by Alan Paul
Recalls Layton, “Cutter said, ‘You guys need help. You have to get your shit together because you have no idea what you are doing.’ He had been out in the world with very successful acts, so we listened to him and his list of how we should present ourselves and what we should do.”
“I had learned a lot about touring and artists and said, ‘Stevie, you are a white boy playin’ the blues, and we’re gonna start from scratch,’” Brandenburg said. “We had to take a direction and do things that get him in the position to be the artist he wanted to be.”
As Stevie was establishing his own musical and stylistic persona, his future partner Tommy Shannon was struggling through his own drama, wrestling the demons he would have to vanquish before he could become Stevie’s right-hand man.
SHANNON: I got worse and worse after Krackerjack broke up in 1973. Stevie and I went our separate ways, and I began my descent into a drug-filled hell. The lower bardo of existence! I got really strung out and was put on ten years’ probation, which was revoked three times because I had dirty urine specimens. I was in and out of jail and institutions for five years, falling totally out of touch with music. I had no friends; they all turned their backs on me, thinking I was too far gone to help.
I finally spent a year in the last possible place—a farm in Buda where all of the other guys were old derelicts from under the bridge. I was lost. It’s a terrible thing when someone else has control of your life, like the judge who told me that I couldn’t play music anymore because he didn’t want me in bars. When I finally got out, all I had was a broke-down car, some clothes, a few pictures and memorabilia—and my ’63 Fender Jazz bass, which I’d kept under my bed at the farm. One night, I opened up the case and just started crying. I loved it so much, but I was so far away from it that I couldn’t even pick it up. I just put it back under the bed.
I got out in ’78 and stayed in a halfway house in Austin for four months and started working as a mason with my cousin laying rock and brick. During this time, I drove my ’64 Volkswagen Bug to the Rome Inn and heard Stevie playing his ass off. Afterwards, we talked for a long time outside. I had gotten a better probation officer, who let me play, and I started playing with Rocky Hill. I moved to Houston to play with Rocky and Uncle John, then quit to join Alan Haynes in the Texas Boogie Band. All this got me back into music and away from the bottom.
9
BLUES POWER
In October 1979, Stevie met a person who would change his fate. Edi Johnson was a bookkeeper at the Manor Downs horse track outside of town and, after getting to know Stevie for most of a year, she asked her boss, Frances Carr, if she might back the guitarist, whose talent and need for help were equally obvious. Carr was from a prominent South Texas family and a friend of the Grateful Dead’s. Sam Cutler, ex-Dead and Rolling Stones road manager, helped her open Manor Downs in 1975. Chesley Millikin, an Irishman who had been general manager of Epic Records in Europe and was also close to the Dead, was another friend and the track’s general manager. Carr and Millikin formed Classic Management specifically to manage Vaughan, starting in May 1980. Stevie finally had some backing to help propel him beyond the club circuit.
After eight years of honing his craft and finding his own artistic voice, the twelve-month period from January 1980 to January 1981 would prove to be pivotal in Stevie Ray Vaughan’s career. After years of toughing it out in beer joints, couch surfing, and riding in broken-down vans for weeks at a time, with no place to call home and no money in his pocket, the essential elements to Stevie’s success began to fall into place one by one. His old friend Cutter Brandenburg was back by his side, along with bassist Tommy Shannon, who would become his closest friend. With the financial backing of Frances Carr and the music industry connections of Chesley Millikin, Stevie finally had the tools he needed to break through.
“It was like watching a Polaroid develop,” says Layton. “What was once a cloudy picture was coming sharply into focus.”
EDI JOHNSON, Classic Management bookkeeper: I took karate classes at the Rome Inn Monday afternoons, and people there kept telling me I had to see Stevie, because I loved the blues. I realized immediately that he was on a different level than anyone I’d ever seen; he took you to a place where you only hear music and nothing else in your life matters. At one point, he and Lenny asked me to read a contract from Denny Bruce and Takoma Records. I told them not to sign it and said they needed someone with more knowledge than me. Stevie then asked me to be his manager, which was ridiculous!
I thought he was worthy of going places, and it wasn’t going to happen being paid by the door at the Rome Inn. I saw Stevie over a period of months, getting to know him a little bit before I was comfortable suggesting to my employer that she get involved. I figured Frances, who was known to have resources and connections in the music business, could help.
LAYTON: Frances was good friends with the Grateful Dead, and Chesley knew the Rolling Stones.
EDI JOHNSON: I told her that this guy was really good and had a chance to go somewhere and that maybe her friend Chesley could fly in and see him. They went down to the Rome Inn and were impressed and started talking about setting up Classic Management. Frances said, “I need to have someone watching the books, so you’re going to have to do more work, and I’m going to have to pay you more.” I offered to do it for free—that would be my contribution to this project. It had become clear to me that one reason Stevie did not have management was his involvement with drugs and reputation for being unreliable. Anyone backing him had to be willing to not make any money for a few years.
LAYTON: All of that happened without my knowledge. All of a sudden, we had a manager. It was kind of bizarre.
EDI JOHNSON: Chesley realized that the guys needed to play a lot more, and Frances was concerned that they needed money to pay rent and have places to stay. The band and crew were put on a weekly salary, and the money to cover it was transferred from Classic Management to a Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble band account. All the money that the band earned was deposited into that account. They were only making $500–$1,000 a gig, and I don’t think the band started to pay any of the loans or 10 percent commission back for about three years.
NEWHOUSE: Stevie saw Frances as a guardian angel who could finance the band’s day-to-day operations, but I made more money when we were self-managed, paid our expenses and the Rock Arts booking fee, and split what was left. All of a sudden, we’re on salary and making less. It was a regular paycheck, but we didn’t see any extra money from the windfall of a really good gig. We got $200–$250 a week, which wasn’t bad, but there were clubs in Lubbock where we’d make $800 at the door, and now that money went to Classic Management and we were getting peanuts.
LAYTON: Nothing was really any different than it had been before, though at least we felt like we weren’t doing it all ourselves.
EDI JOHNSON: Stevie and I both had to sign every check, and that could prove challenging for me. Stevie and Lenny moved out to Volente [about forty miles from downtown] because she wanted to get him away from all the people who were giving him drugs. Every Friday, I had to bring the paychecks out there and get them signed so the band could get paid. I would bring any bills as well, and it could take all night to get him to sign everything. Stevie wasn’t responsible, and like most really artistic people, he didn’t have a grasp on money. He was totally consumed by his music.
STREHLI: Stevie was so compelling that we all figured that sooner later he was going to grab a lot of people. But there were so few businesspeople in the Austin music world. As good as he was, he could have kept grinding his gears for years. Just having a manager was a big deal.
NEWHOUSE: Chesley would tell us, “You guys have got to watch out for Stevie; keep him away from the drug dealers, and make sure he’s not doing coke.” Then twenty minutes later, we’d see him shoving coke up Stevie’s nose.
After Stevie signed with Classic Management, he and bookkeeper Edi Johnson had to sign every check from the band accoun
t. (Courtesy Joe Priesnitz)
LAYTON: Chesley was a very high-rolling guy with a lot of great ideas but with very little attention to what it meant to the bottom line.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: I mean, who likes managers, anyway?
NEWHOUSE: We used to make fun of Chesley behind his back. We didn’t have a lot of respect for him because he was an older guy with some affectations: he wore an ascot, and we just thought he was ridiculous and out of touch. But he was Frances’s boy, so we had to accept him.
EDI JOHNSON: He was Irish and he had an accent, so the way he dressed didn’t seem that strange to me. He was European.
LAYTON: Chesley had some stock phrases that were ridiculous, all said in this grandiose Irish accent. “Top dollar! Nothing but the best!” “You’ve never had it so good, you little cocksucker!” And my favorite: “You’ll be eating shad roe on the gefilte fish highway!” The idea was, “Stick with me and we’ll all be eating caviar, or fuck it up and we’ll be eating gefilte fish.”
BENTLEY: Chesley … well, he wore an ascot around Austin and treated the local scene and certainly a mere writer like me as being beneath him.
EDI JOHNSON: Chesley could charm a snake. He was funny, and he was a crowd-pleaser who made people laugh. He was protective of Stevie.
BRANDENBURG: He was uniquely hard to read; Chesley just kinda rolled with it. He had a master plan, and he did a lot of great things like hiring publicist Charles Comer, who was well respected in the industry and had a lot of connections.
EDI JOHNSON: Charles Comer was extremely helpful.
PRIESNITZ: One of Chesley’s big problems with Stevie, who he called Junior, was the lack of original material. He’d say, “All Junior wants to do is play the blues.” The band would work around Texas, and we established a tour through the Southeast and Northeast, anchored by the Lone Star Café in New York City. It was a grind.
NEWHOUSE: After a gig at No Fish Today in Baltimore [February 15 or 16, 1980], Stevie was speed rapping at the bar with someone for two hours. It was twenty degrees out, and we were huddled in the van. Finally, I walked in and said, “C’mon, let’s go to the rooms,” and Stevie turned around and told me to fuck off. Soon we were yelling in each other’s faces—not for the first or last time. I said, “We’re tired of waiting on you; get your ass in the truck!” And he said, “Suck my ass! It’s my truck, and it’ll leave when I tell it to!” It was forgotten the next day, but Chesley embellished the story into me knocking Stevie out, which led to weirdos calling my house and threatening to kill me years later.
LAYTON: Speed was everywhere—it was cheap, and it brought total chaos to everyday life. One day, I got a call to jam with Stevie at Hole Sound. I pull my car around back, and there’s the van sitting there running and burning up, with the radiator overflowing and on the verge of stalling out. Stevie was passed out in the driver’s seat with the door hanging open; he’d been up for days and finally crashed. I reached in and turned the motor off. The drug-induced mayhem and chaos was endless.
BRUCE: Stevie was always snorting what he called cocaine and I call crank—“coke” that made his nose bleed with every line. He’d get going on long raps that made very little sense, such as, “In addition to being a recording artist, I need money for a medical research laboratory and to hire skilled people, because I’d like to cure poverty and starvation.” It was a speed freak’s rap. I thought he should calm down and get sober, but “Just Say No” was not going to work. He just wanted to rock on his own terms.
April 1, 1980, Steamboat 1874 show broadcast live on KLBJ radio and released as In The Beginning in 1992. (Courtesy Sony Music Entertainment)
On April 1, 1980, the Double Trouble show at Steamboat 1874 was broadcast live on KLBJ radio. This oft-bootlegged show was released in 1992 as In The Beginning. It’s a solid document of what the band sounded like at the time: raw, powerful, and unrelenting.
LAYTON: A gig like that was special. KLBJ did live broadcasts once or twice a month, and they’d tape it as it was being broadcast. The “Tin Pan Alley” from that show became the most requested song KLBJ ever had. We beat “Stairway to Heaven”!
WARREN HAYNES, guitarist, Gov’t Mule, the Allman Brothers Band: The Fabulous Thunderbirds had started to infiltrate our scene a little bit, and I already loved Jimmie when a friend saw Stevie at the Double Door in Charlotte, North Carolina [July 9, 1980], a little bitty blues club. He said, “Jimmie Vaughan’s little brother is pretty fucking amazing. Oh, and it was the loudest thing I ever heard.”
GARY WILEY: I was going to Texas Tech in Lubbock when Steve and his band came to Fat Dawgs, which held about two hundred people [September 18–20, 1980]. I visited him at his cheap motel, and he asked if I was coming to the show. I said I couldn’t afford it, and he said he’d take care of it and to bring three friends. We walked into the packed club, past a line of people who couldn’t get in, just waiting outside so they could listen. We discovered he’d given us the best table in the house, three feet from the stage. He got into a very long version of “Voodoo Child,” squirted lighter fluid on his guitar, and lit it on fire with his cigarette while still playing it! It was incredible, and the place went berserk. At their break, Steve came over and sat down with us. We were all mesmerized; all the people in the crowd were raving about how great he was.
NEWHOUSE: We opened for Willie Dixon at the Bottom Line in New York [October 17–18, 1980], and it felt like we had reached another level, playing a place we had heard about for our whole lives. Billy Gibbons was there, along with other important musicians and celebrities. And, of course, sharing a bill with Willie Dixon was especially significant to Stevie.
Early promo flyer for the trio. (Courtesy Joe Priesnitz)
On October 27, Stevie and Double Trouble played at Rockefeller’s in Houston, one of their regular gigs. Old friend Tommy Shannon was living in town, still working as a bricklayer and day laborer when he came to see them.
SHANNON: Seeing Stevie again was a revelation. I thought, “That’s where I belong.” He played “Texas Flood,” and I got goose bumps; after just a few notes, it was like I woke up and thought, “I’m going for this gig with everything I’ve got.” His guitar playing had crossed the gap from straight blues, incorporating some rock and Hendrix. At the break, I went up to Stevie and said, “I belong in this band.” I was almost frantic about it. I sat in, and it sounded so good!
BRANDENBURG: Tommy had been through the worst part of his life, and his hands were cut, calloused, and crusty from laying bricks. You could see the pain and anguish in his eyes: one of the best bassists of all time forcibly kept away from music by legal rulings. I think it was slowly killing Tommy because he is music. It was so sad to see him dying for someone to give him that opportunity. There was an immediate connection between Tommy and Whipper that did not exist with Jackie. It was on, and Stevie had the foundation he needed—a rhythm section that he knew would follow him wherever he went.
LAYTON: I thought, “Well, all right!” Big Jack was losing enthusiasm. He and Stevie weren’t that close. It was just a gig for him. Jack didn’t like the band to play loud, and Stevie was getting louder and louder. Cutter told Stevie, “Man, we could get Slut in this band! Fuckin’ Tommy Shannon! You need to hire him.” Stevie was hitting methedrine, snorting cocaine, and drinking like crazy, but he had reservations because of Tommy’s past drug abuses. I was thinking, “What are you talking about? You’ve got a rig in your sock right now!” Cutter said, “No, man, he’s cool.” And I said, “Let’s get him! Call him up now!”
BRANDENBURG: Whipper and I talked about it on the drive back from Houston. When we talked to Stevie, he agreed that this thing had to include Tommy Shannon. We went to tell Chesley, and he didn’t want to do it. He felt the investment had been made in Jackie, but we said, “Chesley, if this does not happen, we are going nowhere.” The next time we went to Houston [a month later], he came to hear Tommy sit in with us, watching from the back with me as the energy level jumped ten times. He said, “Yo
u’re right, Cutter, it’s what we have to do.” He asked what I knew about Tommy, and I said that Stevie and I had known him for a very long time, and he said, “I’ve seen enough and have never heard Stevie and Chris so alive. It’s now on you. Get these boys back to Austin, and we will start all over.” I could hardly contain myself.
10
GET EXPERIENCED
Jackie Newhouse’s last gig with Double Trouble was January 3, 1981, at Skip Willy’s in San Antonio. The next day, Layton drove to Houston in his Datsun 510 station wagon to pick up Shannon and help him move to Austin. The Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble lineup was set for the next four years.
“We all felt bad because Jackie was a great person and a real good bass player, but he wasn’t Tommy Shannon,” said Brandenburg. “I think he recognized that, too, when it came down to it.”
Indeed, decades later, Newhouse says there were never any animosity between him and Stevie, noting that they had stopped socializing outside gigs. And, he adds, “all of the drugs and alcohol were getting harder to deal with.”
Shannon’s presence shifted the dynamics and sound of Double Trouble in ways that were immediately apparent. “When I saw Stevie with Tommy and Chris, it was obvious that the guy was about to blow up,” says Eric Johnson. “You can’t say too much about the magic, chemistry, and alchemy between a group of musicians, because those guys had it.”
The local Buddy magazine reviewed the February 20–21 shows at the Steamboat, writing, “Stevie may be the best guitarist playing anywhere in the country. With the addition of bassist Tommy Shannon, Double Trouble has become a virtual blues machine, while Stevie is leaning more and more towards blues Hendrix style.”