All of the guitar gods were gone, or otherwise occupied. Drum machines had replaced stomping feet. There were synthesizers instead of someone slapping on the 88s. Into this unlikeliest of scenarios stepped Stevie Ray Vaughan.
He recorded Texas Flood in 1983 along side a pair of guys in bassist Tommy Shannon and drummer Chris Layton called — brilliantly, anachronistically — Double Trouble, after the Otis Rush song. And they did it live, with few overdubs, basically a mirror image of their stage show. But only after being discovered by John Hammond, a svengali who had previously worked with Billie Holiday, and Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen. And after being offered, in the aftermath of a chance meeting with Jackson Browne during the Montreux festival, a warehouse space to record.
Everything, it now seems, fell together perfectly — opening the door for a career made complete by today’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction announcement. And yet Texas Flood couldn’t possibly be called inevitable, and Vaughan’s unyielding commitment to the blues might never have become widely known had he not detoured into pop.
Nobody made music like this anymore, not with this sound, not with this attitude, not with this low-key grace. It was too raw, too real, too frankly weird. Texas Flood, even today, seems like a found treasure, like something uncovered after having been hidden long ago, rather than a product of the early 1980s.
[SOMETHING ELSE! REWIND: Producer Nile Rodgers, who worked with Stevie Ray Vaughan on Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ and on ‘Family Style’ with brother Jimmie, remembers the legendary guitarist.]
Picture what was in heavy rotation on MTV as “Love Struck Baby,” this amped-up Chuck Berry romp, spins. And that’s just the opening track. There’s “Pride and Joy,” a scalding blues workout; the title track, which takes us to the very bottom of a brown bottle; and his groove-tastic take on “Testify” — which completely transformed the old Isley Brothers classic. The original “Rude Mood” is breathless, while “Dirty Pool” peels back every layer of emotion on Stevie Ray’s tensile 1959 Stratocaster. Finally, there’s “Lenny,” a hauntingly ruminative finale to an album that ultimately encompasses everything we learned about Vaughan all at once some three decades back.
For many, Vaughan’s dubbed appearance on David Bowie’s comeback recording Let’s Dance from the month before, and his short stint on Bowie’s subsequent Serious Moonlight tour, represented all they’d heard of this fast-rising star up to this point. Texas Flood offered a more complete accounting of his sweeping talents, and everything that came after simply explodes the assumptions made from those more studied performances with Bowie. Vaughan would never again be shoe-horned into a narrow pop-song format.
In fact, as early as October 1983, during a show at Ripley’s Music Hall that was later part of a Texas Flood reissue package, Stevie Ray Vaughan illustrated that he was more than ready to accede to the throne of Jimi Hendrix — someone with whom the younger guitarist was already consistently being compared. In short order, Vaughan covered not one, not two, but three Hendrix songs, beginning with “Voodoo Child” and then melding “Little Wing” and “Third Stone from the Sun” in a cocky closing salvo. There was also a thunderous second pass at “Testify,” a salacious journey through “Pride and Joy,” and a crackling take on Buddy Guy’s memorable update of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” to boot.
Seven years later, of course, Stevie Ray Vaughan would be gone — the victim of a 1990 helicopter crash. A long-hoped-for call from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame serves as a needed reminder of his flinty ambition, fiery verve and grease-popping throwback grooves, something that seemed to arrive of a piece some three decades ago. And, even more, what terrible a loss that remains.
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