by Alan Paul
GRISSOM: It’s hard to write a good blues song. Where do you go from Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters? Stevie wrote a bunch of really great songs for Texas Flood, all played with this simmering intensity and assuredness. There was a low-down, visceral quality to everything he did.
HODGES: Stevie had a vision, intellect, and artistic bent toward reinterpreting the blues. The label only pressed ten thousand units initially. They felt it was a John Hammond artistic commitment with not a prayer of commercial success.
Texas Flood was starting to take off, 3/26/83. (Tracy Anne Hart)
LEEDS: There was a great independent promotion guy who could get anything played in Texas. We played him Texas Flood, and he said, “I’m not interested. Rock radio won’t touch it.” I was like, “Let me get this straight: I pay you a lot money to get music on Texas radio, and you’re turning down a genuine Texas hero? If you pass on this project, you will never work for Epic Records again. You are so fucking wrong.” It was surely different than anything that was out there, but it was fucking great!
SHANNON: We could feel things changing on the road, the crowds slowly getting bigger and bigger. Stevie chose the milk truck over the chance to get in limos and fly all over the world because he really believed in what we were doing. Then we finally got a bus [on July 21]! It was a really shitty bus, but we were in heaven riding around in it.
A page from Cutter’s tour notebook. The Texas Flood tour was still seat-of-the-pants. (Courtesy Cutter Brandenburg Collection)
LAYTON: We toured the whole country, selling out five hundred–seat clubs, with two hundred people standing outside trying to get in, and all of a sudden “Pride and Joy” was being played on MTV. It was just unreal to realize we could do all the things we’d dreamed about that represent a successful band on the road: get a bus, play some good gigs, and have decent food backstage. You take that stuff for granted pretty quickly, but it’s hard to overstate what it meant to us at the time. Until that moment, we were still forced to think, “How long will I be fighting to keep the electricity and gas on?”
HODGES: A guitar player was the last thing any record label was looking for, but there are cycles and there’s a world out there looking for a new spirit, and Stevie was that spirit. It started in Texas, but people everywhere caught on to Stevie Ray quickly when they had the opportunity, especially in New York City and Detroit and some other weathervane cities.
JACK RANDALL, booking agent, former radio station program director: I was working at an AOR radio station in Lansing, Michigan, and I went down to Detroit to interview Stevie on his bus before he played at St. Andrew’s Hall, capacity one thousand. David Bowie was at Joe Louis Arena the same night—twenty times as many people almost across the street [July 30, 1983]. We shook hands, and he said, “I’m not going to say any derogatory shit about David Bowie.” There were no other guidelines, and we did a great interview. Then we did a line of coke and walked onto stage together. I watched a ninety-minute set from behind the speakers and had my mind blown.
HODGES: We did a lot of shows around the Bowie tour. That began because we were trying to book club dates on off days when we thought Stevie would be with him.
Exactly a week before that July 30 Detroit show, the band had performed in Toronto at the packed El Mocambo club. The show was professionally filmed and released in 1991. The footage holds up as the ultimate capture of the band’s magic on this coming-out tour.
SHANNON: We were on fire, and I was glad they were filming it, but that’s the way we sounded! It’s not like that was a much higher level than the night before or the night after.
BRANDENBURG: El Mocambo was a small but famous place, and Mr. Hammond had invited several people out to see Stevie. It was also a live radio and video feed, and they went full balls to the wall. Just before every show, we kind of hugged, and that night Stevie hugged me so hard, I thought he’d cracked my back. He said something like, “Buckle your seat belt; I’m not stopping.” And boom, he was like a racehorse out of the gate. A few times Chris or Tommy tried to pick up a drink after a song, but Stevie was starting again. I had goose bumps most of the night.
SRV and DT followed David Bowie’s Let’s Dance tour around some of North America. They placed these flyers on cars in the parking lots of Bowie venues. (Courtesy Cutter Brandenburg Collection)
SHANNON: For me, personally, this success was a godsend. I went through all of those years of being in and out of jail and laying brick. To come out of that hell and actually get to an even bigger level than I had been at with Johnny was the greatest blessing I could imagine. My heart was full, and one of the real highs was when we went to Hollywood to play the Palace [on August 22]. We’d played there before to mediocre crowds, and we arrived to see a line going down the street and around the block. It was the first big indication that something was happening; it was a hallmark in the momentum of our career.
LAYTON: That fucker was sold out! And it was like that everywhere we went after that. We had gotten used to selling out the four hundred seaters, but the Palace held almost two thousand people. It was like we were getting ready to be stars.
SHANNON: All of a sudden, there was this big vibe going on about our record coming directly from the people, by word of mouth.
DICKEY BETTS, Allman Brothers Band founding guitarist: When I heard “Pride and Joy” on the radio, I said, “Hallelujah.” Stevie Ray Vaughan single-handedly brought guitar- and blues-oriented music back to the marketplace. He was just so good and strong that he would not be denied. No one was interested in this stuff until they heard Stevie Ray, and I think it reminded them of what they had been missing.
BRAD WHITFORD, Aerosmith guitarist: There was a hole, a vacancy that most of us weren’t even aware of until Stevie filled it in, completing the circle of greatness of Clapton, Hendrix, Bloomfield. It just made sense. It seemed like there was this big empty spot that his spirit filled. He came along at a time when we really needed him, and nobody knew it.
HUEY LEWIS, musician, leader of the chart-topping News: I followed the Fabulous Thunderbirds for years and thought Jimmie and Kim were terrific, so I was aware of Stevie Ray’s existence. But I had not heard him until I got a copy of Texas Flood in the Record Plant [in San Francisco]. I put it on and lost my mind, so excited that I busted into a Jefferson Starship session, yelling, “You gotta hear this shit!” I stopped their session and put on Texas Flood. A couple of them flipped, and the other five guys stared at me, like, “What the fuck is this and what are you doing?”
We had these picture postcards to send back to fan club people, and I wrote one to Stevie saying, “Great record. Keep up the great work!” and sent it to an address on the back of the album. When I met him, he thanked me and said it was like his eighth fan letter he received.
GIBBONS: The underground awareness of this guy from Texas ran rampant through some lofty realms of an inner circle of players. It did not take long to become an immediate admirer of the sounds he was putting down. When it finally got committed to wax, it was over. There wasn’t any denying that this guy Stevie Ray had arrived. The lid had been lifted, and the cat was out of the bag.
ANDREW LONG: I returned home to New York in the summer of ’83 and heard the DJ on WPLJ announce a new song by this hot new guitar player from Texas. I couldn’t believe “Pride and Joy” was blasting across the airwaves alongside Zeppelin, Allman Brothers, Springsteen, and Dire Straits. Here was this secret small local thing, the Antone’s blues world, being discovered by the whole world. Suddenly, kids I grew up with were saying to me, “Have you ever heard of this guitar player Stevie Ray Vaughan? He’s the best!” I just smiled and thought about all the times I watched him for hours on end from a few feet away.
MARK PROCT, Fabulous Thunderbirds / Jimmie Vaughan road manager and manager, 1981–1998: The T-Birds had been kings of the hill, touring all over with a great agent, with fans in Clapton, the Stones, Nick Lowe. Then Texas Flood took off, and Stevie became the big shot in town, surpassing the T-Birds, w
ho had no label at the time.
Stevie and the band were invited to play Tennis Rock Expo, a benefit at New York’s Pier 84 organized by John McEnroe and his tennis buddy Vitas Gerulaitis, on July 23, 1983. The event also featured Rush’s Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, Buddy Guy, Bruce Springsteen’s sax player, Clarence Clemons, and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Tom Hamilton. After the show, many of the artists, including Vaughan, Guy, and the tennis players, jammed in a studio.
“Stevie’s playing that day was phenomenal, so consistent and precise, on as high a level as I have ever seen,” McEnroe says. “We talked, and he asked what I thought about him leaving the Bowie tour. He said he was offered something like $500 a week, basically wondering why David Bowie was paying so little. But he still felt bad and worried that he might never make it after leaving such a big tour. I said, ‘I think you should do your own thing,’ because his brilliance was just so extraordinary.”
On August 27, Double Trouble started a two-week European tour at England’s Reading Festival. These would be Cutter Brandenburg’s final shows with the band.
BRANDENBURG: I couldn’t deal with us having worked as hard as we had just to see it all go down the hill for: drink that, snort this, smoke that. I also felt they were tired of me ragging on them, but I couldn’t stop. I was becoming disenchanted because I just knew this band was headed for a brick wall, and I wasn’t sure whether I could watch it happen.
LAYTON: Cutter was frustrated because people were drinking and doing drugs and the business was sideways, and there was all this stuff going on with Chesley and he wanted to go home. He freaked out in Germany. He could be unstable in his reaction to things, out of sheer frustration. He took some deli meat from a gig and shoved it in a hotel air-conditioning unit and almost got us kicked out. And we were like, “What is wrong with you?” And he’s ranting, “This is bullshit! You guys are out of control.”
BRANDENBURG: When we got to the last show in Amsterdam, I was down. I didn’t want to go out at all, and Whipper told me to relax, that everything would be okay. But I knew it wasn’t okay, and I wasn’t relaxing. I was making a decision that I couldn’t do it anymore. He thought that we needed to hug and make up and go on, but it was more than that; it was all about Stevie and Tommy continuing to get high and me not wanting to watch these guys die on the road. I had decided this was my last show, and I was going back to Texas to be a dad. It was one of the hardest decisions of my life, and also one of the easiest.
OPPERMAN: There was an incident involving Lenny that precipitated Cutter quitting. She got into Cutter’s house while he was out on the road with the band, and started digging through his paperwork; she got it in her mind that Cutter was taking advantage of Stevie. It was ridiculous—that was the last thing Cutter would ever, ever do. When I first met Stevie, Cutter was supporting him financially, and he loved Stevie like his own son.
Lenny convinced Stevie to confront Cutter, whose response was, “If you think that is what’s going on, then I quit.”
BRANDENBURG: I was empty and out of gas. I cried through most of the Amsterdam show, thinking, “This is it.” The next day at the airport, I told everyone with tears in my eyes, “It’s time for me to quit. I’m not a yes-man, and I can’t watch you guys kill yourselves.” Chesley said, “Cutter, I am shocked, I am ashamed, and I am hurt.” Stevie said, “It goes two ways. You’ve been a jerk, too.” And I thought, “You’re right,” and let it go. On the plane, I told Chris and Tommy I was sorry that it worked out that way and that I hoped they’d still honor the pledge of points on the record if it took off, which I felt I had earned. Stevie was still very high from everything he had gotten in Amsterdam when he sat down next to me, and I said, “I’m sorry about the way things happened.” He said, “Man, I am, too.” I said, “It’s time for me to go, Stevie, I want to be a dad, and I’m worried about you guys.” He said, “Cee, I understand. I love you.” And I said, “I love you, too.”
LAYTON: We returned to America for three weeks of touring on the Eastern Seaboard. We landed at JFK, and as we were pulling up to the gate, I heard the stewardess yelling, “Sir, you have to be in your seat!” I look up and see Cutter coming down the aisle, his arms filled with everything from his briefcase, which he threw at me and said, “Here. I guess you’re the new road manager.” Pens and pencils and rulers and receipt books and itineraries fell on my lap. He got off the plane, and I didn’t see him again for years.
BRANDENBURG: At the airport, everyone was running around without a road manager. I got in a cab and saw Chesley going in circles, Stevie carrying two guitars, Whipper dragging his cymbal bag, and Tommy and Byron [Barr, crew member] lugging all this luggage. Chesley was waving his arms around because they were going the wrong way. I looked back from my cab with tears in my eyes, seeing their confusion. Stevie and I never really spoke again. Many people would ask him where I was, and he would simply say, “He couldn’t stand the weather.” It has always been hard for me to listen to that song because it was about me.
A couple of weeks later, I took all the money and receipts from Europe to Edi Johnson, who was shocked at what was going on. I was out of money, and she called Stevie, who told her to pay me for another couple of weeks. He was a great friend, kind enough to give me a month’s severance pay. We were in a weird place, and I was not going to be able to watch them go where I saw them headed. It actually took longer than I thought it would for the drug and alcohol abuse to catch up with them.
OPPERMAN: I had quit working for them right before they recorded Texas Flood because Stevie kept getting worse, and after ten years of living that lifestyle, I did not want to go down that path again. I’d go check on him in the dressing room ten minutes before we hit, and he’d shut the door because he was waiting for his connection to show up. I watched the most humble, nice guy simply become a less nice person as he got deeper into drugs. We were all doing it, and I had to get away. We all loved each other like brothers and parted as good friends.
EDI JOHNSON: When he finally had some money, I took him to the bank to cash a check for $5,000 so he could buy his Caprice convertible. He asked me to stop on the way to pick up the car so he could grab a six-pack. We pulled into a shop, and he asked me for five dollars—with $5,000 in an envelope in his pocket!
After six months of rigorous touring behind Texas Flood, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble joined the Moody Blues national tour, an odd billing that the group embraced. Starting October 17 at the Hartford Civic Center, they opened twenty-eight arena shows for the band, who were still riding high on their 1981 number one album, Long Distance Voyager.
HODGES: The Moody Blues tour was not an obvious move, and there was pushback at the label and from people doubting if Stevie could command a large stage, but Chesley was a creative thinker, and he and Stevie got it. I believed Stevie had a captivating magnetism that commanded attention and that the Moody Blues shared fans with Eric Clapton, who would be Stevie fans if they saw him. It was hard to see him walk onstage with a guitar and not know you were seeing something unique.
LAYTON: Alex said, “There’s been an offer, and it’s gonna seem strange, but don’t be hasty.” The Moody Blues felt all wrong, and he made the point that their fans weren’t that different from ours in terms of age group and musical tastes, and he was right; their audience loved us!
SHANNON: We were playing big arenas full of people who didn’t know who we were, and we just wiped them out. It was our first time to experience a big crowd and big stage together, and we kicked ass, getting standing ovations. Glorious is the best word to describe that tour, which was our introduction to working up a big stage show, and it fit like a glove. The sound rang through those big coliseums like a monster.
ANN WILEY: Martha and I were Steve and Jim’s biggest fans, so we went together to see them play whenever we could. When Steve opened for the Moody Blues [November 4, 1983, Reunion Arena in Dallas], that was a big night for the family. Martha got so many of us together to go to that show—almost
all of the Cooks were there, at least a dozen of us altogether. It was so exciting to see Steve playing a big show like that.
GARY WILEY: Stevie gave us free seats way up high, and before he started playing, he said, “My family’s here tonight!” He asked us to stand, pointed up, and said, “That’s my family!” They put the spotlight on us and everything.
We all loved Steve dearly, but we knew he had a drug problem. We went backstage, and he was in need of a fix. We were talking, just enjoying company, but he was not himself, looking very tired and worn out. Somebody came and visited him and brought him something to pep him up. I had to hold my brother Mark back, because we knew what was going on, and his instinct was to protect Steve. After that, Steve was “up” again. Our mothers and the older family members did not see it, but we did, and we were concerned.
BENSON: I went over to see Stevie in Travis Heights, where he and Lenny were living, and they were strung out really badly. I was kind of shocked because Stevie was saying shit that didn’t make sense. We went to dinner with Lenny’s mom and grandma at the Big Wheel Café, and every fifteen minutes they’d go into the bathroom and hit it up, and I was sitting there with Mom and Grandma, who knew something was off.
On December 4, 1983, at the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco, Stevie received three awards from Guitar Player magazine: Best New Talent, Best New Electric Blues Guitar Player, and Best Guitar Album. He flew from there to Hamilton, Ontario, to record the In Session TV show with Albert King. Stevie and Albert had continued their relationship since their first meeting. At least once, King was told that Stevie Ray Vaughan was in the house and would be sitting in, only to proclaim, “No he’s not!” When Vaughan showed up and King saw him, King lit up, asking, “Why didn’t you tell me it was Little Stevie?”
