“A long, long time ago
I can still remember how
that music used to make me smile.”
What to say about Stevie Ray Vaughan, gone 29 years ago now?
First, I would say he changed music.
Once he emerged from Texas, he was the antidote to the hair-sprayed, spandex-clad, pointy day-glo colored guitar-wielding axemen on MTV, whose main musical sensibility seemed to be to play faster and faster. Stevie could blaze; but slow and sassy was his forte.
Stevie played old, beat-up Fender Stratocasters, bad-ass style, with heavy strings and tuned down to E flat… his favorite Strat, aka "Number One," so old and battered that no finish remained. But in Stevie's hands, magic... A sound that you felt as much as you heard.
He brought the blues - with a reverence and honesty few had before or since - back out from exile in the neighborhood dives, and back on to the big stages, inspiring a new generation of musicians and music fans alike to really hear the blues, and to play what they feel. Forgotten legends re-emerged from the shadows, relevant once again - Buddy Guy, Albert King, Albert Collins, Lonnie Mack, et al - because SRV paid his due respects to them every time he was interviewed.
He was authentic at a time when, in music, there was little authenticity to be found.
I would say he changed my life.
I can vividly recall the thrill my thirteen-year-old self felt when he (I) first heard Stevie Ray’s “Pride and Joy” jumping out of my stereo back in the summer of 1983. I had never heard anything like it before, and I wanted to hear it again, so being 13, I called the radio station. WMMR DJ “Bubba” John Stevens (RIP) was excited too. He happily told me who it was, and promised he’d play it again before the shift was over.
*****
“Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn’t take one more step”
I was fifteen years old in 1985 when I saw SRV for the first and only time at the ancient art-deco Tower Theater, just outside of Philadelphia.
That was the moment that I decided that playing guitar would be an important part of my life.
Although Stevie was a sharp dresser in a gypsy-gunslinger style, but there was nothing fancy or trendy about his performance. He just stood there and played his heart out. That same sound that I heard coming out of my stereo speakers was twice as potent in person. His guitar sang… growled… shrieked…Something about that sound really moved me. I had never seen… or heard anything like it before.
*****
“I can’t remember if I cried
when I read about his widowed bride.
Something touched me deep inside
The day the music died.”
In the late summer of 1990, I was out on worker’s compensation following knee surgery. I was about to leave for my physical therapy appointment about when beloved WMMR DJ Pierre Robert came on the radio to announce that new reports indicated that members of Eric Clapton’s touring organization were missing and presumed dead in a helicopter accident. They didn’t know if Eric was among them. I stuck by the radio and held my breath and said a few prayers.
A few moments later Pierre came back on, and somberly announced that although Eric Clapton was not on the doomed helicopter, it had been confirmed that Stevie Ray Vaughan was, and was indeed gone. Just like that.
Sometimes there are no words to adequately express the devastation and heartbreak one feels. You just feel the floor fall out beneath you.
*****
Later that winter, I received a check for settlement of my knee injury.
I always wanted a Stratocaster; I lusted after a Strat. I used to trace pictures of them from guitar magazines in my high school homeroom class, imaging how it would feel to hold one, to strum it, maybe even try to play a solo one day. Once that check cleared, I was on my way to the music shop.
“I want to try out that Strat.”
