by Alan Paul
LAYTON: I looked into his eyes, and it was like looking into the eye of a dead deer on the side of the road. He eyes were almost dry, with no life in them. I got scared shitless.
SHANNON: He started shaking, trembling, sweating …
LAYTON: All of a sudden, the life came back into his eyes, and he very weakly said, “I need help.” I took that as the moment where he realized that things had to change. Not like, “I need to get better so I can go back to doing what I’ve been doing,” but, “Everything has to change.”
We called an ambulance, and all of these guys showed up in white trench coats yelling in German. They pulled out IVs, and we were screaming, “What the hell’s going on?” They spoke not a word of English, and we know no German. They determined that he was suffering from near-death dehydration and took him to the hospital with us yelling, “Where are you taking him? How will we find him?”
SHANNON: It was a very sad time.
LAYTON: He went to the hospital, and the next day we went to Zurich, Switzerland, for a show [September 29, 1986]. I had never heard him sound weaker. He was playing in time, but he was about two beats behind the rest of the band. He was just fully drained, physically and spiritually. We were headed to London with a couple days off, and I called Alex and said, “We’ve got to do something.”
HODGES: The situation was very scary, and Stevie wasn’t going to fight anymore. Someone suggested finding the doctor who helped Clapton, and I made some calls and found Dr. Victor Bloom. I called him and explained the situation and that it all had to go down really fast. There was total understanding, and he agreed to see Stevie immediately, and he didn’t mince words after the meeting. He said, “First, send Stevie’s mother over because he needs her. And he’s been talking about Janna Lapidus. I think you want to get her to London.” I said, “I’ve got several flight reservations myself.” He said, “That’s not what I want you to do.” Of course, my first inclination was to be there, but he said, “He trusts you, so stay where you are and take care of business. I’m in charge here, and you’ll be in charge there.” He told me to use my resources to come up with my first and second recommendations for rehab centers.
LAPIDUS: Stevie hadn’t called me in months, after calling all the time at all hours of day and night. I was frankly heartbroken but decided that whatever we had was over and decided to move on. I applied to an exchange program in Italy and made plans to go in December. Then he called and said, “I’m in London in really bad shape, and I want you here.” I hung up, thought it through, and decided I was going if I could get there. We hadn’t even been intimate, but I had invested enough emotionally, and there was something magical there. I was just following the heart.
CONNIE VAUGHAN: He called me from a phone booth and said he needed help and sounded so weak. I didn’t have a passport and didn’t know what to do.
LAYTON: Eric Clapton visited him at the clinic. Stevie said he was very encouraging. He told Stevie that he’d been through something similar and wanted to encourage him to get better. He said Clapton was a kind soul.
DUCKWORTH: Stevie broke down with Dr. Bloom. It was in that moment he grasped it was time to change.
After two days in Bloom’s clinic, Stevie and the band returned to the stage at London’s Hammersmith Palais on October 2, the day before Stevie’s thirty-second birthday. Martha Vaughan was in the audience. Janna Lapidus was en route.
BOB GLAUB: I was at the show in London. He had that gray pallor, the skin color of someone who’s unhealthy. We were all hitting it pretty hard at that point. Tommy asked me if I wanted to sit in for the encore, but it never happened.
SHANNON: We were walking offstage at the end of the set, and there was a very narrow ramp—really just a board—and the lights turned off just as he got to it.
WYNANS: It was complete, pitch blackness.
HODGES: Stevie was wearing his American Indian headdress, and he told me that as he looked down at the narrow gangplank, the weight of the headdress shifted forward and over his eyes, thus resulting in the misstep.
LAYTON: There was a gangplank leading off the stage, and he stepped off the edge and scraped his leg up. The headlines in the English press said VAUGHAN COLLAPSES ON LONDON STAGE and VAUGHAN FALLS OFF STAGE, but that wasn’t true.
SHANNON: He was totally sober when that happened—and he never fell off the stage.
Stevie loved this headdress, a gift from brother Jimmie. (Tracy Anne Hart)
LAYTON: When Stevie fell off that gangplank, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He thought, “That’s it. I’m beat, and I’m done.”
The band canceled thirteen remaining shows on their European tour. Stevie spent the next ten days receiving care from Dr. Bloom while Lapidus, Duckworth, and Martha Vaughan kept him company and tried to keep him steady and occupied. The rest of the band and crew returned home.
LAYTON: I thought, “The whirlwind has finally stopped. And we’re alive.”
WYNANS: Something had to give, and what gave was Stevie. He had a breakdown, and it was a huge relief knowing that he was going to get help. The guy was a priceless jewel, and we just loved playing with him. It sucked that he had let his health deteriorate to such an extreme, and it was heartening to think he could recover.
LAPIDUS: I just got a ticket and figured I would stay at the YWCA. While I was in transit, Stevie called again and spoke to my mom, who told him I was on my way. When I landed, Timothy Duckworth was waiting for me, and he took me to a hotel where Stevie’s mother was staying.
These were intense days, as he was detoxing and fighting to overcome the urge to drink, which he’d been doing since he was a little boy stealing from his parents’ liquor cabinet. We went to cafés, walked through parks, shopped at vintage stores, did some sightseeing at Windsor Castle and other places, and he checked in with the doctor daily. We were driving around with his mum, with Stevie saying, “I need a drink. I need a drink.” We all understood and it would pass, but he was really fragile.
On October 13, Vaughan, his mother, and Duckworth flew to Atlanta, and Stevie checked into the Peachford Hospital while Lapidus flew back to New Zealand. Shannon, already back in Austin, entered rehab there at Charter Lane. On the plane from London, Stevie penned a four- page letter to Janna, thanking her for coming to London, expressing his undying love and gratitude, writing “you are responsible for much of the progress I have made in my life.” He also confessed to a “fall in [his] character” that occurred early in the flight.
At Windsor Castle, with Timothy Duckworth, Martha Vaughan, and Janna Lapidus, October, 1986, while Stevie was receiving treatment from Dr. Victor Bloom. (Courtesy Janna Lapidus)
LAPIDUS: He wrote that he had a drink on the plane and was so ashamed. He had never flown without a drink. It was his last one.
SHANNON: I had to change my life, too. I saw Stevie hit bottom, and I had nothing to hang on to anymore, either. I was basically in the same place he was. My liver was all swollen up, and I was in bad shape. Sure enough, we hit the brick wall we had seen coming. We had really wanted to go to rehab together and were upset when they said that wasn’t possible, but I get that now.
LAPIDUS: Stevie was struggling for a long time. And he got that big wake-up call. It’s like he always said, you have a couple of choices left: you either die, you end up in jail, or you get sober. It’s pretty clear.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: Stevie finally realized that if he didn’t stop drinking and using, he was going to die. It’s a fortunate thing to realize before it’s too late. We’ve got a lot of friends that didn’t get that opportunity, didn’t get to that place.
SHANNON: We both felt real gung ho about treatment but didn’t know shit about what it would be like. It was all brand-new, but we’d made it over twenty-four hours without a drink or drug, and we knew it was the only thing we could do. After about ten days I was allowed to talk to Stevie for the first time.
HODGES: I spoke to him on the phone when they said I could. Everyone in rehab think
s they’re ready to leave, and he made those intimations a few times, but he stayed the course. You just had to listen and say, “Call me tomorrow, and if we need to, we’ll make a reservation. In the meantime, listen to the people there.” And he had the good sense to look at the circumstances and add a little bit of patience to his life. I visited him, and we went out to Stone Mountain one day and played baseball with his niece and my son with a pine cone and a stick. We tried to have a couple of normal afternoons, but we had business meetings, too.
LAYTON: While Stevie and Tommy were in rehab, Reese and I went out to LA to master Live Alive. We would call Stevie on the phone from the mastering facility, which was so bizarre, because we had always done everything together. It was virtually impossible to master with Stevie on the phone. It was like, “Well, you can’t really hear it, but…”
SHANNON: Our twenty-eight days were just the beginning of the day-to-day process.
EDI JOHNSON: When I was picking health plans for them, I rejected any that didn’t cover rehab. Tommy thanked me for that later on.
LAYTON: We were all lucky to have someone like Edi watching out for us. I visited Tommy and sat in circles and held hands, so I was involved in his recovery. I figured they would both do their thirty days, but beyond that, who could say?
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: It didn’t even occur to me that Stevie would really go clean. I figured that he’d do his thirty days to get everyone off his back, then go back to it. But he was serious and dedicated, and he showed the way for me and for a lot of other people.
RAITT: I was playing in Atlanta towards the end of his rehab stay, and he came to see me, and I invited him onstage, as we would always do for one another [November 12 at the Center Stage]. I found out later that he was really nervous because it was his first time playing sober, but he played great, and there went my last excuse for not getting sober. Because he didn’t get any less funky, any less passionate or fiery or great as a musician. So a few months later, I checked myself into rehab and started over. It was without a doubt thanks to Stevie’s inspiration.
WYNANS: Stevie was real worried about playing after he’d gotten sober. He’d never really been sober and didn’t know what it would be like. He worried about whether he still had anything to offer.
SHANNON: He wondered if he had lost it.
SRV: I know that everything is better now, and I do mean everything. My whole life is better. It was hard for me to see that when everything is better, that includes the music, too. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t. I’m not saying that it’s automatic; I have to work at these things harder than ever. And that’s fine. I’m glad I do. It has to do with progression, and there’s healthy and unhealthy sides to it. The balance is the thing to try to find.
OPPERMAN: After you go down that path for too long, you realize, this is leading me to nowhere. And when you get sober, you try to help other people not go down that same road, and that’s exactly what Stevie ultimately did. That comes with the emotional healing of getting sober.
LAYTON: Stevie was the leader. He had led everyone with his incredible musicianship, he led everyone with his massive capacity for substance abuse, and he led us all in sobriety, too.
21
THE THINGS I USED TO DO
Throughout his monthlong rehab stay in Atlanta, Stevie and Janna Lapidus engaged in a steady, passionate correspondence. Stevie wrote her daily, sometimes two or three times a day, and sent her a steady stream of Polaroids of himself. After checking out November 13, he immediately flew to New Zealand to visit her. “We just wanted to be together,” she says.
Seeing his new love meant leaving Atlanta at 3:30 in the afternoon on Thursday, November 13, flying to Los Angeles, changing flights to Auckland, crossing the international date line, switching planes again, and flying to Wellington, where he would arrive at 9:55 a.m., Saturday, November 15. Adding to the burden of this grueling travel, these would be his first sober flights ever—his last drink had been on his last flight, from London—and he could only stay for a few days. The first clean-and-sober Double Trouble show was November 22 at Towson State University in Maryland.
LAPIDUS: He met my parents for the first time, and they loved him. He was a beautiful, pure soul and so kind and sincere with them. I felt embarrassed bringing him to our little apartment. I was making excuses, and the irony is when I went to Stevie’s mom’s place, I saw the exact same thing in a very different location.
DUCKWORTH: I questioned that trip, but when Stevie did something, he gave it everything he had. He stayed at my house when he came back from his trip to Australia, where he and Janna had met, and talked a lot about how wonderful she was, and once she came to see him in London, that was it. He gave everything he had to her. He was vulnerable and in bad shape, and she gave him so much love, which he needed. He let Janna know before he left London how he felt, and I don’t think he ever doubted it.
HODGES: Janna was very young, but I just felt like she was uniquely stable, grounded, beautiful, and smart—and tremendously in love with Stevie. What else can you ask for?
WYNANS: His relationships had their ups and downs, and we liked it when Janna was around, because he was very peaceful around her. He wasn’t as prone to be so wild when she was with him.
LAPIDUS: He told me that he wanted to break the cycle of addiction because he came from that. He knew he had to be the one to break it. It’s why he had never had children. He told me, “I never wanted to bring love into a place where there wasn’t love that you could depend on.” He understood that he had gotten a second chance. He said, “I was bleeding internally. I could have died. I’m getting a second chance, and I better not fuck it up.” He was finding some kind of clarity, maybe just, “Life is good.” A big thing for recovering addicts is to realize life is okay without numbing your emotions.
Stevie and Janna Lapidus at Antone’s, 1988. (J.P. Whitefield)
SRV: I learned all that stuff—the guilt and the shame—when I was a little kid; I didn’t realize how deeply that was embedded in me. Without someone else doing it, I do it to myself, because I’m familiar with that, you know? It’s a shame.
LAYTON: Sometimes when we had issues in the band and it led to some sort of confrontation, he would just shut down and be quiet, and it was frustrating and I didn’t understand it. Eventually, I realized that it stemmed from his childhood.
LAPIDUS: A few times when we had arguments—and they weren’t big, screaming fights—he would just break down. He said it reminded him of bad scenes in his childhood, holding on to his father’s leg, asking him to stop.
SHANNON: Stevie and I spoke for hours about this stuff, and he told me things he never told anyone. I’m taking most of it with me to my grave, but he experienced some really tough stuff as a kid.
SRV: I’m just now learning how to let go of some of that, and I can’t always do it. Sometimes, I can put the club down. And other times, I pick it right back up and go to flogging myself.
LAPIDUS: The steps he was taking gave him the strength to feel like he had something to hang on to. And hopefully, you also have love. You just can’t mess with what your heart feels, so when you open yourself up to that, and it’s reciprocated, you can show each other the way forward. I learned from him as much as he hopefully did from me.
HODGES: His inner constitution carried him through a lot of this. We were supportive, and I couldn’t have been happier or prouder of what we did together, but nothing would have happened without Stevie’s willingness and commitment.
SRV: A lot of times, our fears keep us from seeing what’s really there. I realized the other day that, without my fears, without my guilt and my shame—without that club to beat myself over the head with—I got a glimpse of what life would be like without that. It was just for a couple of minutes, and I realized that without that stuff … I never realized how much those feelings and those emotions permeate everything. I got a glimpse of how I felt without all of that, and I felt a lot better about everything and everybody. It
was a real neat deal. I was just talking to somebody, and they said something that sparked it. It was like being in a completely smoke-filled room—like a cloud—and then somebody turned on a vent and all the smoke was gone for a minute.
Live Alive was released on November 17, 1986, while Stevie was in New Zealand.
“It was a cruel irony that Live Alive came out right when Tommy and Stevie got out of treatment,” says Layton. “One of the first times we got together again was to make a video for ‘Superstition.’ Stevie and Tommy were clean and fresh, and everyone was clearheaded and healthy, and we were trying to play along to this dope-and-booze-laden tune. It was like, ‘God, can’t we cut this song again?’ It was a weird contrast, but it was a great feeling to have everyone really into it again, ready to put the whole thing back together and get back to work. That alone made it a great experience. It was the start of something real good.”
As they prepared to return to the road, Alex Hodges put together a more professional crew around Vaughan. Not only had Vaughan and Shannon gone through rehab but so had guitar tech René Martinez and drum tech Bill Mounsey. With four people in the program, attending daily meetings became an important part of life on the road. The new tour manager was the calm, capable Skip Rickert.
LAYTON: Alex said, “You guys are sober. You need someone new,” because our road managers had been guys getting us dope and finding us after-hours places to drink. Jim Markham didn’t want to do that stuff and left. Alex understood that we needed a new clean-living guy, and he also brought in a new accounting firm, who looked over everything, straightened out our taxes, got our finances in order.