by Alan Paul
LAYTON: I’ve got to thank Rodney, because if he hadn’t overslept, I might never have gotten the chance to play with Stevie.
7
COME ON (PART 1)
The Cobras had a growing reputation and were drawing large local crowds when Ray developed vocal nodes in July 1977 and had to stop singing for several months. The rest of the band decided to fill in at the mic and keep pushing on. Stevie’s exposure and experience as a front man continued to grow, and the next month he abruptly left the Cobras just after Ray returned. While his bandmates accepted the departure as inevitable, it was a blow to a group riding high on their Band of the Year award.
“I wasn’t surprised when he left, but I was upset,” says Sublett. “His energy was one of the things that made playing in the band so much fun. Standing between Stevie and Denny was incredibly inspiring and exciting. He asked me to join him, but I didn’t have the foresight to follow him out of a popular band making decent dough.”
Adds Freeman, “It wasn’t surprising when Stevie decided to go front his own band. He was picking up fans along the way, and it was just time for him to go become Stevie Ray Vaughan. It was obvious that he had some sort of destiny, and we were all rooting for him. He was taking a big chance, but Stevie wasn’t afraid.”
On September 23, 1977, Jeff Nightbyrd wrote in The Austin Sun, “The reason for the split appears to be that Paul Ray’s moving in a more mainstream direction while Stevie wants to play blues; also Stevie Vaughan lately has been recognized as a star in his own right, and he wants a band.”
Vaughan formed the Triple Threat Revue, so named because it featured three front-people: Stevie Ray, blues belter Lou Ann Barton, and the sweet-singing bassist W. C. Clark. The drummer was Fredde “Pharaoh” Walden, and the keyboardist was Mike Kindred, an old Oak Cliff friend and former member of Krackerjack and Storm who had already written the great moody tune “Cold Shot,” which quickly became a Triple Threat staple.
Triple Threat Revue, 12-4-77, L-R: Mike Kindred, W. C. Clark, Lou Ann Barton, Fredde “Pharaoh” Walden, Stevie. (© Ken Hoge)
KINDRED: I was playing in the Antone’s house band and pumping gas on South Lamar when Stevie pulls up, walks over, looks at me, shakes his head, and the talks began. He told me about Lou Ann and his plans for this band, and I said, “We need Fredde Pharaoh on drums.” Then I got into his car, and we went to McMorris Ford, where W. C. Clark was one of the top mechanics, and starting laying our propaganda on him.
CLARK: Stevie was always on the black side of Austin because he was really interested in learning the black culture. He kept coming by my job and telling me that he had decided to put a band together and needed me to play bass. I wasn’t looking for a gig, because I was getting a steady paycheck and relaxing for a change, but he kept pestering me.
LAYTON: Lou Ann led the way initiating Triple Threat Revue. She grabbed Stevie and said, “You gotta get out of the Cobras, and we should form a new band.”
MAY 28, 1977, LOU ANN BARTON DIARY ENTRY
Stevie and I talked again about doing something last night … Saw Paul Ray and the Cobras, and they asked me to sing.… It was so great to see Denny. Stevie played so great I fell out. We spoke later and he asked me for my phone number. He said he’s enjoying what he’s doing now but he thinks we can work together in the future.
LOU ANN BARTON, Triple Threat and Double Trouble singer, 1977–1979: I knew that Stevie’s time in the Cobras was running out. We put together a dream band. They were all killers.
KINDRED: We all sang lead and would chorus behind Lou Ann with four male voices, and it was just killer. We were a happening band!
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: They were a fabulous band. Fredde Pharaoh had done a lot of playing in my bands, with a killer shuffle, and he could really swing. He played simple, aspiring to play like the guys on the early Albert Collins records, and he did. And W. C. Clark is a great singer, bassist, and guitar player.
CLARK: I had seen Stevie around a lot, and I knew how unique he was: how clean a tone he had, how nasty and low-down he could be, and how he could play licks exactly like Chuck Berry, Albert King, and B. B. King. I knew he was for real, that he was a seeker, a warrior. And that’s why I not only agreed to join his band but to play bass, which I had given up to focus on guitar. I really had no interest in playing bass again, but Stevie had such a fire and I was so impressed by how much he had already improved that I wanted to see where he could take it.
Just another “midnite to 5 am” gig: a Triple Threat Revue flyer. (Courtesy Mike Steele)
On October 7, after just a few shows, Margaret Moser wrote in The Austin Sun, “Triple Threat Revue’s first week of performances promises to give Austin’s blues bands serious competition … Fort Worth chanteuse Lou Ann Barton … skimmed the cream of the crop of Austin’s rhythm and blues musicians. Besides Miss Lou Ann’s cat scratch vocals, she hand-picked Freddie [sic] Walden and Mike Kindred, who thundered their way through Storm, on drums and keyboards, respectively; W. C. Clark, bass and former lead guitarist for Southern Feeling; and the whiplash guitar of Stevie Vaughan, who just retired from a two-year tenure with Paul Ray and the Cobras. This ain’t no empty threat.”
CRAIG: Lou Ann was terrific, a great singer in her prime and a huge presence.
LAYTON: Lou Ann was very dominant, very imperative, very demonstrative, and she knew exactly what she wanted. Lou Ann had the reins of Triple Threat. Stevie slowly asserted himself.
CLARK: Stevie got down every inch of the way. There was no slack in him. His endurance and perseverance were unreal. Guys like B. B. and Albert and Freddie King and Albert Collins had that mean, soulful endurance, always trying to get every possible tone out of a single note, just digging deep into the guitar to satisfy something deep within their own souls. Stevie had that, and it changed me. Like a lot of black people at the time, I wasn’t getting down that hard on the guitar, instead focusing on my singing and the groove, but he opened my eyes.
BRAMHALL: When you’re up there that high musically, you’re always looking around the corner for something new to add. I think that with any great artist or athlete, you can see them move through different levels of growth and continue to improve. It never surprised me that Stevie would surprise me. You kind of expected it. It was like, “What are you gonna do next?” Then he would do it, and it would be like, “Let’s build on that.”
BENTLEY: Stevie completely burned it down when he started Triple Threat. He was possessed. Jimmie was the king of cool, and you could feel Bill Campbell in your bones, but you could feel Stevie from the back of the club before he played a note. Some nights, there were only five or six of us at the Rome Inn for Triple Threat, but we were all completely breathless.
CLARK: We didn’t need a leader in Triple Threat. Everything just worked, but after a while we all looked up at Stevie because his name was the one that was selling the band, and we all knew who was drawing the people.
KINDRED: He was the strongest member. The first time they billed his name was in Dallas. W. C. pointed it out to me, and I said, “We might as well get used to it.” Stevie was a phenomenon. When you see a blazing meteor, you don’t argue with it. Give him his due, and we can all only prosper. He was a six-shot killer, and you take the stage alert and aware when you take the stage with Stevie Ray Vaughan. I loved that about him. He wasn’t trying to make anyone look bad, but he immediately established a level which said, “Do not approach if you’re bullshitting.”
RONNIE EARL, Roomful of Blues and solo guitarist, friend of Stevie’s and Jimmie’s: I met Jimmie when he toured the Northeast and then stayed with him for a month in 1978, and he told me to go see his brother. I had never heard blues with so much passion, intensity, and force, and it really affected my playing. Hearing both Stevie and Jimmie was a heavy awakening. Their styles were different, and Stevie was very loud, but he was not playing rock. The biggest difference between them was Jimmie was in an ensemble and Stevie was more the centerpiece of the band. Yeah, he had W. C. and
Lou Ann, but it was Stevie Ray’s band, and that was unmistakable.
CLARK: He still wasn’t really singing more than a song or two a set. Somewhere in there, Stevie started doing “Pride and Joy.”
BETHEL: We were living together in Hyde Park, and one night, I woke up and he wasn’t next to me; he was kneeling down by the window, sitting in the moonlight, writing. He had his beret on—his “security” hat—and nothing else. I said, “What are you doing?” and he said, “I’m writing this song.” The next morning, he showed it to me, and it was called, “Sweet Little Thang.” He later changed the name to “Pride and Joy.”
ERIC JOHNSON: My girlfriend Mary Beth [Greenwood] shared a cottage with Lindi, and Stevie and I saw each other there. One night, we passed one guitar back and forth and talked about music. He was a very sweet, affable guy, down to earth, and just easy. He was not complicated, edgy, or murky, but entirely genuine and generous about music.
BETHEL: Mary Beth and I would tell Stevie that he had to come with us to see Eric play, but he didn’t want any part of it. One night, Eric was playing at the Armadillo, and Mary Beth said, “I go to all your gigs, Stevie, so you are coming with me to Eric’s gig.” As soon as Eric started playing, Stevie flipped out; he stood on the chair, screaming, “Yeah!” He loved it, and they became very good friends after that.
Stevie, 3/77, new tattoo peaking through. (© Ken Hoge)
KINDRED: We were both wondering about our spirituality, and some of my fondest memories of him are the long rides back from playing Stubbs in Lubbock. W. C. was always driving, bless his heart, and Lou Ann was passed out, usually across our laps, and Stevie and I were talking about trying to treat everyone the same and trying to be spiritually upright. There was a soft side to him that was very different from what you saw onstage.
SHANNON: Stevie was very interested in certain spiritual quests. That was one of the things that drew us together, but we expressed it in the weirdest ways. We were into the I Ching, the power of crystals, color therapy, and certain prophecies that we’d read about. We were into the Urantia, a big ol’ thick book supposedly written by an alien. He always had a spiritual ideal, but, like me, he had a hard time living up to that ideal.
BETHEL: He basically lived with me and Mary Beth. We used to get into our PJs, and Stevie would read to us from The Urantia Book.
LAYTON: Healing oneself—spiritually, physically, and mentally—was something Stevie was very interested in. He was into investigating healing modalities uncommon to Western culture and believed that people could be healed via color light therapy. He came up with this idea for a chair, like a dentist’s or massage chair, with a pattern of lights or LEDs that would correspond with the energy points/meridians in the body. You could then orchestrate the kind of light that went through the chair and develop a therapeutic protocol specific to the ailments or needs of a given person. It would be directed to every part of the body, using ultraviolet light, or blue or red lights. This concept is not that far out; the roots of color light therapy go back to ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, China, and India.
The T-Birds were well established as Austin’s top blues band by April 1978, when Stevie and Jimmie were featured together on the cover of The Austin Sun. Jimmie told writer Bill Bentley that it was the first time he had ever been interviewed.
“Though not actually the leader of Triple Threat … Stevie is the one who keeps the fire burning,” Bentley wrote. “And, as Jimmy [sic] is sometimes known to point out in explaining the brothers’ difference, ‘Stevie sings.’”
BENTLEY: When we finished the interview, I asked Stevie for his address to send him a copy when it came out. He replied, “I don’t really have a place to live.” He was still sofa surfing. His home was his guitar.
STEELE: One day, I asked Stevie, “Where are you living?” and he said, “Well, um … nowhere, really.” I invited him to live with me, which he did, staying on the sofa sleeper for about six months.
JAMES ELWELL, friend of Stevie’s: I spent a lot of time moving his stuff because I had a pickup truck and he lived out of boxes. He was definitely a struggling artist. I worked at a bicycle shop close to where he was living—the “Custom” sticker on his Number One guitar came from there—and he walked in and asked to borrow five dollars for food. I said, “Stevie, I have a moped in the back of the shop; why don’t you take it so you don’t have to walk everywhere?” He had a blast riding the thing around Austin with his beret on and people saying, “Goddamn, get a car, son!”
Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s right-hand man, sitting in with Triple Threat Revue at the Soap Creek, 6/78. (© Ken Hoge)
By mid-May 1978, both Clark and Kindred had left Triple Threat and were replaced by a pair of Barton’s Fort Worth buddies, bassist Jackie Newhouse and saxophonist Johnny Reno. No longer a triple threat, the band changed its name to Double Trouble, after the Otis Rush song.
KINDRED: With five el jefes in one band, I’m amazed it lasted as long as it did. Like his brother, Stevie’s music became more focused, and he became less interested in variety. Storm was a very restrictive band; Jimmie didn’t want to play any rock and roll, and we all knew it. Stevie was far more accepting on the front end, then we went through a natural shaking-out period where we discovered that we weren’t on the same page; people’s musical drives were different. My imagination was becoming pretty active, and I wanted to play more than blues shuffles. Look where Stevie ended up: with a trio playing Texas to Chicago blues. Triple Threat started out with a wider scope than that.
CLARK: One reason I pulled back is I wasn’t ready for the life on the road I saw him headed towards. He had a destiny, and I felt for a long time like I let him down, because he struggled for a few years to find a bassist to do what I did: set him up, anticipate him, cut out the drummer, push him to a new thing.
BARTON: They all quit because of differences with Stevie. I stuck with him. We were a team, and I also felt sorry for him. I felt that I had to help this guy out. He didn’t have two dimes to rub together or any decent clothes. I said, “Don’t worry, we’ll regroup,” called my buddies in Fort Worth, and got Jackie and Johnny Reno in the band.
KINDRED: My one regret is we didn’t get a great recording—which we captured one night at the Armadillo opening for Toots and the Maytals. We played an incredible show that they recorded. Being young and dumb, we let some guy have the tape, and we never saw him or it again.
BARTON: We changed the band name. Stevie and I were the Double Trouble. When I quit, it worked out perfect for the rhythm section to just pick that up and become a trio.
JACKIE NEWHOUSE, Double Trouble bassist, 1978–1980: Right from the start, we were usually playing five nights a week. Every Friday and Saturday was either Antone’s, the Rome Inn, or Soap Creek, and we had a lot of great gigs at After Ours, which was open till 5:00 in the morning. We had a regular Wednesday at the Soap Creek and Sunday at the Rome Inn, but otherwise I never knew where we’d be, and Stevie’s communication wasn’t great. I often had to look in the newspaper to see where we were playing that night! The drummer situation was in flux. Fredde had a family and a roofing business in Dallas, so he couldn’t always make the gigs, though he was the perfect drummer for the band: a hip, cool guy with the best flat-tire shuffle you ever heard. He would usually come down for Friday and Saturday, but we were always scrambling to get somebody for the weekday gigs.
BARBARA LOGAN, Doyle Bramhall’s wife, “Life by the Drop” cowriter: We went to see Stevie and Lou Ann one night and she came over and said, “We’d love to have you in the band, Doyle.” He thought it might happen but he also had just stopped drinking and was hesitant and was working with Rocky Hill [brother of ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill] and happy with what he was doing.
On June 19, Double Trouble played Houston’s Juneteenth Blues Festival, one of the biggest free blues fests in the world and the first time they played before a massive outdoor crowd. Other artists on the bill included Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Big Mama Thornton, and
Albert Collins. It was, recalls Newhouse, “a big deal” for the band, but their lineup was still unstable.
In July, Pharaoh finally left Triple Threat, replaced by Jack Moore, a University of Rhode Island student who was spending the summer in Austin and had been introduced to the scene by mutual friends in Roomful of Blues. When Moore left town, Vaughan was looking for a drummer again.
Sublett recommended his friend, roommate, and Corpus Christi homeboy Chris Layton, who Stevie knew a bit from the time he sat in with the Cobras.
“I moved from Corpus to Austin with a band called La Paz that played funk and jazz fusion,” recalls Layton. “Joe Sublett left the band to join the Cobras and recommended me to Greezy Wheels, a cosmic cowboy band with a big following and a major label deal. It was a good, steady-money gig.”
SUBLETT: Stevie told me he needed a drummer, and I asked if he would give Chris Layton a shot. He asked if he was a blues drummer, and I said, “No, but he’s a good musician, and he can learn.” I told Chris, and he started woodshedding. Stevie came over, and Chris was in the back room with headphones on playing Albert Collins’s “Frosty.” Stevie thought he sounded good and was impressed that Chris had strung together all these wires to make headphones run through our apartment.
LAYTON: The next day, he came over and we realized we had a lot of the same musical influences and interests like Stevie Wonder, James Brown, and Earth, Wind & Fire. We were both flipped out over the Donny Hathaway Live album. I told Stevie that I wanted to play with him. He was this amazingly talented guy, and I thought that we could do great things together. I had never seen anyone like him.
SUBLETT: He basically told Chris, “If you play what I want you to play, I’ll give you a shot,” and Chris didn’t have any ego issues, so that was fine. Stevie told me that he preferred a guy that he could teach how he wanted him to play, because he was a really good drummer himself. He could sit down and show you how to play a few different shuffles, and he said, “I’ve had drummers who are set in their ways and get offended if I make suggestions.” With Chris, he had a guy with an open heart and open ears who could grow with him. He said, “If Chris can play in sync with my right hand, what more can I ask? We’ll build anything beyond that.”