Couldn't stand the weather --- Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble --- 1984 (Epic)
Another guitar hero gone long before his time, Stevie Ray Vaughan was discovered by the same man who brought us that workingman's hero, one Bruce Springsteen, and cut six albums before his death in 1990, with a further fourteen released posthumously. Seems almost ghoulish, but that's the music business for you: dead stars often sell more records than live ones. This album, however, was his second, and made with his band, Double Trouble, six years before his untimely death in a helicopter crash. Vaughan typified the “Texas blues” style of playing, and was feted by his contemporaries, remaining the inspiration and aspiration for many young guitarists to this day.
The guitar jam “Scuttle buttin'” starts the album off, almost two minutes of fret-burnin' frenzy, which you really wish was longer, but then we're into the title track, with a bluesy start and then you would swear you're listening to the ghost of Jimi Hendrix, both in his guitar playing and his vocals, which is not too far off the mark, as he later tackles that old classic “Voodoo chile (slight return)”, and does a great job with it too. Like a certain Rory Gallagher, Stevie had a stripped down, no-frills band: it's just guitar, bass and drums, with the addition of a sax on just one track, and it's pure rock'n'roll from the word go.
The pure blues of “The things that I used to do” conjures up the aforementioned Gallagher, and I find myself wondering if they ever got to play together? Would have been one hell of a gig. Elements of the great BB King in there too, methinks. It's pure heaven to listen to: this man could make a guitar do anything he wanted to, and he knew it. His version of “Voodoo chile”, as mentioned, is awe-inspiring, all eight minutes of it. Hendrix lives again, indeed!
“Cold shot” is pure Texas Strut, if such a thing exists, and if it doesn't it should. Swagger and panache drenches this track, but it's the nine-minute “Tin Pan Alley” that really gets the attention, its slow, laid-back, lazy blues echoed later in fellow Bluesman (and sadly, also late of this world) Gary Moore's “As the years go passing by”. A song this good needs to be long, and luckily it is, but it never gets boring or seems overstretched: in fact, at the end you wish there was more. This, even more than his homage to Hendrix, is the centrepiece of the album, and without question its standout track. I could listen to this all day, every day.
The album ends on two short tracks then, “Honey bee”, a swinging blues/boogie number, and “Stang's swang”, jazzy improvisation with added sax, a track which least represents rock to me, and which I would have preferred not to have closed the album, but close it it does. Not my cup of tea Stevie, sorry.
Called too soon to play in the Great Gig in the Sky, Stevie Ray Vaughan was clearly emerging as one of the bright new talents of the blues world, and who knows what he might have achieved had he not taken that fateful helicopter ride that foggy August morning? But at least we have his music to remind us how good he was, and like I said at the beginning, even though he's left us his influence remains on the new rising stars of the rock and blues world, so that, in a way, like all true bluesman and rockers, he will never really be gone.
TRACKLISTING
1. Scuttle buttin'
2. Couldn't stand the weather
3. The things that I used to do
4. Voodoo chile (Slight return)
5. Cold shot
6. Tin Pan Alley
7. Honey bee
8. Stang's swang