by Alan Paul
THORNTON: We never really rehearsed for the taping, but the night before, we met with the producer and discussed what we were going to do. Then we all went to the hotel to chill. Me and Tommy and Mike [Llorens, the brothers who played drums and keyboards] were drinking and playing cards, and there was a knock on the door. Stevie came in with a Texas Flood cassette and said, “Here, guys—we’ll play a couple of these songs.” We were good and buzzed up by then, pretty well blasted, so we put that tape on the bed and never did listen to it.
The next day, we just got up and started jamming. We listened to each other and played along. Stevie was very easy to play with. He was a good, experienced musician who knew when to play and when not to play. We were just listening to one another and complimenting each other. When you’re zoned in like that, it’s easy. We all were very happy for every opportunity to play with Stevie, definitely including Albert.
SHANNON: Stevie always said that 50 percent of learning how to play is learning how to really listen. He had a certain kind of awareness to music that is hard for a lot of people to get in touch with. He really listened.
O’BRIEN: A short time after the taping, I asked Albert about it, and he said, “Oh, man, that was great! Stevie played so good, but, you know … I had to step on him!”
A week after the session with King, Stevie and Double Trouble capped off a momentous year by recording their first performance on Austin City Limits, the public television show that was growing in national stature. It was a joint appearance with the Fabulous Thunderbirds that did not air until late the following year, as the final episode in the show’s ninth season.
The show, which began in 1974, initially focused heavily on country, both the cosmic cowboys lighting up Austin—Willie Nelson was the very first performer—and classic Texas artists, including Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. The scope slowly expanded, with featured artists including Lightnin’ Hopkins, B. B. King, and Tom Waits.
LICKONA: I really liked Stevie and saw him all the time, and I wanted to have him on the show well before he finally made it on. His management thought of us as a local show and didn’t want him treated him as a local act. They just weren’t cooperating. Chesley came from a different world and had a different notion of what Stevie should do and not do.
LAYTON: I ran into Terry Lickona at a cafeteria right before the whole Montreux thing and said, “You ought to get us on Austin City Limits,” and he goes, “Well, actually, I’m sorry to say that what y’all do is not the kind of thing we present on the show. We really can’t do it.” Then Texas Flood comes out, and they call and say, “Oh, we’d love to have Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble on the show!”
SHANNON: We were really excited about being on the show, and it came off real well.
LICKONA: Stevie was definitely in an altered state, which is how he spent much of his time back then. He was coked up, sweating, and almost paranoid; he kept going off the stage because he felt like he was such a mess. In reality, he looked like a mess, but his playing was terrific, and the people there were blown away. Every guitar player in America either saw the show or quickly became aware of it and begged us for repeats or copies. It became the stuff of legend, and we were flooded with requests.
Austin was a small town, and his lifestyle was common knowledge. Frankly, almost everyone else was doing the same thing; it was just part of the culture, and not only for musicians. For the most part, it didn’t really impact Stevie’s performance. It was just having a real bad effect on him personally as well as his decisions about his career and business. A lot of the issues were compounded once he started getting some acclaim outside of Austin and had some money coming in.
15
STORMY WEATHER
After eighteen months of nonstop touring, Stevie, Chris, and Tommy were a well-oiled musical machine when they entered the Power Station in New York City in January 1984 to cut their follow-up. Mullen was once again engineer and coproducer with the band. John Hammond was there as executive producer. The only problem was they lacked new material, having included the highlights of their club years on their debut.
One song fell into Stevie’s lap when he went to San Antonio, where he was being recruited by Arrowhead Music Management, which hoped to sign him away from Chesley. Stevie’s old Triple Threat bandmate Mike Kindred was working for Arrowhead and attended the courtship lunch, where he gave him a cassette of “Cold Shot,” the song the pianist wrote and sang in their former band. “Stevie said, ‘Oh, I had forgotten about this,’” Kindred recalls. “Arrowhead did not acquire management of Stevie, but I got ‘Cold Shot’ in there.”
The band spent time in an Austin studio writing and making demos as they worked to come up with an album’s worth of new material. “We hadn’t had all of those songs floating around for most of the band’s life as we did the first time,” says Shannon. “We had to start from scratch.”
The high volume of excellent outtakes from these sessions released in ensuing decades is indicative of both the band’s strong playing and the fact that songwriting remained laborious. The extra tracks were mostly covers, including “Little Wing,” “Wham,” “Close to You,” “Come On (Part III),” “Hideaway,” “Look at Little Sister,” and “Give Me Back My Wig.”
MULLEN: We did three weeks of preproduction in an Austin studio, where they wrote “Couldn’t Stand the Weather,” “Stang’s Swang,” “Honey Bee,” and “Scuttle Buttin’.”
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: “Scuttle Buttin’” was like Lonnie Mack’s “Chicken Pickin’.”
SHANNON: We had to come up with the songs pretty quickly. Stevie wasn’t a fluent songwriter; he’d spend a lot of time on a song, rewriting parts and lyrics. “Couldn’t Stand the Weather” came together over a period of time. We worked through it in rehearsals and gradually put all of the sections together.
MULLEN: It was really the first time they were going to a studio to make a record, and it was a lot more difficult simply because they were unsure about what they wanted to do. They had toured relentlessly since the release of Texas Flood and only had pieces of songs written.
LAYTON: Couldn’t Stand the Weather was our first real record, because Texas Flood was a demo. It was a very exciting time. All of the great opportunities that arose simply strengthened our belief in ourselves, which was coming to bear on this record. Just being flown to New York to stay at the Mayflower Hotel for six weeks was a big deal for six guys from Texas, as was working at the Power Station, where Stevie had worked with David Bowie. And to top it off, we were being produced by John Hammond!
SHANNON: What an honor to work with that guy. Billie Holiday, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan …
LAYTON: Charlie Christian. He’s one of the coolest guys ever in the history of music.
SHANNON: In every generation, he found something spectacular. He just knew.
LAYTON: He said that he hadn’t heard anyone imbued with the blues spirit like Stevie since Robert Johnson. He’d come in his tweed coat and bow tie, bring his sack lunch and New York Times, sit down, read the paper, and listen to what we were doing, then make a comment here and there about the groove or whatever.
MULLEN: John wanted to be involved, and though his ear was one of the best ever in terms of picking out talent, he was pretty unfamiliar with modern recording techniques. Every time the guys came in after recording a take, John would tell them a story, which seemed to be his whole reason for being there. He would also use a stopwatch to time all of the songs and tell you how long every take was. I didn’t know what he was doing, but in the old days, tape machines didn’t have timers, numbers, or Return-to-Zero buttons. I kept saying, “John, you don’t really need to time this stuff.”
LAYTON: On the very first day, Richard asked us to play something so he could get sounds, so I did the floor tom drumroll that starts “Tin Pan Alley,” and Stevie and Tommy just fell in. When we were done, John hit the talkback mic and said, “You’ll never get it better than that!” I said, “Y’all recorded that?”
It was a warm-up, but he was right; that’s the track we kept. He knew when something was really special and had an intuition into people’s nature; when you played something that reflected your truest nature, he knew it immediately.
SHANNON: There’s no telling how and when that magic is going to happen, and John had amazing ears and knew immediately when we’d captured the best take. We always thought he wasn’t paying attention behind his New York Times, but he heard every note and offered valuable insight. His instincts were impeccable.
MULLEN: He was really sweet and had all of these great stories, but I think the guys felt on edge around him. It was like having your high school principal there because they had to conceal the drug activity.
LAYTON: We were like “Party down, man!” Big record budget, living at the Mayflower, drinking, snortin’ cocaine … but we thought, “We can’t do drugs in front of John Hammond!” So we’d go sneak off behind the Steinway piano or a sound baffle. But he knew what we were up to.
SHANNON: Why else would a whole group of guys go crouching down behind a piano together? We couldn’t have been more obvious, really.
LAYTON: John is sitting in the control room reading the paper, which he closes, sets on his lap, then looks off, like he’s going to be real reflective. He says, “Years ago, I worked with Gene Krupa. Fabulous drummer—incredible musician! One of the greatest. He had this thing, though, that he liked to do from time to time. He loved to smoke pot, marijuana. And when he did, his time went all to shit. He became something not like what he really was when he smoked that marijuana. Even since then, I just don’t like drugs in my sessions.” And he picked up his paper and started reading again! We were all speechless, but we got the message, even though all we did was try to hide it from him a little better.
MULLEN: There were probably five thousand different song lists. We joked that every time Stevie did a line [of cocaine], he’d come back with a different list; I was guilty of the same thing.
LAYTON: We were high on how cool it was to be recording in New York with a record company’s backing, but we were real high, too; two distinctly different highs going on.
SHANNON: We were becoming successful, so dealers found us. The drug intake had increased dramatically, though the real negative effects hadn’t taken over yet. We were feeling great, and the drugs were just a part of everything else.
LAYTON: Label people—A&R and marketing—wanted to come in to evaluate midstream. They had ideas about how to make a “great record,” and Stevie didn’t want them in the studio at all. He said, “Do you think we did pretty good on the first one?” They said, “Oh, it’s wonderful,” so he replied, “Then we don’t need your help on the second one. Get out.”
Stevie didn’t want any music to get out of the studio till we were done, but a guy came in one night after we were gone and took some tracks. Stevie called and ripped him a new asshole. “Don’t you ever steal my music again! I don’t give a fuck if you’re with the record company!”
MULLEN: Stevie knew he would benefit more from originals and left a lot of great covers off the album. “The Sky Is Crying” was one of my favorite songs that Stevie played, and I pushed him to record it. The version that was finally released [in 1991] is actually a comp: the instrumental track was recorded during Soul to Soul, but the vocal track was recorded during Couldn’t Stand the Weather.
LAYTON: Jimmie played some amazing rhythm guitar on “The Things (That) I Used to Do” and “Couldn’t Stand the Weather,” with chord voicings that added so much. He really plays more like a keyboard player than a guitar player.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: I put all the parts down in one afternoon. We’d gone over the tunes before, so it was a breeze.
SHANNON: I came up with the funky guitar/bass unison lick on the title song’s intro, but I had the first note falling on “two” instead of “one,” more like a horn line. Stevie suggested changing that first note to the “one.”
LAYTON: The third time that lick is played, we wait two extra beats before we come back in, and that was something we’d never done in rehearsal. We were cutting the track, and when we reached that point, Stevie put his finger up to his lips like, “Shhh!” and then cued us to come back in.
SHANNON: That was actually Jimmie’s suggestion.
LAYTON: I wasn’t even certain that Stevie was interested in cutting “Cold Shot” until we recorded it. And he didn’t sing even a scratch vocal, so I didn’t really know the arrangement, and it was the first time we’d ever played the song beginning to end. Drummers have always asked me how I got that super-laid-back, in-the-pocket feel—well, I’d been awake for twenty hours, then finally fallen asleep, when Stevie woke me at 4:00 a.m. and said, “Whipper, come in and do ‘Cold Shot’!” I got behind the drums, and we cut it in one take. I’ve always wondered if it would have been any better if I was really rested and had known the arrangement!
MULLEN: Stevie started relying more on his own instincts and didn’t want to make the same kind of record, which led to cutting “Voodoo Chile.” They’d been doing it live for a few years, and I pushed him to record it, because he brought a life force to the song that no one else possibly could.
SHANNON: I really had to talk Stevie into doing that track. He needed encouragement to help him pursue what was in his heart, and “Voodoo Chile” was our point of departure into the future. It felt like breaking out of jail. Stevie played the song with so much soul and spirit. That take was live from beginning to end, seven minutes of pure guitar energy without a single miscue. It would be hard to find anyone that could play guitar that way without some sort of mistake, but he blew right through it.
LAYTON: I was unconscious on the couch again when it came time to do “Stang’s Swang,” so Stevie grabbed [Fabulous Thunderbirds’ drummer] Fran Christina, and that’s why he ended up on that track. Everyone in the T-Birds showed up in the studio with Jimmie and hung out for two days.
MULLEN: Stevie had more of a guitar collection by then, but he still favored Number One, which I was very vocal about him using, because he had the most authority and best sound on it. It always had a huge tone whether he slammed it or picked it gently. I got sick whenever I saw him live, standing on top of the guitar pulling on the neck. If I told him the guitar was a little out of tune, he’d just give the neck a yank, and it would be right back to pitch.
RENÉ MARTINEZ, Stevie’s guitar tech, 1985–1990: Number One was always Stevie’s primary guitar. There’s been some debate about the year of the guitar, mostly because it was a “parts” guitar, put together with pieces from different years. Stevie always referred to the guitar as a ’59. The truth is that the neck, which has a “veneer” fretboard, is stamped “1962,” which is also handwritten inside the body cavity. One day, I asked Stevie why he referred to the guitar as a ’59, and he said, “Well, if you look at the back of the pickups, ‘1959’ is handwritten on there.” Back in those days, it was the standard practice to handwrite the year on the back of the pickups. Ever since Stevie saw the ’59 on there, he started calling it a ’59.
SRV: Number One has a real unique sound, but I can’t use it all the time, because, for some reason, it wants to rattle real bad. The low E will be this high, and it still rattles.
The neck has also been broken up by the headstock. Have you ever seen Jimmie throw his guitar? I learned this trick from him, except his guitar never broke! I was playing in Lubbock, back in ’81, and when I threw it, it hit this paneled wall, catching it up by the headstock, snapping the wood. It laid there on the ground, and some of the strings went up, and some of them went down! It was doing all this “BLUBGBBNGBG!” by itself, and I was standing there, going, “Yeah!” It was during “Third Stone from the Sun,” and it sounded fine, like it was supposed to be there! But then I cried later.
Stevie standing on Number One. His abuse of the guitar made others cringe. (Donnie Opperman)
MULLEN: Chris’s drums were in the big room, and Stevie’s amps were in the larger iso [isolation] booth
with a sliding glass door sometimes left open, though he played so loud the guitar sound bled into the drum mics. This wasn’t a big problem, because most of his takes were keepers, and the bleed is only a factor if you have to drop a new track in. We had a twenty-four-track machine but were only using about twenty. The extra tracks were for additional takes, but Stevie was so good, we didn’t need ’em. He’d either stand right next to his amps or with Chris. I think guitar players play better without headphones, which can get in the way of their relationship with the instrument; they start to over-pick because they aren’t feeling it the same way. I always tried to allow Stevie to play without headphones so he would be just as animated in the studio as he was in his live performances. He danced around, slidin’ across the room on his toes, stuff like that.
LAYTON: We’d normally cut a tune three or four times and go on from there. If we didn’t get it in a few takes, we’d try another tune.
MULLEN: Stevie was a piece of cake to record. Until he slipped a little because of drugs, he almost never missed a lick, virtual perfection. Most guitarists who play with that kind of intensity and aggression tend to rush, but Stevie’s time was rock-solid. He was the band’s metronome, which always amazed me.
GRISSOM: Stevie was the Time. In most bands, the drummer defines it, but Stevie was the one who defined where the “one” was, and where the groove was at all times. He was the groove.
MULLEN: That fact that he could pull everything off with such precision is the very thing that allowed us to make the albums how we did. Each take was based on Stevie’s performance; if he exploded on the track, that’s the one we used.
GIBBONS: Stevie took to the style with an intensity that led to a deep devotion. So deep that over time, the expert technical dexterity became second nature, and these mesmerizing riffs seemed to be so easy. Stevie got real, real good. And, of course, he had the feel. He swung!