Ray Vaughan’s greatest studio album, it’s also his most influential. In fact, in terms of the continued survival and progression of blues music, In Step is as important as Robert Johnson’s King Of The Delta Blues Singers, BB King’s Live At The Regal, East West by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, even the Beano album by John Mayall’s Blues Breakers.

Recorded with his band Double Trouble [bassist Tommy Shannon and drummer Chris Layton], it was Vaughan’s fourth and final studio album and his biggest commercial success. In Step won a Grammy in 1989 for Best Contemporary Blues Album, and delivered a No.1 single, Crossfire, on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart. It’s the album where Stevie Ray finally found his true voice.

In Step put blues music back in business. The guitar landscape of 1989 was still roamed by hordes of gangly scrotes with bicycle pumps shoved down the inside leg of their spandex pants. Before grunge drove the decisive stake through the heart of these Hollywood vampires, Vaughan scored more than a few converts with the power of blues.

Unlike the Marshall-fuelled shredders, he found his sound via classic American amplifiers. He ran his amps loud and clean, albeit pushed into light overdrive with his heavy touch, even heavier strings and a succession of Ibanez Tube Screamer pedals. You can hear his pick hitting the strings of his Fender Stratocasters on In Step. You can hear the same thing on Jimi Hendrix’s studio recordings.

While 80s rock and metalheads modified their Strats beyond recognition, thanks to the efforts of Edward Van Halen, Vaughan preferred the vintage originals. Like Slash and Gary Moore did for the Gibson Les Paul Standard, and Danny Gatton did for the 50s ‘Blackguard’ Fender Telecaster, Vaughan rebooted the desirability of the classic unmolested Stratocaster. His tone on In Step defined the sound of modern electric blues just like Gary Moore did on this side of the Atlantic with his Gibson Les Paul.

In Step became the blueprint for the emerging trend of young blues artists of the 90s and beyond.

These initially included

Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Jonny Lang, who were then joined by the likes of Joanne Shaw Taylor, Oli Brown, Laurence Jones and Quinn Sullivan. Thanks to SRV and In Step – and Gary Moore’s Still Got The Blues, released a year later – the yoof found a way to make an ancient art form their own.

“The defining moment for me was when I saw Stevie Ray Vaughan,” disciple

Kenny Wayne Shepherd told Guitar World. “I was seven years old at the time, and I got to meet him afterward. I walked away from that concert just dying to get serious about the guitar. I already had some toy guitars that I had played around with at home, and I probably learned my first notes on one of them, but I got my first electric guitar right after I had met Stevie.”

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about In Step is that it exists at all. Stevie Ray Vaughan was your archetypal dead man walking, hell-bent on self-destruction until he committed to recording what would become his final studio album with Double Trouble.

His five-hundred-yard crawl began when he was a child. “I guess about seven or eight years

“Stevie didn’t reinvent the wheel, but added flair and polish to the blues.”

Joanne Shaw Taylor