Stevie’s dedication proved to be too much for the members of his band, and in less than a year Blackbird was over and Stevie briefly joined Krackerjack. One of the clubs on the band’s regular circuit was the Abraxis in Waco, Texas, where the musicians were furnished with cocaine, and Stevie fell right through the sparkling trap door. But the kid felt good about himself. Coke was better for you than speed, right?
Austin’s answer to the Fillmore, the Armadillo, became Stevie’s headquarters for the next two years. He played until he dropped, developing his flaming bluesy style to kick-ass perfection, eventually joining another R&B band, the Cobras, on New Year’s Eve 1974. The band had a lot of camp followers, eager to shove cocaine up Stevie’s flattened nose, and he was always flying, wired to the hilt. When the band did some demos, Stevie not only did some ferocious solos, he sang for the first time, and started singing live soon afterward, his voice nearly as soulful as his picking.
Stevie Ray tearing it up. “I have been gifted with something,” he said, “and if I don’t take it to its fullest extent, I might as well be farting in the bushes.” (JAMES FRAHER/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/VENICE, CALIF.)
Lindi Bethel, Stevie’s main squeeze, cooked for him, sewed his clothes, and supported him when he was low on cash, but she couldn’t keep him faithful, and Stevie Vaughan was a double-standard kind of guy. He demanded that she be “good” whenever he was on the road, and when Lindi bitched, Stevie said that it was the music, not the devil, that made him do it. The music could take the blame.
Cobra band members called Stevie “Little Nigger” because he loved black music so hard, but mainly because he was such a fuck-up. They were tired of driving the kid around, holding his hand. When Stevie gave his notice, the Cobras heaved a combined sigh of relief.
When the landmark club Antone’s opened in Austin, Jimmie Vaughan’s Fabulous Thunder-birds were the unofficial house band, opening for heavy-duty legends like Muddy Waters and Otis Rush. When Albert King came to town, Clifford Antone asked the blues great if Little Stevie Vaughan could sit in, and King begrudgingly obliged. Stevie was so charged up to be playing with the master that he owned the stage, keeping up with King the entire night. King tipped his hat to the kid. It was time for Stevie Vaughan to start his own band.
Rounding up Austin’s finest, Stevie put together the Triple Threat Revue and started a fourteen-year road stint. Often waking up in strange houses in strange towns, Stevie wondered where the fuck he was, and where were the drugs? Girls were mad for the shy guitarist, following him from gig to gig, but when he laid eyes on Lenny Bailey, he knew he had to get her away from his friend Diamond Joe. A week later Joe was hurling darts at Stevie’s picture, and Lenny was his. The couple had a skewed domestic scene, preferring to score a bag of ice each day instead of springing for a refrigerator. Though Lenny was able to provide the household with drugs, they were both into the spiritual sphere, consulting their horoscopes and throwing stones. Crystals or crystal meth, what was the difference? Above anything else, Stevie valued his musical gift, never really understanding why he was chosen to be so blessed.
Less than a year after their debut, Triple Threat lost a couple of members due to Stevie’s jacked-up demands and became Double Trouble, the new name taken from an Otis Rush song. Stevie was playing like a motherfucker, but shooting a lot of speed and downing a fifth of Chivas Regal a day. His fingers bled, but he didn’t seem to notice unless it got in the way of his playing. At a show in Lubbock he pulled a bloody callus down to the quick and reattached it with Superglue so he could do a third set. One night, when Jimmie did his usual heckling job from the audience, Stevie jumped offstage and punched his big brother in the jaw, then broke down into remorseful tears. When Stevie talked about Hendrix dying so young and how maybe he was in for the same fate, his friends started to worry about him.
Stevie and Lenny were busted for cocaine possession after Double Trouble opened for Muddy Waters in Houston, and in a state of confusion—after asking former girlfriend Lindi Bethel to come back to him—Stevie proposed to Lenny. They tied the knot between sets in the office of the Rome Inn nightclub, pledging their way-out adoration by creating rings out of wire found on the floor. They were probably guitar-string wedding bands. When the newlyweds went to court for the cocaine bust, Stevie was ordered to undergo drug abuse treatment. It didn’t take.
When Double Trouble signed with Chesley Millikin at Classic Management, the new manager liked the sound of the guitarist’s middle name, and Stevie became Stevie Ray Vaughan—Stevie Rave On!—the new guitar Wunderkind. “I have been gifted with something,” Stevie said, “and if I don’t take it to its fullest extent, I might as well be farting in the bushes.”
Through Chesley, Double Trouble played a howlingly successful showcase at Danceteria in New York for the Rolling Stones, and the following week the grinning faces of Stevie and Mick Jagger graced the “Random Notes” page of Rolling Stone. Mick made noises about getting Stevie on the Stones’ new label. It didn’t happen, but the word was out.
A friend of Chesley’s, Claude Nobs, extended an invitation for Double Trouble to play at the prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival, and after a raunchy, dazzling display of virtuosity from Stevie, audience member David Bowie came backstage to hand out some praise. He also asked if Stevie might be interested in appearing in his new music video. The second night of the festival Double Trouble jammed with Jackson Browne, who offered the band his studio back in L.A. free of charge. Things were looking way, way up for the kid who had hid in the closet with his brother’s guitar.
The band took Jackson Browne up on his offer, recording ten songs in three days. While Double Trouble was in the studio, David Bowie called to see if Stevie would like to come to New York and play on his new album, asking what he was doing for the rest of next year. Good question.
Bowie and Stevie Ray were an odd pairing—Mr. Glam Sophistication and a no-frills blues guitarist who was called “Stinky” because he worked and slept in the same clothes for so long. But Stinky tore it up in the studio, completing six songs for the Let’s Dance album in two and a half hours, and Bowie asked Stevie Ray to join the Serious Moonlight Tour. It was a sticky offer, tearing Stevie up, but he decided it just might jack him into the big time, so when rehearsals began in March 1983, Stevie Ray showed up.
Bowie hadn’t planned on Stevie’s coke habit or his starstruck wife, Lenny, as part of the package, and quickly laid down the Let’s Dance law. Stevie’s manager thought his client was worth more than three hundred dollars a night, and when Chesley Millikin was asked to cease managing Stevie for the Moonlight Tour, Stevie shocked the rock world by quitting the Bowie tour before it started. The bold move heightened his “working-class guitar hero” image.
After working on music industry icon John Hammond for two years, Chesley was overjoyed when the producer called after hearing a live tape of Double Trouble from Montreux. When he heard the rough mixes from Jackson Browne’s studio, he was determined to put out Stevie Ray Vaughan’s first album. The Bowie record helped the cause, and after some remixing, Epic released Double Trouble’s Texas Flood in June 1983. By the end of the year Stevie had gone gold.
Stevie no longer had to worry about paying the bills and always carried five grand in one boot and a gram of coke in the other. He indulged his passion for guitars, buying the best of the best and giving them all names. Onstage he kept his head down and attacked his instrument like a hell-bent lover on a rampage, torturing the strings into adoring submission while his fans went into a frenzy. With the fame came the drug-toting sycophants, and even after a loving yet stern warning from mentor Albert King, Stevie continued daily to down a bottle of Chivas and inhale seven grams of coke.
Texas Flood was nominated for four Grammy awards, winning Best Traditional Blues Category, and the second album from Double Trouble, Couldn’t Stand the Weather, sold like Texas hotcakes. After a packed date at Carnegie Hall, Stevie found his parents in the glad-handing backstage crowd and hugged Big Jim
until they both had tears running down their faces.
The routine went on and on. Only now there were bigger venues, more money, grander parties, more eager women, jet planes, and never-ending, heaping mounds of cocaine.
Lenny was always pissed off about something. She didn’t see Stevie enough. He didn’t know how to handle his money. She didn’t get enough of it. It was all going up his nose. He was barely coherent half the time. He gave her some kind of venereal infection. He appeared to be having a long-distance infatuation with a seventeen-year-old model, Janna Lapidus. Really it seemed like he was too fucked up to care about anything but the music. But even the music was starting to suffer. The third album, Soul to Soul, was a pain in the ass to record, and though his fans flipped over it, the album didn’t satisfy Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Stevie Ray (right) and brother Jimmie Vaughan. Stevie died a few hours later. (ROBERT KNIGHT)
His addiction got so bad that before and after gigs wasn’t enough—Stevie started dissolving a gram of coke into his Crown Royal, imbibing throughout the set. But nobody could help him. He was everybody’s meal ticket and too damn stubborn to listen. Brother Jimmie wasn’t any help. He was fucked up, too.
A fourth album was due, but Stevie was in no shape to deliver it. The easiest way out was to do a live record, and Live Alive is full of some pretty jacked-up, meandering tracks. The guitar solos are ragged, tragic, and full of tears that Stevie needed to cry. He was a total wreck. When Big Jim had a heart attack and died, Stevie still didn’t weep. He played the blues instead. On tour in Germany Stevie threw up bloody vomit and was rushed to the hospital, saying all he needed was a drink. His diagnosis was severe internal bleeding. The alcohol laced with coke had been tearing Stevie’s guts apart and in another month he would have been dead. On September 29, 1986, Stevie went to the London Clinic to take the cure with the same doctor who had helped Eric Clapton get healthy. He reached out to his mother and she came to her son’s side. Eric Clapton came to visit, encouraging his friend in recovery.
After 242 dates with Double Trouble that year, the rest of the tour had to be canceled. On the plane to Charter Hospital in Atlanta, Stevie had his last double Chivas, then collapsed sobbing in his mother’s arms.
Stevie grabbed hold of recovery the way he did his music, with every ounce of his being, holding the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous in the same esteem as Albert King’s guitar playing. The program forced him to stop running, stop hiding behind his Strat, and be brutally honest with himself and the other recovering addicts. “There were a lot of things I was running from,” he told a writer. “ … I was scared that somebody would find out I was scared. And now I’m realizing that fear is the opposite of love.”
Out of Charter, Stevie lived one day at a time. He filed for divorce from Lenny, which turned out to be a long and bitter experience. He moved eighteen-year-old Janna Lapidus in with him, and attended several AA meetings a week. He got healthy and stopped eating red meat. Stevie Ray was happy to be sober but nervous about picking up a guitar and playing the blues—after all, the term came from “blue devils,” a description of the hallucinations caused by getting too high—but the music didn’t fail him. Stevie started embracing people, saying with a huge, goofy grin, “Hugs, not drugs.” When old coke buddies swore Stevie’s passion had disappeared with his habit, he proved them ragingly wrong with his fifth album, In Step, a passionate mixture of hard-learned lessons and solid steamy riffs, which went gold, then platinum, earning him another Grammy, for Best Contemporary Blues Recording of 1989.
Big brother Jimmie was still getting way too high and his career had started to backslide after the Fabulous Thunderbirds’ Top Ten hit, “Tuff Enuff.” There had always been underlying rivalry, but surrounding it was a deep brotherly love. More than anything, Stevie wanted to get his brother straight and suggested that the two of them finally record an album together, which intrigued Jimmie enough to enter rehab. When he completed the program, the brothers Vaughan went into the studio to make the record of their lives. They played from their hearts and got closer than they had ever been.
When Stevie collected a crate full of honors at the Austin Music Awards, he thanked God he was alive, adding, “I want to thank all the people that loved me back to life so that I could be here with you today.”
Some of Stevie’s fans swore he had a healing gift. “I’ve seen that kind of sound heal me and other people,” Stevie once remarked. “I’m not saying that I am a healer; I’m saying that wherever those kinds of feelings and emotions come from, or through, music is a healer. If I hadn’t had the music to play, I probably would have been dead a long time ago.” Stevie seemed grateful and surprised to have made it through his addictions. Onstage in Kansas City he told his audience, “Every day I live now, it’s kind of like borrowed time.” He was going to make every day count. To a journalist at Guitar World, Stevie pointed out the Hendrix pin on his lapel. “See this? You know there’s a big lie in this business. The lie is that it’s okay to go down in flames. Some of us can be examples about going ahead and growing. And some of us, unfortunately, don’t make it there and end up being examples because they had to die. I hit rock bottom, but thank God my bottom wasn’t my death.”
Stevie and Double Trouble were added to Eric Clapton’s lineup for a gigantic gig at Alpine Valley resort in Wisconsin on Labor Day weekend 1990. The first night Stevie stole everybody’s thunder, causing Eric Clapton to say the following night, “How am I going to follow this guy?” Opening with “The House Is Rockin’” from In Step, Stevie got the audience jumping and gyrating, and when brother Jimmie came onstage for the last three numbers, the entire house was on its feet. At the end of Clapton’s set, he made an announcement: “I’d like to bring out to join me here, a big treat, the best guitar players in the entire world: Buddy Guy, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Robert Cray, Jimmie Vaughan.” A monster jam ensued, in which Stevie Ray lifted off the stage. “He just sort of kicked everybody’s ass and nobody seemed to fight back,” Jimmie later recalled. “Stevie was on a cloud or something.”
After the set Stevie was in a hurry to get on a helicopter, get back to his hotel, and call Janna. There was a single seat left on one of the Bell 206B Jet-Rangers, and Stevie fastened himself in along with Clapton’s agent, Bobby Brooks, tour manager Colin Smythe, and Nigel Browne, Clapton’s bodyguard.
The helicopter lifted up through the thick fog and seconds later crashed into a three-hundred-foot-high hill. Nobody heard a thing. All the passengers on board died instantly. It was August 27, 1990, the fourth anniversary of Big Jim Vaughan’s death.
At 6:50 A.M. two sheriff’s deputies discovered the wreckage, judging the crash site as “a high-energy, high-velocity impact at a low angle.” In the chilly morning sun, Jimmie Vaughan and Eric Clapton quietly identified the bodies. Somebody found Stevie’s cross necklace, and his big brother put it around his own neck.
A few days later several thousand people mourned the loss of Stevie Ray Vaughan at the Laurel Land Memorial Park in south Oak Cliff. Dr. John played piano while Stevie Wonder sang the Lord’s Prayer. Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne joined Stevie Wonder in an aching a cappella version of “Amazing Grace,” then the local preacher read the Serenity prayer, concluding with the Prayer of St. Francis, which was found folded up in Stevie’s pocket. (“ … For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”)
The ruins of Stevie RayVaughan’s helicopter—“a high-energy, high-velocity impact at a low angle.” (AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS)
The Vaughan brothers’ album, Family Style, released after Stevie’s death, shot straight into the Billboard Top Ten and won two Grammy awards.
As always, rumors were whispered that there were drugs on the helicopter, that Stevie Ray had been getting high again, but the coroner’s report told the truth: Stevie’s aorta had been severed. There was no evidence of drug use. Stevie had been clean and sober for three years, 317 days, and
forty minutes.
SID VICIOUS
Hit Me with a Flower
Sid woke up in a blood-soaked bed. Staggering through the chaotic mess to the bathroom, he was horrified to see his precious Nancy in her black lacy underwear, curled into a fetal position under the sink, white as a ghost, which is what she was. Except for all the blood. A hunting knife was sticking out of her side, the same knife she bought for Sid in Times Square the day before. Sid Vicious stood there slack-jawed, in a state of stun-eyed shock from which he would never, ever recover. The only person who gave a shit about him was dead on the floor, killed with his own knife. Though he couldn’t remember how it had happened, when the cops arrived Sid admitted to stabbing Nancy. “I did it because I’m a dirty dog,” he announced in a tragic monotone before being handcuffed and taken away to prison.
Born John Simon Ritchie on May 10, 1957, Sid Vicious left home—such as it was—at fifteen. His air force father disappeared when Sid was two, and his mum, Anne Beverley, shuttled him from place to place, barely making ends meet, sometimes rolling joints for a living, dragging her son through the drug-torn hippie haze of London’s flower power. Later Sid would pick fights with aging hippies, harassing them with, “Do you remember the magical summer of ’68?”
During a brief stint at Hackney Technical College, Sid met John Lydon, a like-minded, pissed-off, scrawny young outcast who had suffered with meningitis as a child. Together they went “squatting” in abandoned London dwellings, took fleeting odd jobs, and wandered up and down the King’s Road in Chelsea—the trendiest street for fashion in the universe—often hanging out at Sex, a hard-edged fetishwear shop owned by Malcolm McLaren.
Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Page 38