by Alan Paul
When I got a new start with Stevie, the drugs were back, too, and it worked again for a while. I felt that they helped me open up more, to drown out the pain that got in the way of reaching what I wanted to reach. We needed a certain amount of intake of drinks and cocaine to feel right. But that amount changes, until finally, no matter how much you do, you can’t get back to that place. It doesn’t work anymore.
As the drug use continued to escalate and Stevie became ever more fragile, his relationship with Lenny was becoming even more volatile. Things between them could explode anytime on the turn of a dime.
SHANNON: Stevie and Lenny loved each other very much, but the relationship got so sick because they both became irrational and paranoid due to cocaine and alcohol abuse. Anytime Stevie was afraid to go home, he’d pick me up, we’d go out there, and she’d start swearing at him, throwing shit, swinging at him, and I’d get between them. The relationship had become so volatile that anything could set them off. Had they been clean and sober, maybe they could have worked through their problems.
BRANDENBURG: Things got bad because they both were too high; it’s a love that would have never died. She looked out for him and understood music and some of the realities better than he did, and I always thought they were meant for each other. When the drugs got involved, they were not able to find that love and hold on.
SHANNON: This went on so long because deep down inside they loved each other. The other side of Lenny being difficult is she was very protective of Stevie and would get irate if she thought someone was fucking him around, and she would jump on him for not defending himself. In spite of it all, I have nothing but good thoughts for Lenny.
EDI JOHNSON: Stevie would sometimes call me when he was troubled, maybe because I was more available than anyone else or he didn’t want anyone else to know what was going on. This one time, I could hear Lenny screaming and making all this noise, and I asked what was going on and he goes, “She’s breaking my record collection.” I said, “Don’t let her do that!” He had a record collection to die for, including 78s of blues greats, and he loved it so much. I said, “Stevie, you’ve got to stop her and get away from that. You can’t have that kind of conflict in your life.” How do you react when you see something like that happening to someone you care about? I couldn’t get close to Lenny, who was causing Stevie so much pain.
OPPERMAN: The most disturbing times were when we’d pick Stevie up at his house and there’d be three or four cars there, Stevie’s and Lenny’s friends. When we came back a few days later, the cars would still be there, unmoved. Nothing was ever said, but it was the elephant in the room; all of those people had been in there doing drugs nonstop for days on end. It was clear as soon as we pulled up that Stevie was really unhappy to see that. He’d just grab his stuff and go in, without saying anything. My heart went out to him.
SHANNON: One day, Stevie, Lenny, and I were on our way back home from the airport when she blew a fuse over some little comment Stevie made. She was screaming, getting more and more mad, with both of us telling her to calm down. Finally, she started to crawl out the back window right in the middle of town! Stevie braked, and we were trying to grab her, but she squirmed out the window and was screamin’ at the car, then took off running. Stevie and I started circling the block, looking for her, with me saying, “Stevie, the cops are going to come! We got to go.” I had a little vial with some powder in it, which I threw away, but Stevie kept saying, “Let me try one more trip around.”
Sure enough, cop cars came from four different sides with guns drawn. Someone probably called the police thinking we’d kidnapped her or something. A big, black cop found this little vial of cocaine on Stevie and took him into a park for a fatherly lecture: “What are you fuckin’ up like this for? You got too many people looking up to you to be doing this!” He took the cocaine from Stevie and let us go.
DUCKWORTH: Stevie’s deepening drug problems had a lot to do with his marital problems. He used a lot but was highly functional for years—and then he wasn’t. It was all catching up with him, but he was also getting distressed about his marriage, becoming more emotionally fragile at the same time he was becoming more physically fragile. He was gone for months at a time, he and Lenny were both doing a lot of drugs and doing things married people shouldn’t do. Every phone conversation became fraught and filled with screaming and yelling. There was a lot of fire in the air.
CONNIE VAUGHAN: He had been hitting everything hard for years, and I think his body just fell apart. I just know Stevie and Lenny were not getting along, and it’s because they we’re both so fucked up.
DUCKWORTH: On the road, Stevie asked me to take Lenny’s calls and say he couldn’t talk, and she got really angry. All of a sudden, Lenny wasn’t my friend anymore and started saying horrible things about me because I wasn’t letting her talk to her husband—because he was telling me he didn’t want to. He told me he just couldn’t do it anymore. He was getting really weak and couldn’t deal with the fighting.
BENSON: I was really worried. He had the means to get all the coke he wanted, and that’s dangerous. I just knew that eventually he would either get busted, go crazy, or die. And I cared a lot, because I loved the guy. He had such a great heart, which was always visible, even at his worst.
On June 2, Stevie sat in with Jimmie and the T-Birds at Austin’s Riverfest. Michael Corcoran wrote in The Dallas Observer that Stevie “emerged gingerly from a big, black limo and used a silver-tipped cane to pick his way to the side of the stage. His thirty-one years had been multiplied like dog years and almost suddenly he was old, frail and out of breath. His skin was gray and one size too big. You didn’t need a doctor to diagnose the obvious: Stevie Ray Vaughan was dying.”
Corcoran went on to note that as shaky as Stevie looked, once the song kicked off, he seemed “almost miraculously … to come back to life.” It was a tenuous way to approach performances, and recording a live album became a far more difficult proposition than anyone had imagined. Vaughan set up some special performances, starting at the Austin Opera House, July 17–18, 1986. Putting these shows under a microscope revealed some ugly truths.
FREEMAN: I was at the Opera House gigs and was very disturbed by what I saw. It was a musical mess; they would go into these chaotic jams with no control. I hadn’t seen them in a while and didn’t know what was going on, but I was concerned.
SUBLETT: I was very worried about him. I was supposed to play on these shows, and it was a complete debacle. I didn’t even have a monitor, I couldn’t hear a note I played, I’m like a fly on the ocean being tossed around, just completely winging it, and we’re supposed to be recording a live album. It was insane and over the top, not a situation where you could go, “Hey, I’m a saxophone player, and I need to hear myself.” That kind of thing was just clearly a waste of time. In retrospect, all of us could have been in better shape, but Stevie and Tommy were so far gone.
SHANNON: That was the period when the drug use really started to get to us. And it happened fast, like a cold northern air blowing in on a hot day, and we looked at each other and realized, “Something bad is wrong here.” I remember sitting backstage telling Alex [Hodges], “Stevie and I are headed for a brick wall.” We all saw it coming, because we were really getting pathetic, but neither of us could stop—and we tried.
WYNANS: There was a dark period and a light period of my time with Stevie. The shows at the Opera House were probably the darkest days.
FREEMAN: The music was starting to go off the rails anyhow. It had gotten to just being guitar, guitar, guitar without much focus, but this was a new level of out of control. Joe and I were united in being disturbed by what we were hearing.
SUBLETT: I felt like I’d lost Stevie. He was still alive, but the guy that I knew was gone; it was a shell that looked like him but wasn’t him. I couldn’t talk directly to him and be honest. Anyone in that state is very distracted. This was a guy who barely knows I’m here.
CLARK: The thing is, when yo
u’re out on the road, playing for hundreds of people, they’re still strangers, and the routine of going from one gig to another, waking up in a hotel, and trying to figure out where you are and what you’re gonna do, it puts a toll on a human being’s spirit. And you’re doing this just to play music. I think those things were getting to him.
“I had been trying to pull myself up by the bootstraps, but they were broken,” Stevie told Guitar World in 1988. “I would wake up and guzzle something just to get rid of the pain I was feeling. Whiskey, beer, vodka, whatever was handy. It got to the point where if I tried to say hi to somebody, I would just fall apart crying. It was like solid doom.”
The day after the Opera House shows, Double Trouble recorded their performance at Dallas’s Starfest at the Park Central Amphitheater. Following the show, they attended a pre-opening VIP party at the Dallas Hard Rock Cafe, along with Dan Aykroyd and some other celebrities. Hard Rock owner Isaac Tigrett had lured Stevie to the event with the promise of checking out Jimi Hendrix’s Gibson Flying V.
Vaughan happily posed with the guitar, and, apparently mistaking the offer to use it on a future recording session for a gift, he asked for the case so he could take the guitar with him. He became incensed when he realized that the offer was to lend it to him in the future, not give it to him that night. “Stevie really thought it was a gift, and he was fuming,” says Layton. “He gave the guitar back and split.”
The next week, when the band began working on selecting tracks, mixing, and mastering the material from the Austin and Dallas shows at Los Angeles’s Record Plant, they quickly had to face reality: the music was just not up to snuff. Stevie wanted to fix some vocals and guitar lines, but once they started doing punch-ins, they kept going. It became evident that a band long-renowned for its live performances was no longer capable of playing consistent shows—and often not even consistent-sounding songs within any given show. Listening intimately to the tapes forced them to confront these hard truths.
SRV: God, I wasn’t in very good shape when we recorded that. At the time, I didn’t realize how bad of shape I was in. There were more fix-it jobs done than I would have liked.
SHANNON: There were a lot of things we didn’t like that we thought we could fix.
WYNANS: It started with trying to put in new vocals, then new guitars over existing tracks.
LAYTON: We hauled those tapes all over the country, working on them whenever and wherever we could, booking time in different studios to replace parts. It just got silly.
SHANNON: Stevie got creative and ended up getting carried away, trying to do too much. And there began the saga. We began redoing guitar tracks and vocals, then we got into redoing bass lines … and as these were live recordings, there was a lot of bleed between the tracks, which made it a nightmare!
LAYTON: The drum tracks sounded horrible, so we ended up at Stevie Wonder’s LA studio [Wonderland] with me trying to overdub entirely new drum tracks. We took all the drums off the live tracks, so we had all of the tracks except the drums. Then I had to try to play along with these tracks. It sounded like horseshit.
WYNANS: It was ridiculous!
SHANNON: It was insanity.
WYNANS: It was a miracle that we ended up with anything listenable. We all really wanted that live record to be a winner, but it was not one of our finest hours.
LAYTON: We were just trudging along, wondering if we would make it until the afternoon. It was like being in the middle of the desert wondering if the next step would be the one where we just fell over and died.
FREEMAN: I happened to be recording my second album when they came into the same studio to record part of that so-called live album. I got word that Tommy stomped off after a big blowout with Stevie and became very concerned. It was an indicator that the thing was off the rails because they loved each other so much. Pals can have trouble, but it was obvious that there was something deeply, profoundly wrong, and everyone who cared about these guys was concerned.
LAYTON: Stevie got mad at me for saying in an interview after Live Alive was released that it was horrible, but it just wasn’t very good—and it wasn’t really live.
SHANNON: He was defensive about that record.
SRV: “Texas Flood” is good … that was from the [1985] Montreux Jazz Festival, when we felt good about what we were doing. Overall, there were some good nights and some good gigs, but [Live Alive] was more haphazard than we would have liked.
SHANNON: Live Alive is a good example of the drugs not working anymore. I can see that happening all through that record. The best tracks were from Montreux, which was a year earlier.
LAYTON: I just don’t think it’s a great record. We basically played live on our studio records anyhow. Part of it is just listening and thinking, “I know we can do better than that.” At some point, you’re chasing your tail. By the time of Live Alive, we were about as squashed as we could get.
SRV: Some of the gigs were okay, but some of them sound like they were the work of half-dead people. Of course, my thinking [at the time] was, “Boy, doesn’t that sound good?” And there were some great notes that came out, but I just wasn’t in control; nobody was. We were all exhausted.
20
WALKING THE TIGHTROPE
Despite their increasingly frazzled state, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble continued to tour relentlessly even as they were attempting to finish recording, mixing, and mastering Live Alive. The strain was showing on Stevie, which anyone who was really paying attention was sure to notice.
“Stevie did things that would kill a normal person, and there was no secret about it,” says Austin singer and songwriter Bill Carter.
Stevie did little to hide his increasing drug use. When Bill Bentley interviewed him in a Los Angeles hotel room, Stevie looked like he had been up for a few days. He poured himself a full glass of Crown Royal and then dissolved a package of cocaine in it and drank it all down. When Bentley asked him what he was doing, he said, “I’m having trouble with my nose, and I want to get high.”
Stevie began to have stomach problems, likely caused by drinking cocaine, though, as Layton notes, “It’s not like Stevie went to a doctor who told him he had an ulcer from drinking cocaine. But he thought that he could get the high he felt he needed by dropping a gram into a shot of Crown Royal. He said he got the idea from George Jones. Talk about mentorship!”
In the midst of this madness, Stevie walked offstage at the Saratoga (NY) Performing Arts Center on August 24 and learned that his father, who had been in declining health, had collapsed and was in a Dallas hospital. He flew back to be with his family.
On August 26, Stevie and the band flew to Memphis to perform at the Orpheum Theatre as part of the American Caravan TV show with Lonnie Mack, a show he felt obligated to make. Vaughan performed well, particularly with Mack, but appeared gaunt, his eyes sometimes looking blankly out over the crowd. During his regular rap in the middle of “Life Without You,” he appeared to be on the verge of tears. He said, in part, “You know, it’s a very strong day today … a very good day for all of us to remember a few things … You better pass around as much love as you can in your lifetime. That’s all we really have to give or accept.”
The next day, August 27, 1986, Jimmie Lee “Big Jim” Vaughan died at age sixty-four from complications of asbestosis. He also had Parkinson’s disease and had been using a wheelchair for some time. Stevie flew home from Memphis to join his family. Jimmie, Connie, and Stevie spent the night before the funeral in their childhood home together with Martha.
On August 29, Mr. Vaughan was buried in Dallas, and immediately after the funeral, Stevie and the band went straight to the airport and boarded a Learjet to fly to Montreal for a show at Montreal’s Jarry Park, where he played a two-hour show without mentioning his father until the encore, when he simply said, “This one’s for you, Dad.”
“There are no words for the mood backstage that day,” says James Rowen, a Canadian A&R representative. “I saw Stevie well over
twenty times, and I may have seen him play better, but I don’t know if he ever came close emotionally. He was playing for Dad, and I don’t think he even knew that the crowd was there. He was deep into himself on guitar, stretching out. And although he always had plenty of emotion in his playing, this was an entirely different level. This is hard to imagine, but true. It was an evening I will never forget and I still get a similar feeling just thinking about it.”
Two weeks later, on September 12, 1986, the band started a European tour in Copenhagen. The bottom was about to fall out, starting on September 24, the second of two nights at L’Olympia in Paris.
WYNANS: Paris was a low point.
SHANNON: We’d really reached bottom. We played “Tin Pan Alley” for like fifteen minutes …
LAYTON: And Reese got up and walked off.
SHANNON: Stevie got stuck in the wrong key and just kept playing. I was thinking, God, that is not like Stevie at all. People in the audience were getting pissed off.
LAYTON: Stevie was playing perfectly in time on the wrong beat. He drifted off, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
On September 28, four days after the show in Paris, Double Trouble performed in Ludwigshafen, Germany.
LAYTON: After the show, Stevie and I left the hotel together to get a drink, but everything was closed. We were walking around looking for a place, and he said, “Goddamn, I need a fucking drink.” I said, “No, you don’t,” because he was feeling sick to his stomach. He started to throw up, and blood came up. And he still kept saying that he needed a drink. I told him he shouldn’t, and he yelled at me, “Goddamn it! I don’t need a fucking drink, but I need a fucking drink!” I said, “Man, let’s go back to the hotel.” He laid down on his bed, and I called Tommy.
SHANNON: Stevie and I always had adjoining rooms and left the door open so it was like one big room. I was lying on my bed sick as a dog and could see Stevie rolling around on his bed, mumbling shit and sticking his head over the side and vomiting blood onto the floor and himself, too weak to get up and walk to the bathroom. There wasn’t much I could to do to help him because I was so sick myself, but I went over and he was gray, and the throw-up all over; his chest was a big pile of blood. We were very scared.
