by Alan Paul
In September, the band cut another demo with Gracey, nine songs in all, once again starting with “Rude Mood.” Remarkably, this version of the instrumental is virtually note-for-note identical to the version recorded for Texas Flood more than three years later.
Stevie’s alter ego Bwady. (Courtesy Tommy Shannon)
“‘Rude Mood’ is like a thoroughly composed classical blues piece,” says Layton. “All of the hits, accents, and breakdowns were always in the exact same place every time we played it.”
Adds Newhouse, “This is around when Stevie began to write more, and those tunes became staples of his set for years to come: ‘Love Struck Baby,’ ‘Rude Mood,’ ‘I’m Crying,’ ‘Empty Arms,’ and ‘Pride and Joy.’”
Despite winning converts one by one, Vaughan was still struggling to develop an audience beyond Austin and outside a smallish circle of blues fanatics, some of whom rejected Stevie’s love of Jimi Hendrix and tendency to inject any number of influences into the music. The conflict even extended to the band itself, a constant source of tension between Vaughan and Barton, who was still treated as the de facto star by taking the stage after the band had warmed up the crowd.
NEWHOUSE: We were encouraging Stevie to take more of a leadership role. He really came along as a singer, and Lou Ann was more of a featured vocalist; we would do twenty to thirty minutes without her, then we’d bring her up and she’d do four or five songs.
LAYTON: Stevie and Lou Ann had a fiery relationship.
BARTON: I truly loved him and cared about him. When he finally got a house, I took sheets, drapes, plates, and cutlery over to set up house for him.
LAYTON: She wanted to play straight blues and had no patience for anything else. Jimi Hendrix was one of the biggest, most important musicians to both me and Stevie. We started doing “Little Wing,” and it rubbed Lou Ann the wrong way: “We don’t need to do any goddamn Jimi Hendrix!” They were totally at odds about that.
NEWHOUSE: Lou Ann was more of a blues and R&B purist, but she certainly liked Hendrix’s music.
BARTON: I love Jimi Hendrix! Who wouldn’t? I just didn’t understand Stevie wanting to do covers of his music in our blues band.
The quartet incarnation of Double Trouble came under serious stress during a monthlong East Coast tour in the fall of 1979, coming to a head November 13 and 14 at New York’s Lone Star Café. Many music industry insiders were there to check out the swashbuckling Texans with a growing reputation. Among those in attendance were New Orleans piano master Dr. John and his friend Doc Pomus, composer of “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “Little Sister,” and other early rock classics.
Stevie and Lou Ann onstage. (Mary Beth Greenwood)
DR. JOHN: Doc kept telling me about this Texas guitar player I had to see, so we went to the Lone Star Café. Stevie was a hell of a guitar player, but he wasn’t showing he was special yet.
LAYTON: There was some good word out about Lou Ann and the band, and we knew this was a potentially important gig with record company people in attendance. We opened with a few tunes without Lou Ann, during which time she drank herself into obliteration. When Stevie called her up, she tripped on the last step, grabbing onto the mic stand to catch her fall and pull herself up. Stevie said, “C’mon, Lou Ann, get it together!” She turned, thinking she was off mic, and said, “Fuck you, motherfucker! You worry about your own shit, and I’ll worry about mine!” We could see the record company people running for the door. The show was a disaster, and Stevie was livid. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back between them.
NEWHOUSE: Lou Ann was drunk and breaking glasses. It wasn’t the first time something like that had happened—but it was the last time.
BARTON: We were both so drunk, and I threw a shot of whiskey at him and walked offstage. I was just sick of being shit on. Sick of him treating me badly, hogging the stage, and looking at me as an afterthought. My feelings weren’t hurt. They had been before, but I was pissed. At the beginning, it was all Lou Ann, and he started doing more and more singing. It got to where we’d play from 12:00 till 2:00, and at 1:30, I was still sitting in the back with people asking, “When are you going up?” I think he wanted the spotlight for himself and saw me as competition, and I finally had it with him.
LAYTON: The same thing happened the next night, and Stevie told Lou Ann that she needed to stop drinking so much. She said, “You do as much of that bullshit as I do.” He said, “Yeah, but I keep my shit together.” That was mostly true. Then it was “Fuck yous” back and forth, and he says, “Get out of the fucking van! I’m firing you!” And she goes, “You can’t fire me. I quit, motherfucker!” Back and forth: “I quit!” “You’re fired!”
NEWHOUSE: It was the breaking point. Stevie fired Lou Ann in the middle of the night in the van.
LAYTON: Then she looked at me and asked, “What about you, Harold? I was the one that asked you to join this goddamn band! Where are you at?” I said, “I’m playing with Stevie, which is why I joined the band.”
BARTON: We both drank way too much, and it’s really hard to have a relationship with bottles of Crown Royal between you all the time. Drinking leads to nothing good, and we had big fights, and I was ready to get the fuck out of there. I don’t know which of us was meaner to the other. We all loved each other, but it wasn’t working with me and Stevie anymore.
LAYTON: A week later was Thanksgiving, and the band was in such bad shape as we limped into a shitty diner on a cold, rainy night. The food was no good, it seemed like the band was falling apart, and we’re on the other side of the country, away from our families. We felt pretty desperate and very low.
The band stayed together for the rest of the tour. Barton’s last show was at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 24, after which she joined Roomful of Blues, with whom they had played several shows on the tour.
“I never regretted it for a moment,” Barton says. “I was sick of being mistreated. There’s a reason all the other guys quit Triple Threat, and I held on trying to help Stevie as long as I could. Roomful of Blues had been after me for six months, and it was time to make the change.”
Reno had left the band a few months prior, so Double Trouble was now a blues/rock power trio. With their focus sharpened, there was an immediate change in the group’s setlist.
LAYTON: When Lou Ann left, we moved away from an R&B approach to blues and dropped a lot of songs.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: Stevie had made the decision that he wanted to play with just bass and drums, where there was room for a twenty-minute guitar solo, which could be a good thing.
NEWHOUSE: It was clear that a trio was the best thing for Stevie, who rose to the occasion. Lou Ann no longer felt like a really good fit. She needed a more traditional R&B/blues band and sounded better than ever in Roomful of Blues.
ERIC JOHNSON: Stevie had an open mind and wanted to create his own signature, to open up to the potential that music has, unencumbered by genre lines or ceilings. That allowed him to become as big as he did emotionally and musically. People like that create a new alphabet but it requires sacrifice, slowing your career velocity by removing you from the categories of blues, jazz, or rock that people rely on.
PRIESNITZ: When the band returned to Austin, they came into the office, and Stevie explained what happened. His general feeling was relief, but I was concerned about the ninety days of shows we had booked. Lou Ann was the front person. Stevie was a phenomenal soloist, but I wondered if they should bring in another person. I posed the question: “We got all these dates, so who’s gonna sing?” And I got this ice-cold stare from Stevie, who said, “Well, I am, motherfucker!”
LAYTON: There was some talk about getting another woman singer, but I think Stevie always wanted to be the sole front man. He had to get over the hump of feeling timid about his singing. Not everyone is Aretha Franklin, and you don’t have to be to put your message across.
BARTON: I taught him everything I knew—to sing hard and loud and project, and I
think I helped him. He was a hell of a lot better singer in Triple Threat than he had been in the Cobras. I thought he became quite good and got his point across with a lot of guts and soul.
PRIESNITZ: Our agency was right above Steamboat, which my partner Hank Vick booked, and they came in and started rehearsing that day. We could hear them working up the set with him as the singer and improving.
STEELE: One night at Steamboat, I walked up the stairs behind the stage, and Stevie was right in front of me. He was playing a slide song, and this guy comes to stand next to me, and it’s George Thorogood. He was in town playing at the Opera House and was really riding high. Stevie finishes the song and turns around and sees George and yells,”Hey, c’mon up and play!” and George said, “No, no, I don’t want to play.” And I said, “I don’t blame you.”
On December 5, 1979, Double Trouble opened for Muddy Waters at the Palace in Houston. Stevie and Lenny were busted for cocaine possession when an off-duty police officer saw them snorting in front of a picture window after their set. They were released on $1,000 bail after a night in jail.
NEWHOUSE: Chris and I were watching Muddy after we played, and a friend found us and said that Stevie and Lenny had been taken to jail. Ironically, Muddy was playing “Champagne and Reefer” at that moment. We only missed one gig but had to bail him out ourselves with all of the money I had in my bank account.
BARTON: Drugs and alcohol are no good in a relationship, and that one … oh my God!
Lenny and Stevie, June, 1980. (Daniel Schaefer)
On December 23, just a couple of weeks after the bust, Stevie and Lenny got married in the band room at the Rome Inn during a Double Trouble set break.
SUBLETT: All of a sudden, Stevie and Lenny said, “We’re getting married upstairs.” It was just a room where we hung out before we played. Keith Ferguson poked me with his elbow, and we looked at each other like, “What is this?” We were highly amused because the last thing anyone thought was that Stevie was going to be married, and where he chose to do so kind of says it all.
COLONNA: I had moved to Seattle and was passing through Austin when I stopped at the Rome Inn to see Stevie play. I got there early when he was setting up, and he said, “Hey! I’m getting married tonight!” He had twisted Juicy Fruit gum wrappers into wedding rings. I said, “What’s your anniversary present gonna be, a newspaper?” and I could see that hurt his feelings.
NEWHOUSE: Some guy with a collar did the ceremony. Then we went back down and did the next set. We all brought gifts and tried to make it as much of a real wedding as we could. It was real sweet and pretty crazy, but that’s the way he rolled!
COLONNA: People threw little rice packets, and after Stevie and Lenny left, her father said, “They better pick up that rice, because that’s about all they will have to eat.”
STEELE: I was in the club, and he came down for the second set, saw me, and said, “Hey, we just got married!” I thought, “Oh, fuck.”
NEWHOUSE: Their relationship was tumultuous, dysfunctional, passionate, violent. [Rome Inn manager] Clayton “C-Boy” Parks, who was kind of a godfather to the blues scene, did not predict good things for that union; he thought they were too much alike, crazy in the same way. Neither was what you would call emotionally available, and they ended up bringing out the worst in each other. She certainly was no good for his bad habits, and the drug use escalated the extreme behavior.
STEELE: Their relationship was always volatile, and it got worse as the coke use escalated.
NEWHOUSE: We were driving back from a gig in Houston with Chris and I in a car following Stevie, Lenny, and the crew in the van. We came up to them pulled over on the side of the road, and James [Arnold], our driver, was leaning against the back door as we pulled up. We asked what was going on, assuming they had car trouble, and he rolled his eyes and pointed to the back of the van. Lenny and Stevie were inside, crying and hugging, with everything in the van completely trashed. They had a knock-down, drag-out fistfight in the back of the van. Physical fights were not uncommon.
SUBLETT: Stevie and Lenny were in that zone, partners in crime. A lot of the time, they seemed to get along fine, and I liked her. It just seemed nuts to get married in the middle of so much craziness—that such a marriage was bound to crash and burn.
NEWHOUSE: Their marriage came completely out of left field, and neither seemed like the marrying kind. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had broken up, so I was surprised they got married. Deep down, I think Stevie wanted to have a normal relationship. But he and Lenny would pick on me and my wife, Jody, saying things like, “Oh, you guys are so normal, happy, and boring!” Maybe that came out of being a little jealous of a less rocky relationship.
LAYTON: Stevie was a sweet person, but he was difficult to have a relationship with. He was kind, decent, and morally put together, but he didn’t always function that way. Lenny would say, “The drugs have gotten way out of control, and I’m really concerned,” and the next minute they’d be doing drugs together. Their relationship was just haywire.
STEELE: The problem was you never knew which Lenny you were going to get. She had as many personalities as Heinz has varieties. I didn’t trust her, and I didn’t think she was right for him, and I couldn’t understand why he wanted to be with someone like that. I thought that Lenny would be his downfall, because she was so into drugs, and his abuse increased once they got together.
LAYTON: Stevie needed a lot of basic help, and Lenny wanted to give it to him. She tried to help him get his shit together, but trying to make someone do things can become part of the dysfunction of the relationship. You can’t help people that don’t want to be helped. It turned into codependent enablement.
STEELE: Once while Stevie was out on the road, she was so high and hysterical that she brought their Caprice convertible into a mechanic and told the guy he needed to get the snakes out from underneath the seats. She’d been up for days and was hallucinating.
Eight days after his marriage, Stevie and Double Trouble rang in the new year and a new decade at Antone’s. The blues club, which continued to be so vital to the Austin blues world, was not a regular gig for the band, though Stevie was often there sitting in on off nights or after his own gigs.
LAYTON: We had a circuit of places we played regularly, and it didn’t include Antone’s, which had legitimate blues legends playing there, and the Thunderbirds as the house band. Our homes were the Steamboat and the Rome Inn, which got its name because it was originally an Italian restaurant. It was vacant and left for nothing, with broken-out windows and splintered doors, and C-Boy Parks brought in a cash register and some whiskey bottles and just set up shop. The door was always open for us there; we played every Sunday, and eventually the Thunderbirds started doing “Blue Mondays” there. C-Boy would always say, “I take care of all my people,” and would bring in barbecue and feed us.
NEWHOUSE: Stevie was never as traditional as Jimmie, and he wanted to differentiate himself and get out from his brother’s shadow. Some of that included changing the way he looked.
LAYTON: When I first saw Stevie, he was wearing an early ’60s retro style: applejack hat, sharkskin pants, and vintage satin or bowling shirts. He was getting all of his clothes at thrift stores.
NEWHOUSE: Stevie went from wearing a suit and vest in the Cobras, which was more or less the standard way traditional blues bands in Austin were dressing, to cutting the sleeves off his T-shirts and wearing kimonos and a full-length leopard-skin coat. One night in New Orleans’s French Quarter, the ladies of the night offered Stevie all kinds of things for that coat. Other times, I thought we were gonna get our asses kicked, stumbling out of the van at rural rest stops in the middle of the night with Stevie wearing that coat. But he was oblivious to all of that. It was like he never came off the stage. It became glammed-out, punked-up blues, which was also part of separating himself from his brother.
SUBLETT: I heard there was a rivalry, but I never saw that. Jimmie was loyal to the core if you a
sked him about Stevie: “Oh, he’s great.” And Stevie would always say about Jimmie, “He’s the best. He’s the reason I play.” If you tried to disrespect one to the other, they’d jump on you in a second. They didn’t jam together or hang out all that much. They had to find out who they were, and their styles were very different, but man, did they love each other and love playing together.
NEWHOUSE: If we were in town, we’d always go see the T-Birds Monday at the Rome Inn. I can’t say I remember seeing Jimmie at our gigs too much. Occasionally, Stevie would sit in with the T-Birds. He idolized his big brother. I saw Jimmie do things that I don’t think he would be proud of, and I imagine alcohol was involved. We went to a Thunderbirds gig in Dallas when Stevie was scrambling and the T-Birds were one of the top regional bands in the state; Jimmie could go to Dallas and own that town. Afterwards, Jimmie was riding Stevie in the parking lot, saying that he and his band weren’t worth shit. It got physical, and Stevie pinned Jimmie down and was on top of him. I think that was a turning point in their relationship, like when you stand up to your dad for the first time. I never saw anything like that happen again.
Cutter Brandenburg, who had spent years in California, touring the world as a crew member for Ian Hunter, Jo Jo Gunne, Andy Gibb, and others, became Double Trouble’s first real crew member in 1980, after returning to Austin and seeing Stevie for the first time in several years at his wedding.
“Stevie and Whipper asked me if I could come work with them,” Brandenburg recalled. “Stevie hugged me and said, ‘I need ya.’”
As a very old friend with years of experience working with successful rock and pop bands, Brandenburg had Stevie’s trust and definitive ideas about how to boost Double Trouble’s odds of success. Over the next year, Cutter’s influence would help create “Stevie Ray Vaughan.”
