Stevie Ray Vaughan bio ‘Texas Flood’ has soul to spare
It should surprise no one that during Stevie Ray Vaughan’s final performance in late August 1990, witnesses described seeing an otherworldly aura surrounding the tragic Texas guitar hero.
“Like it was some sort of a premonition,” notes Double Trouble drummer Chris Layton.
That night at Wisconsin’s Alpine Valley amphitheater, testifies Vaughan’s good friend Bonnie Raitt, “he was more magical than I’ve ever seen him.”
Killed when the helicopter he shared with four members of Eric Clapton’s crew crashed into a fog-shrouded resort hillside, Vaughan was already a folk hero. In Texas and around the world, he breathed new life into the blues by doing things on his beat-up vintage Stratocaster (aka “Number One”) that even his idol Jimi Hendrix probably never imagined. Eventually, fans couldn’t get enough.
More important, he had soul to spare. Touted as the definitive SRV biography, “Texas Flood” will do little to diminish Vaughan’s lofty reputation. At the same time, veteran music journalists Alan Paul and Andy Aledort have little interest in presenting him as a saint; in many cases, they argue, his foibles are precisely what gave his music such power.
Their decades of research and dozens of interviews reveal a born musician and deeply spiritual human being whose contradictions fed straight into his art. His obsession with playing guitar often came at the expense of more quotidian aspects of daily life, even a fixed address. During the mid-’70s, notes longtime journalist/record executive Bill Bentley, “his home was his guitar.”
Vaughan showed little interest in conventional rock stardom but nearly succumbed to that lifestyle nonetheless. He was a soft-spoken introvert who used his talent to connect with people from all walks of life — be they heroes such as Albert or B.B. King or the last remaining autograph-seeker before Vaughan was hustled onto the tour bus.
Told as an oral history with plentiful author-supplied context, “Texas
Flood” weaves several storylines into a free-flowing narrative that remains as taut as one of Vaughan’s preferred large-bore strings: a father who both terrorized and encouraged him; the improbable onset of stardom after years of slugging it out on the Texas bar circuit; the dizzying 18 months that took Vaughan from the Montreux Jazz Festival to recording Double Trouble’s debut LP at Jackson Browne’s L.A. studio and appearing on David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” album; and the booze and drugs that enabled Vaughan’s punishing schedule but threatened to
derail his career just as it was taking off.
Alongside Vaughan’s older brother and perhaps earliest guitar role model, Jimmie, the memories of Layton and his fellow surviving Double Trouble bandmates, Tommy Shannon and Reese Wynans, form the spine of “Texas Flood.” Coming next are the wellknown Dallas and Austin musicians who also found a second home at Antone’s in the ’70s and ’80s: Doyle Bramhall Sr., Denny Freeman, Joe Sublett, W.C. Clark and Lou Ann Barton, to name a few.
Even when painful, or unflattering (which isn’t often), their recollections ring true.
Additionally, Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel and “Austin City Limits” producer Terry Lickona put Vaughan’s importance to Austin music in perspective. On a national level, Raitt, Nile Rodgers, Buddy Guy and Dr. John can’t praise him enough, nor can Aerosmith’s Joe
Perry and Brad Whitford. Even Huey Lewis, who asked Double Trouble to open a month of sold-out arena dates on his band’s summer 1984 tour, recalls how the Texas trio’s blistering first-night set was met with little besides shouts of “Huey! Huey! Huey!”
“It was one of those moments where you really hate your audience,”
Lewis sighs.
The common thread is how much this disparate crowd loved Vaughan, and continue to do so, but no voice resonates louder than Jimmie’s. The elder Vaughan brother was Stevie’s biggest fan, a feeling that was very much reciprocated.
“The world misses his music, but I miss my brother,” he says near the end.
The cruelest irony of “Texas Flood” is that when it all started coming together for Vaughan, the clock had almost run out. He got sober, embraced recovery and hit a new career stride on 1989’s “In Step” and the Rodgers-produced joint album with Jimmie, “Family Style.”
But as the story crests toward Alpine Valley, a palpable sense of loss seeps in. Vaughan and Double Trouble were on such a high — and the right kind of high this time — that the circumstances surrounding his death seem abnormally capricious and cruel. Doubly so because, the authors note, the helicopter flight “never should have happened.”
Readers are left to ponder what might have been had fate been kinder, but by that point Vaughan’s place in history was secure. In 1994, a statue of his likeness was erected alongside present-day Lady Bird Lake, near the site of his final Austin performance. He and Double Trouble were elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, finally, in 2015.
More to the point, people will learn and sing Vaughan’s songs as long as guitars exist. His loss is still so acutely felt that those he inspired still struggle with it nearly three decades later.
“Texas Flood” sings those blues, the kind where healing and hurting combine in a soul-cleansing shower of guitar.
Says Ray Wylie Hubbard, the sage singer-songwriter who met Vaughan in recovery and immortalized him years later in his classic tune, “Screw You, We’re From Texas,” “He’s left a path for others to follow, people that get down in that hole so deep you can’t see the top.”