by Alan Paul
He started using a glass bottle to play slide after we saw the Allman Brothers at the State Fair Music Hall [September 27, 1971], sitting up in the balcony right above the stage, watching Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Jaimoe, and the rest. It was unbelievable, and we were heartbroken when Duane died a month later [October 29, 1971]. That night we played at the Funky Monkey, and Stevie played the Goldtop in honor of Duane and played his heart out.
One of Blackbird’s regular gigs was at the Cellar, a rock-and-roll strip club that was an important venue for Dallas bands playing original music and blues.
Blackbird, Austin, 1972. (Courtesy Cutter Brandenburg Collection)
COLONNA: The Cellar was a small room with spotlights everywhere, and the band set up behind a little runway where the girls would dance. A phone onstage would ring; I’d answer it, and someone would say, “Y’all play a long instrumental,” so a girl could get up for a striptease. Right before she showed it all, the lights would go off and she’d run offstage. Every once in a while, a professional stripper would come in and wow everybody.
We’d play a set, then two other bands would play, and we’d play again. We’d be off from 11:00 to 1:00, so we’d jump in the van and go jam at the Fog, Mother Blues, or the Funky Monkey.
PAUL “PAPPY” MIDDLETON, Dallas guitarist, soundman, and mixer: We used to sneak Stevie in to sit in with my band at Mother Blues, which was, shall we say, a full-service club. You could get anything there, so they were very careful about underage people on the premises. The owner would be up on the third floor playing poker with guys like Freddie King, and when he heard Stevie playing—because he was louder and different than anyone else, even then, he’d run down and chase him out.
COLONNA: We’d sit in with the soul guys at the Aragon Ballroom, or go smoke a joint somewhere and go back to the Cellar for the second set. ZZ Top played after us one night and called Stevie up to jam. Stevie sang “Thunderbird” with Gibbons yelling, “Sing it, Little Stevie, sing it!” That was one of the first songs Stevie would sing: “Get high, everybody get high!”
GIBBONS: “Thunderbird” was one of those pass-around fast shuffles that everybody knew.
COLONNA: His main guitar was a red semi-hollow Epiphone [a 1963 Epiphone Riviera], which he got cheap because it had sat in a store window and the sun had faded out the color of the guitar.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: I left the “Jimbo” guitar for Stevie, and he took it to school and routed it out and put two P-90 pickups in it, or attempted to, which might explain why it had two volume knobs. He didn’t want me to see what he’d done, so he traded it for the Epiphone Riviera. But it wasn’t a secret weapon that we figured out how to rule the world with—it was just a $175 guitar. Guitars were like hot rods: everybody took them apart and customized ’em. It was like a ’40 Ford.
COLONNA: It was all about tone with Stevie, even then. He started moving to larger string gauges, an idea he got from Jimmie. Stevie would make fun of guys that used thin strings. But the Epiphone was falling apart from the heavy string tension, and I constantly drove him to the store to get that guitar epoxied back together. The strings were also wreaking havoc on his fingertips, and he started using Krazy Glue to fix the holes in the ends of his fingers, which came from bending those heavy strings.
BRAMHALL: Stevie and Jimmie were the first ones I was ever around who were as into tone as anything. They weren’t satisfied with just playing the notes. Most players at the time didn’t think tone was that important, but Jimmie and Stevie definitely concentrated on having their own sounds from the beginning.
3
AUSTIN CITY LIMITS
Over the course of several months in 1970, Jimmie Vaughan and Doyle Bramhall both moved to Austin, along with several other musicians who would form the core of the city’s blues scene. They didn’t all know each other well or at all, but they were all lured by the city’s more laid-back, less restrictive feel. Stevie would not be far behind.
“It was an environment that attracted musicians and people who liked to have fun,” says guitarist Denny Freeman. “A lovely place with trees, funky houses with cheap rent, lots of pretty girls, and a lot of freaks where it felt safe to have long hair.”
The state capital was still a sleepy town of 250,000 and, of course, the home of the University of Texas, where most of the Dallas crew had been playing parties for years. The city was full of advantages for young blues-obsessed musicians. Jimmie was no longer a rock star, and that was fine with him; in Austin, he could pursue his blues vision unimpeded.
BRAMHALL: The Cellar was really the only place in Dallas where you could play Muddy Waters on ten. In Austin, there were more places like that, and it was cheaper to live. It was like a little San Francisco; you could come down and express yourself, and people left you alone to do your thing. We started having a little scene.
DOYLE BRAMHALL II, son of Doyle Bramhall, guitarist, friend of Stevie’s: Jimmie’s house was sort of home base for everybody. It was a blues commune vibe, a village, one big musical family, and everyone was very tight. Jimmie was like my uncle, and his daughter, Tina, was like my sister.
Denny Freeman and “Little Doyle,” Doyle Bramhall II. (Connie Vaughan/Courtesy Denny Freeman)
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: My daughter, Tina, had been born, and I was working construction because I’d stopped doing fraternity gigs and was just playing blues. I got the Monday night gig at the One Knite and played there with the Storm every week for five years. There would always be a line of dozens of motorcycles out front … you could get in a lot of trouble there if you weren’t careful.
DEREK O’BRIEN, Austin guitarist: The One Knite was a super funky place with a coffin-shaped door and no cover. It was the greatest joint in town, and the Storm were the greatest band, playing authentic ’50s / early ’60s blues. Jimmie was like nobody else, nailing B. B. King’s style and vibrato. He had a great ear and could hear something and just do it, picking up licks from all the great blues guitar players. He was playing through a black [Fender] Bassman [amp] with a single fifteen-inch speaker, instead of the four ten-inch speakers. Jimmie knew all those secrets for great tone.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: On the cover of Willie Nelson’s “Cowtown Jamboree” album [Live Country Music Concert], his steel guitarist is playing though a 1×15 Bassman. In those days, you could send your Bassman back to Fender and they’d recover it and change the speakers from 4×10 to 1×15, if you liked. It was real loud and clear. When that speaker blew up, I plugged my Silvertone 6×10 cabinet, fitted with Jensens, into the head.
W. C. Clark was an Austin guitarist, bassist, and singer who was on the road playing with soul singer Joe Tex. He would play at various East Side clubs while home. Hearing young white Dallas bluesmen like Jimmie, Denny Freeman, singer Paul Ray, and Doyle Bramhall made him rethink his path.
W. C. CLARK, Austin guitarist and bassist, member of Stevie’s Triple Threat Revue: Those guys were not playing music to make money, but for the feeling, and I felt the same way. We were all scholars and seekers of the blues. When I heard those guys laying it down and Doyle singing like Bobby Bland, I knew I wanted to be involved, so I quit Joe Tex, moved back to Austin, and became a hippie.
BRANDENBURG: Blackbird went to Austin one weekend to see Storm at the One Knite, where we could hardly get in the door. People would pass your money to the bar and they’d pass back a beer. Storm’s music made everyone go nuts. The next night at the New Orleans Club, Storm opened for Krackerjack, which was the hottest band in town.
SHANNON: After we left Johnny [Winter] towards the end of ’70, Uncle John and I moved to Austin and put Krackerjack together, and we were drawing huge crowds. Austin was a hippie town—all of the bands had beards, long hair, and played in shorts, blue jeans, and T-shirts. Unc and I learned about cool clothes in New York and dressed in a way no one in Austin had ever seen: velvet bell bottoms, Jimi Hendrix shirts, and high-heeled, square-toed boots, with shag haircuts. Led Zeppelin was our model, and we heard all the time, “Just a bunch of g
uys dressing like a bunch of girls!”
Inspired by Jimmie and his friends and by the encouragement of several people they met on that weekend visit—most importantly, Krackerjack booking agent Charlie Hatchett—Stevie and Blackbird moved to Austin in March 1972. “We’d been going back and forth between Dallas and Austin almost every weekend, so moving there made sense,” recalls Colonna.
Blackbird played clubs while also opening for national touring acts, including Wishbone Ash, Zephyr featuring Tommy Bolin, Wet Willie, and Sugarloaf (“Green-Eyed Lady”). The band was playing blues/rock while the still-developing blues scene in Austin was steeped in traditionalism.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: Stevie called and said he was coming down. He stayed with me for a bit, but I was married, with a kid and a day job, and trying to get something going myself. Stevie had his own friends and pursuits.
COLONNA: As soon as we got to Austin, we could see that there was a big divide between the blues people and the rock people. At a late-night party, Jimmie went off on Kim Davis, and he didn’t seem to respect Blackbird, a rock/boogie band playing Allman Brothers songs.
DENNY FREEMAN, guitarist, fellow Dallas native, bandmate of both Stevie’s and Jimmie’s: By then, Hendrix had died and Cream had broken up, and a lot of us had turned towards hard blues and were getting pretty snobby about it. Blackbird was a rock band, but Stevie’s role was inserting blues. Like Jimmie, Stevie had exceptional, obvious talent that couldn’t be denied. Every once in a while, someone comes around who has a specialness that people just respond to, and that was the case with them both.
COLONNA: Charlie Hatchett kept us booked at places like the Abraxas in Waco, the Nickel Keg Saloon in San Marcos, and the Rolling Hills Club outside of Austin, which became the Soap Creek Saloon. I copied Uncle John Turner’s way of doing business: you get your girlfriend to collect the money at the door and count every head so the club owner can’t cheat you, buy a keg for thirty-five bucks, give away free beer, and let the girls in free. Do anything to get ’em in there dancing.
SHANNON: Blackbird was drawing big crowds because of Stevie’s guitar playing. They were a really good band, with two drummers, organ, two guitarists, a bass player, and a singer, but everyone was talking about Stevie, who was playing Peter Green and Duane Allman licks. All of the musicians would be back at the bar saying, “Listen to that guy!”
COLONNA: Stevie always had a guitar in his hands—he played all of the time. As soon as he woke up in the morning, he’d get the yogurt, put it on the table, and play to an Earl Hooker or Albert King record, whoever his idols were that day. He was completely dedicated to the instrument, and he’d work on his playing constantly. He was real sincere about it—there was nothing phony-baloney about him. Listening to music and playing guitar were the biggest things in his life. He’d always be saying, “Listen to this!” Whatever he was into, he was into it all the way. His main amp then was a 4×12 Marshall bottom with a blackface Fender Bassman top that had “Euphoria” stenciled on it, and Stevie was convinced that Clapton had been in a band called Euphoria and that it might have been his amp.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: Stevie was really good very young, but he really picked it up after moving down to Austin. He went from a really good kid to a real badass who just kept getting better and better.
COLONNA: We all moved into places that were too expensive for us, so when [Krackerjack singer] Bruce Bowland moved out of the band house on Sixteenth Street, my wife and I moved in. Shortly after, Stevie and his girlfriend, Glenda Maples, lost their place and crashed with us. We were all crammed into a tiny shotgun house, and all of these loser drug-dealer people came by all of the time. It was a bad scene. Early one morning, there were these two really seedy guys hanging around my back door, and when they came walking in, I yelled at them, and they said, “Oh, we’re here to see Tommy.” It was the break of day, and Tommy’s speed connections were rolling in.
One was a wild-eyed, crazy rich kid from Houston with a brand-new Corvette. He was a super mean guy. I walked into Tommy’s bedroom, and he wouldn’t let me leave. He pulled out this Bowie knife and said, “Now, hold your foot still,” and threw the knife into the floor, just clipping the edge of my boot.
SHANNON: Krackerjack got a record deal with Atlantic, and then we broke up! Flaring egos. Blackbird was also sort of falling apart, so we merged and called ourselves Blackbird—me, Stevie, Roddy, and Bruce Bowland.
COLONNA: Blackbird didn’t have any original material, so a record deal was even more unlikely. Christian was getting junked out, hanging out with the really bad heroin crowd. He got busted, and we had to bail him out of jail. It got to where we just couldn’t work with him anymore.
SHANNON: That band only lasted a few months, because we were all so crazy into drugs, then Krackerjack re-formed, with me, Uncle John, Bruce, and Stevie and Robin Syler on guitars. Robin was very good, but he was intimidated by Stevie.
COLONNA: Tommy was really heavy into speed, and it soon made its way to Stevie and I. Maybe because of the drugs, the band was just wearing down. I was coming down with hepatitis but didn’t know it. I was getting weaker and weaker, and they replaced me with Uncle John by the end of ’72. I still lived in the house with all of them, and Tommy and Stevie told me one day that Uncle John was going to join, so I went home and cried! I was heartbroken.
Vaughan’s stint playing alongside Shannon and Turner in the re-formed Krackerjack furthered his reputation and provided validation of his skills and of the possibilities inherent in expanding rather than mimicking classic blues. Unc’s preference for flamboyant production and stage attire would prove to be Stevie’s undoing.
“Stevie tried to get into the stage-clothes thing,” says Shannon. “He came to a gig dressed in leotards and the weirdest shit I have ever seen! But Uncle John fired Stevie because he was onstage with a bulging wallet in his back pocket, which Unc thought wasn’t cool. I was too messed up to intervene.
“Stevie was trying to find his place in the world and didn’t realize how deep his talent was, that he was already better than all the older musicians he admired so much. He was very sensitive and very confused. All of his role models, guys like me, were out of our fucking minds on drugs and alcohol, and he was going to live that life. None of us understood where that would lead.”
As Stevie’s stint in Krackerjack came to an end, he joined Stump, with David Frame on bass, playing with them from the end of February to the beginning of May 1973. During this time, Vaughan was also bonding with Bramhall, as the two shared a desire to expand their repertoire beyond the blues, a feeling decidedly not shared by Jimmie.
“I was playing straight blues with Jimmie, but Stevie and I both wanted to branch out a little more,” Bramhall said. “We were listening to Marvin Gaye and Sly Stone and wanted to incorporate some of that stuff into our music, so Stevie and I found each other getting together more often. Then he called and said that he had gotten a phone call from Marc Benno, who had a deal with A&M and a big tour lined up, and needed to put together a Texas blues-rock band.”
Benno had partnered with Leon Russell in the band Asylum Choir in the late ’60s. By ’73, Russell was riding high, having played with Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and many others. Benno’s many high-profile session gigs included playing guitar on the Doors’ L.A. Woman album. Being in Benno’s band was a big deal, and the group he put together and named the Nightcrawlers featured Doyle on drums, Stevie on guitar, Tommy McClure on bass, and ex-Chessmen and ZZ Top member Billy Etheridge on keyboards.
BENNO: I called Jimmie and offered him the gig, but he said, “I’m not interested. I don’t want to do any rock and roll. Why don’t you get my brother?” I asked if he thought he’d do it, and he said, “He will if I tell him to. Y’all are gonna go to Hollywood, huh?” And I said, “Yeah, I’m signed to A&M, and we’re going to go make a record.” And he goes, “I’ll tell him to do this. Give him a call.”
BRAMHALL: We went out to LA to record, and it was a kick for us j
ust to be out of Texas. Other than little trips to Oklahoma or Louisiana, I don’t think any of us had even left the state. We were in LA for two weeks, riding around in limos and living like rock stars. We recorded seven songs, including “Dirty Pool,” the first song Stevie and I wrote together, and three of them are actually good. Then we went on a short tour with Humble Pie and the J. Geils Band. We played seven or eight gigs in places like Detroit, Chicago, and New York, and it was our first time out in the big world. Unfortunately, music took a backseat to drinking and drugging—especially for me—so while we played some good music, it was pretty much a mess.
BENNO: It was just a complete blur. We could do it pretty good but were drinking and drugging heavily, and there was a lot of shenanigans going on. Like we went to Barney’s Beanery and there was a line around the block, and Billy Etheridge said, “We’ll be sitting in there in a minute,” and he walked around the corner, phoned in a bomb threat, the place emptied out, and we walked in. It was crazy times, and stuff like that didn’t even seem like a big deal.
Doyle Bramhall in the Nightcrawlers, Armadillo World Headquarters, 1973. (Kathy Murray)
BRAMHALL: I guess the label hated the record.
BENNO: They said it didn’t sound like me. The music was good, but there wasn’t really a category for it. It was kind of like the Allman Brothers, but it was more blues, and they didn’t hear anything that they could really promote. They were kind of right; we missed the mark. There was some great stuff on the album by what you could call a great cult band, but it wasn’t developed and it never even got mixed properly. They just called the whole thing off. I had invested a lot of time and money, and it just fell completely apart.
