by Alan Paul
LAYTON: I think these sessions ended up producing the tightest band performances of our career, and we really worked at it.
GAINES: We cut for live. Some of the rhythms are overdubbed, but 90 percent of the solos are live, so everything had to be sounding good, and everyone had to be in sync before we started recording.
SRV: Most of the time, the whole band played together live. For some reason, in the room we were in, a lot of things sounded darker, tone-wise. The rooms were all wood. I was having a hard time getting amps to hold up: I’d turn ’em on, set ’em to a real good sound, turn ’em off to let ’em cool down, and when it was time to play and I’d turn ’em back on, one of ’em would die or start going, “ACKHHKHK” or “BLLPPPP.”
LAYTON: Stevie spent an ungodly amount of time messing around with his guitars and amps. It took him six or seven hours to get started some days, which seemed crazy, but I think was symbolic of him being nervous and getting ready in whatever way he had to. It was like standing on top of a huge mountain going, “If I’m going to ski down this, first I have to make sure my boots are tight, and my skis are waxed…”
SRV: I’d hit a couple of notes, and it would start making bad, horrible noises. The setup changed from day to day. The amps were dying like flies. This sounds crazy, but I took thirty-two amps with me. I thought, if worst comes to worst, there’ll always be something I can pull out of a road case. I’m glad I took so many amps, because we ended up having only about three or four that worked. In fact, I bought an old ’59 Fender Bassman and used it on the same settings for the whole session. I loved it! It was the one amp that stayed right the whole time. All these newfangled custom amps kept falling apart.
WYNANS: Stevie’s old routine when recording was to get high before every song, and this was the first time he had not done that. The sessions were a chore because we would play stuff over and over, and there was always something that Stevie wanted to try differently, mostly with his own rig. We had never had that kind of difficulty making a record before. It felt like he was projecting his anxiety onto all these things. None of us got frustrated about it in front of him. I recall sitting in a bar on Beale Street, telling the bartender, “I think I need one more.” We had some rough days. We must have played the same song fourteen times, but we tried to never let our frustrations show to Stevie. We all knew what he was going through, and he really stepped up to bat. We made a great record, and his playing was fantastic.
SRV: I usually record the rhythm track first and then the solo. I was thinking about getting [rockabilly guitarist] Paul Burlison to play on the record, but he never came back into town! We’d talked about it a little bit. He was telling us about how he got the sounds on the old records: he’d drop his amp, break a tube! But he never came back, so he’s not on the record.
GAINES: Stevie wanted to set up his full live rig in the studio, as he told me when we met. Every other producer said, “No way.” But he was doing a lot of experimenting with sounds, running all these amps onstage, and he wanted that in the studio. We had eight to ten amps running all the time. We called it the Wall of Doom, and he kept blowing up amps. Stevie would spend hours getting the sounds he wanted, then an amp would blow. César Diaz was fixing them constantly.
WYNANS: At least they weren’t in the room with us. He would go in there when he was playing, and it was so loud that it must have been like going to work at the airport. I don’t know how he did it, but he just loved that power and volume as guitar players often do. That’s what moved him.
GAINES: Away from the Wall of Doom, I had a Fender Vibratone and a stereo Gibson amp, two teeny amps, which would have gotten eaten up in the big room.
SRV: Usually, I had one Dumble, one Marshall, the Bassman, and a Super Reverb. I ran them all at the same time, but they were mic’ed differently and set differently. Sometimes, I ran the effects through them—when I say effects, I’m not talking about space stations, I’m talking about a Fuzz Face, a Tube Screamer, or a wah-wah pedal.
For the “Wall of Denial” solo, I used a Leslie, but it was noisy on the slow speed. So I took a Variac, lowered the voltage, and then put the Leslie on the fast speed, making the Leslie go a little slower than fast, without making any clunking noises as it went around. That was a new trick that I learned.
HODGES: Stevie liked Kiva, but he said, “It’s got a buzz, a little hum that we have to figure out.” The report at first was no one else could hear it, so you started to think he was nervous and making stuff up, but they brought in a sound tester, and it was there, though audible only to him.
GAINES: Because of all these amps running at once, we had some sort of weird magnetic hum. I tried everything to eliminate it and ended up building a chicken-wire cage to break up the frequency, and he played standing half in there. It was crazy, but it worked.
SRV: The weirdest part was that we had to build this thing that looked like a square baseball backstop, made out of chicken wire. There was either a radio station or some kind of microwave stuff that came through the studio—you’d be playing along, and all of a sudden, there’d be these weird clicks and buzzes coming out of the amps—but if I stood inside this cage that they made, it wouldn’t happen. They caged me!
SHANNON: Stevie would do anything to get new, different, or better sounds, and he seemed to spend a lot of time messing with stuff on In Step. But his actual playing just flowed once he got down to it.
SRV: We got an idea of how we wanted “Tightrope” to go, and that was one of the songs that I just played rhythm on when we first cut it. I didn’t like the tone I had when I was putting down the rhythm track, so when it came up to the solo point, I decided just to groove! It wasn’t intentional. Then I went back and played the whole song again, with the old track a little bit in one side of the headphones, and I played the solo where I was supposed to the first time. We ended up using both tracks together. We might overdub, but we just do it by saying, “Okay, roll the tape!” The only other song with a rhythm track [behind the solo] is “Scratch-N-Sniff.” When I was doing that solo, I hated everything I played. I went, “Hmm, let me try this one more time,” and I turned on all the gadgets I had, including the wah.
LAYTON: Albert King showed up several times while we were recording. He kept picking on Stevie, and he asked if he could borrow some money. Stevie said, “How much do you need, Albert?” “About $3,000.” Stevie said, “$3,000? Well, okay.” Stevie loaned him the money pretty early on in the process, and six weeks later as we were finishing, Stevie said, “Hey, Albert, um … do you have that money?” And Albert goes, “What money is that?” Stevie says, “That money that I loaned you.” “That money you loaned me?” “Yeah,” said Stevie, “I lent you $3,000.” And Albert goes, “Haw haw haw! Now, come on, Stevie! You know you owe me!”
SHANNON: Albert would punch the talkback mic right in the middle of a song. “Yo, Stevie!” We’d stop, and he’d say, “When you come around to that one part, you should do so-and-so.” Stevie was very patient. We weren’t going to tell him to quit it, but he was really …
WYNANS: He was messin’ with the groove! We’d be 90 percent done with a great-feeling track, and he’d bust in and say, “You’re gonna have to turn that tom-tom mic down.”
LAYTON: Bon Jovi was coming to town, and Albert says, “Hey, Stevie! I got the Bon Jovis callin’ me. Are they big?”
Stevie said, “Yeah, Albert. They’re a huge band.”
Albert says, “They want me to come out and play with them, but I’m gonna go over to Arkansas and play cards with my girlfriend.”
SRV: The record took a while to do because of the amp problems and also because, when I write songs, sometimes they have to grow for a while. We can rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, and it just sounds like we chopped, chopped, chopped.
LAYTON: Stevie said, “There’s something I need to do. I want to record ‘Riviera Paradise’ because I need to make amends. This is the time. Let’s turn the lights off.” We turned all of the lights off so we were in
total darkness. I couldn’t see anyone. The engineers weren’t even ready for the take, because the cue mix in the headphones was all wrong. He began to play just as they started the tape. It was really an instinctual thing, because the arrangement hadn’t been discussed.
GAINES: Stevie told me he had an instrumental called “Riviera Paradise” he wanted to try, and I said that I only had nine minutes of tape left. He said, “Don’t worry. It’s only four minutes long.” We dimmed the lights, and they started playing this gorgeous song, which went on to six minutes, seven minutes, seven and a half …
The song is absolutely incredible, totally inspired, dripping with emotion, and we are about to run out of tape! I was jumping up and down waving my arms, but everyone was so wrapped up in their playing that no one was paying me any mind. I finally got Chris’s attention and emphatically gave him the cut sign. He started trying to flag down Stevie, but he was hunched over his guitar with his head bent down in a dark room. Finally, he looked up, and they brought the song down just in time. It ended, and a few seconds later, the tape finished, and the studio was silent except for the sound of the empty reel spinning around. We cut the song a few more times, but it sounded like Muzak compared to that first, magical version.
SHANNON: I don’t recall ever having played “Riviera Paradise” as a band before that.
WYNANS: Stevie looked at “Riviera Paradise” as a movie soundtrack, a beautiful, soulful tune that could be thought of as backing up some touching love story. That song supplied such a pleasurable moment during the live shows. After all of the turbulent rock songs and powerful blues songs, it offered a meditative moment that was very touching.
LAYTON: Stevie described it as “praying through the guitar.” It was great to be able to play a song with so much dimension to it. With that song, you feel so relaxed, calm, and smooth.
SHANNON: Stevie always played what he was feeling inside, as opposed to “with feeling.” There is a big difference.
SRV: I wrote “Riviera Paradise” about four or five years ago. “Travis Walk” we’ve been doing for about three months. “Love Me Darlin’” I’ve been doing since I was about three—or at least ten years. “Wall Of Denial” we played in the warehouse; that’s all. I never learned how to sing it quite right before we did it for the record. “Tightrope” we’d done at two gigs. “Scratch-N-Sniff” we tried to do at one or two gigs. “House Is Rockin’” we’d done at two gigs. It was mostly new tunes.
GAINES: I think the place where I might have pushed him the most was the vocals, where I wouldn’t let him get by with just anything. We paid more attention to it than he usually had, and I think it paid off. He hated singing, so he didn’t want to spend any more time with vocals than he had to, which is not uncommon amongst the great guitar players.
There were times that he was in the studio by himself, lights down after midnight, and he would start playing Hendrix and you would swear that Jimi was in the building. It’s a different side of the blues, and he could duplicate it amazingly well. I felt privileged to make this record with Stevie.
The final sessions, which included vocal overdubs, some guitar parts, and horns for “Crossfire” and “Love Me Darlin’” played and arranged by old friend Joe Sublett, were cut at Los Angeles’ Sound Castle studios. They also recorded the solo acoustic version of “Life by the Drop,” written by Bramhall and his wife, Barbara Logan. It was left off the record, and released on 1991’s The Sky Is Crying.
GAINES: Stevie told me in Memphis that he had a song he wanted to play solo acoustic and that he didn’t see the need to do it with everyone standing around watching, that we could do it alone later. We just used some excellent Neumann mics and cut it. I thought it fit perfectly with the rest of the material, but they made the decision not to include it on In Step.
BARBARA LOGAN: It wasn’t really about alcoholism, as most people take it. It was really about Doyle watching Stevie’s success, seeing him attain those dreams they had talked about together for so long. It’s more about taking it one step at a time and it all ties together if you know the suffering of the dry drunk.
Doyle had started writing “Life by the Drop” before the In Step writing sessions and played a bit of it for Stevie, who loved it and kept asking him about “that Drop song” but he had not finished it. Doyle came home one night and told me this and played the song, and the last verse just came to me. That’s all I can tell you. I am not a singer or a musician but it just came out. He took it to Stevie, who loved it—but never even told Doyle he recorded it!
SRV: I did record one song [for In Step] with the twelve-string acoustic—just me. I recorded it that way because it sounded more personal. However, the more we worked on it—I did several takes—the more the producer and myself heard it as a band song.
HODGES: We left “Life by the Drop” off the album with the thought that he might do it differently. The power of the song was immediately clear.
The biggest debate was sequencing. An album should flow to listeners’ emotions. I’ve seen some bands be haphazard with sequencing, but Stevie really got the importance, as did Gregg Allman and Otis Redding—artists who had grown up changing their sets as they watched the audience react and were attuned to the way people heard and felt their music.
LAYTON: Stevie’s ear was incredible. When we were mixing “Scratch-N-Sniff,” Stevie left the room, and the engineer changed this tiny thing. There are three very similar rhythm guitar parts, which were all treated a bit differently with reverbs and EQs. One of the parts was buried, and the engineer barely changed its reverb. Stevie walked back in and asked, “What did y’all change? You changed something on one of the guitars.” No one else would have noticed this.
SUBLETT: Stevie called and asked me to put together a horn section. He had wanted us to play on five or six songs, but Jim Gaines was like, “Oh, we have a lot to do,” so it ended up being two.
GAINES: We were mixing and doing vocal and guitar overdubs and had a busy schedule, but I also thought it was a bad idea to put horns on too many songs unless he wanted to take a horn section on the road.
SUBLETT: I brought in [trumpeter] Darrell Leonard, played tenor, and overdubbed a baritone. It was a real pleasure because there was no drama. It was all civilized, and the music was so good, and it was the first time I had seen him since those awful Opera House shows. Stevie pulled me aside and said, “Come out to the car; I want to play you some stuff,” and he started playing me different songs on the cassette player. We could have listened on the giant speakers in the studio, but it’s the old-school thing that you test songs by hearing them how people really listen.
But he also wanted to speak privately. It was the making-amends thing from the twelve-step program. I did not feel like he had to make amends to me at all, so when he started with, “If I offended you or disrespected you…” I said, “No, you haven’t, and you don’t have to do this.” But he said, “You have to let me do this,” so I did, and then we hugged. He was probably 150 pounds, but when he’d hug me, I’d feel like my frame was going to break because he was so strong and so sincere. It was a very sweet moment. I was just so happy to have him back.
BRANDENBURG: When they reached the making-amends step, Tommy called and said getting sober saved his and Stevie’s life. A few days later, I got a similar call from Whipper, and they both said Stevie would be calling. I came home to an answering machine message that simply said, “Cee, this is Stevie. I need to talk with you, and I will call you back. I love you, man, and thanks for always loving me. Talk to ya later. Love ya. Bye.”
HODGES: We sat in a studio trying to come up with a name, and Stevie wanted to get the word step or steps in there, because of the twelve steps and the saying, “When the elevator’s broken, take the steps.”
HUBBARD: Stevie and I were in different groups and didn’t see each other that often. On November 13, 1988, I got my one-year chip, and after the meeting, about ten of us went to a Mexican restaurant to celebrate, and Stevie Ray and
his mom walked in. I went over and showed him the chip, and he hugged me and introduced me to his mom: “This is Ray Wylie. He’s got a year.” It meant the world to me. He was a big star, but he came over, sat down, and talked to everyone in my group.
He truly cared about other people’s sobriety. We were getting ready to leave, and he came over and asked if I was working the steps. I said I had finished nine and was working on ten, eleven, and twelve, and he said, “Well, there ain’t no elevators. You got to take the steps.” He knew the book. He would walk the walk, not just talk the talk. He lived on spiritual principles.
RICKERT: Stevie never consciously tried to court an audience of sober people, but of course, people in that world gravitated towards him, saying, “I’m going to try because he did it.” He showed that it could be done and that you could be bigger and better than ever on the other side. It wasn’t easy. He put in the work and deserves any praise he gets for that.
BRAMHALL II: Stevie was very involved in my sobriety. One time, he heard I was going through a hard time and he called the house, and my dad handed me the phone and said, “Stevie wants to talk to you.” He was really concerned about me and just talked about life and being healthy emotionally and physically. He wanted me to know that he was there to help me with anything that I was going through. He would always go out of his way to make sure to connect to whoever he was speaking with in the most genuine and deep way.
23
CHANGE IT
In Step was released on June 6, 1989, representing the recorded rebirth of a new, clean, and happy Stevie Ray Vaughan. It was the first time in a very long time that anyone could apply that last adjective to Stevie, and the album’s success confirmed everyone’s positive feelings, as it spawned a series of hit singles, including the powerful Stax-influenced chart-topper “Crossfire” and the hard-swinging “Tightrope.” Lyrically, both songs addressed the travails and pressures of life as a star musician as well as a commitment to spiritual revelation and growth.