by Alan Paul
SKIP RICKERT, Double Trouble tour manager, 1986–1990: During the interview process, Alex explained that Stevie was just coming out of rehab and was going to be extremely fragile. So I boned up on the newly recovered, which was not something I had a lot of experience with. I just approached it with empathy and a very big, open heart. Stevie was fragile, there’s no question. We maintained a rigorous touring schedule, and in my early days, he needed a lot of attention.
SHANNON: In sobriety, Stevie became more dedicated to the spiritual pursuits that he’d always been interested in. For the first time, he knew what he had to do, and he got the chance to help other people, something he had always wanted to do. He didn’t become Superman, though; we were both struggling. He was like a baby taking its first steps.
JOE PERRY, Aerosmith guitarist: I saw him at the Orpheum Theatre [Boston, November 23–24, 1986], and he sounded absolutely phenomenal. Brad [Whitford] and I were in the fifth row right in front of his amps—the Dumble, the Marshalls, and the Fenders—with the plexiglass wall in front of them. I was blown away. I knew right then that he was going to go down in history.
ANDY ALEDORT, coauthor: The first time I met Stevie was to interview him before his December 2, 1986, show at the Mid-Hudson Civic Center in Poughkeepsie, New York. I had no knowledge of the severe drug and alcohol addiction that nearly took his life; it had been kept very quiet. It had only been two weeks since Stevie left the Charter Peachford rehabilitation facility in Atlanta. The Poughkeepsie performance was Stevie’s eighth dry show.
The backstage vibe was very tense, which was very confusing at the time. Skip Rickert was barking orders at everyone. When I sat down with Stevie, he was generally in good spirits, though his energy level was very low. He was extremely pale and did not look well. But once we got going, and played some guitars together, he brightened up and became more comfortable. He was quiet and thoughtful and, at times, startlingly candid.
During the In Step interview, 6-23-89, at Epic Records, NYC. (Andy Aledort)
WYNANS: When we got back together, I was surprised and very happy that he held the AA thing so closely and that things had changed as much as they did. He became completely immersed in the program, and he loved it. He read the twelve-step book every day on the bus, along with Tom, Bill, and René. Every night, he would either go to a group meeting in the town we were in, or there would be a meeting backstage. He felt that he had found the answer. He was completely comfortable with the program and with having people around that he could talk about these issues with. He was very inspired and motivated.
LAYTON: We had a lot of resources and people helping us in our sobriety. They did not do things for us; they helped us do those things for ourselves. They gave us the hand we needed to make sense of everything, and there was a lot of work to be done. A lot of reconciling and cleaning up wreckage, and making amends.
KIRK WEST, photographer, Allman Brothers Band’s “Tour Mystic”: I was on the road shooting pictures of the Gregg Allman Band when they did two weeks opening for Stevie [June 7–21, 1987]. I was in the program, as was Bud Snyder, Gregg’s soundman, and Gregg was trying hard at the time. We were really happy to have daily meetings with Stevie, Tommy, and several of their crew guys. Stevie’s dedication was impossible to miss and felt totally sincere. Gregg came to five or six of the meetings and seemed, for the time, inspired by Stevie’s example.
GREGG ALLMAN, Allman Brothers Band founding singer, keyboard player; died 2017: Stevie was a dear friend of mine. We had the same manager for a while and did many tours together and became real close. I’m surprised we never recorded together and wish we had. He was very insecure about his singing, and I told him, “Just walk out in the woods, point your head up towards the gods, and sing to them. And fuck anybody who don’t like it!” It must have took because he sang pretty damn good.
WARREN HAYNES: I saw Stevie with Gregg and also with the T-Birds and B. B. King. The promoter wanted Stevie to close, but he said, “B. B. King is closing the show.” Seeing Stevie live was a visual enhancement of what I’d been hearing on his records. The intensity in his whole body resonated with what he was feeling and playing. He never slacked off for a moment.
SHANNON: There was an unspoken rule that when we got onstage, everyone would put every ounce of life into what we were doing. Nothing less was acceptable. To slack off after all that we had been through would have been like spitting on God!
RICKERT: Things getting better for them has to be largely attributed to Stevie getting clean and everyone changing their lifestyle. Chris and Tommy were his best friends. They were more like a family than a band. These guys slept on each other’s couches when they were coming up, and it was such a pleasure to watch them interact with each other and with anyone from that close group of twenty to thirty Austin musicians.
HARVEY LEEDS: After he cleaned up, he was a 100 percent different person. Everyone in recovery is different. Some people don’t have a problem if there’s alcohol at a table, but Stevie wasn’t like that. I did a radio dinner with him at an Italian restaurant in Boston, and someone ordered rum cake for dessert, and I went over and said, “No alcohol allowed. Pick another dessert.” That’s how meticulous Stevie was. He was very, very serious about his rehab. Stevie carried around two book bags like a doctor would carry, filled with his recovery books.
WYNANS: Everything changed. They got rid of all the nonsense and any distractions, and it became a completely different thing. We weren’t about the party as much as we were about the music. It was fun to play again!
RICKERT: There simply is a lot of mayhem and chaos that comes with being drunk or high. When I arrived, there wasn’t any of that. Everyone changed their lifestyle. I was a new person, and I was very organized and things were done well. We were running on time and schedule. It has a lot do with Alex, too; he demanded it be run up to his specifications, and he laid out how he wanted things done. Stevie and I got pretty darn close quickly, and he was delightful.
DR. JOHN: Even at his worst, you’d see a glimmer of hipness coming through Stevie. It started really shining steady after he got clean. He got downright amazing.
RAITT: He was probably the most fierce of the bluesmen I’ve ever heard. He had a furnace in his heart, and was the epitome of all that is dark and sexy, brooding and passionate. The most extreme emotions of the blues and of life were in every breath he took. And to find out that he could maintain that while sober was just a revelation. If anything, he was covering more emotions. He was playing as if his life depended on it, and it did.
PERRY: Like Hendrix, Stevie was a great technical player who took it to an entirely different level. He played with so much assuredness that it was impossible to imagine him not playing on that incredibly high level. It’s like he was born with the guitar in his hand. He had an aura of complete control at all times. Stevie had that coolness and self-confidence; you could tell by just the way he moved that he was totally immersed in playing, which is a really rare quality.
WYNANS: Stevie was real nervous about playing sober, but we hit the stage and it was just magical. Within a few nights, he completely hit his stride and was playing better than any of us had ever heard him. He was playing the way he always wanted to and was just ecstatic. Every song was exciting, and ideas were constantly popping up and flowering everywhere. The shows became more cohesive and more energized and gained momentum. They just got better and better with time.
RAITT: Having gone through the process, I understand how it feels to realize that the ecstatic, transcendent feelings music brings you have nothing to do with being loaded—which is what you think when you are loaded all the time. To realize that it is in fact the music which gives you that feeling is revelatory. The other twenty-two hours a day can be really difficult, but the time onstage just gets better and better.
SRV: The music has become really important [since being sober]. Music is a way to reach out and hold on to one another in a really healthy way. It’s helped me to open up more and
take a chance on loving people. It’s a whole new world for me. Left to my own devices, I would have killed myself, however slowly or whatever. But for some reason, I’m not dead.
WYNANS: He had every bit as much fire, and the direction was more true. Before, he was searching for the place to go, and now he knew just where to go and how to get there. We realized that things could have gone a lot worse, and it felt like a privilege that we survived and were still making music together. We all appreciated every note on every night.
HODGES: The things we did to keep Stevie clean were going to happen regardless, but it was easier having at least three people in the program. We just didn’t need to have booze around—and regardless of what they might have called themselves, we didn’t need people whose first or second jobs were selling drugs. They could be local crew, the photographer you see at every show, or the guy you don’t know what he does but he keeps popping up. All those people went away. You’re not always sure where the danger lurks, but when we weren’t buying, the whole scene changed.
RICHARD LUCKETT, SRV merchandise manager, 1989–90: Stevie said, “I never want to see a pre-rehab image of me on a piece of merchandise. You just tell your art director that I forbid it.”
HODGES: He has a cigarette in his mouth on the cover of Soul to Soul. When we did a songbook deal, we had them take that cigarette out because it really bothered him. Stevie was very aware of his sobriety and the image he projected—and it wasn’t a dangling cigarette. He was very conscious of his good health.
LAYTON: We filmed those nights at the Opera House where we were trying to record Live Alive—a four-camera, one-inch video shoot. When Stevie saw it after he’d become sober, he said, “Oh, God, I look like shit!”
SHANNON: I was feeling really good in sobriety for about four and a half months, when I was suddenly confronted with clinical depression, which became another mountain to climb. Ironically, it was actually much worse than anything I experienced from drug and alcohol abuse. There I was, clean and sober, thinking, “Wait a minute! This isn’t supposed to happen!”
LAYTON: We played at a place in Phoenix with a revolving stage [Celebrity Theater, May 22, 1987], and Tommy was hiding behind the dressing room door. It was time to go on, and we were going, “Where’s Tommy?”
SHANNON: I looked out through the curtains, saw thousands of people out there, and freaked out!
LAYTON: He said, “I’m too afraid to go out there.” This gets to the profound fear at the root of the problem: the dysfunction that’s only been exacerbated by drug addiction and alcohol abuse for all those years. Fear of life itself. The illness is talking to you, saying, “You’re no good anymore.” Drugs and alcohol can initially help release your inhibitions, and it’s really fun … until it’s horrendous. You reach an incomprehensible demoralization. A black hole of existence. If you survive, which is a real gift, you recognize when the day of reckoning is upon you. You just cannot live another day using drugs.
SRV: The hardest thing to deal with isn’t what I thought it would be. I thought the hardest thing would be, “Oh, God, now I’m straight—can I still play?” That had nothing to do with it. The hardest part is trying to keep things in perspective. I found out that the biggest problem that I had was self-centeredness and ego. That’s really what addiction seems to boil down to. To keep that part of yourself under control while everybody’s telling you how great you are is quite a task.
RICKERT: I never saw a guy work a program as hard as Stevie did. He had notes and little sayings that he would jot down falling out of his pockets, and his big book was tattered and highlighted and yellowed. I probably went to a hundred meetings with him on tour. We had a directory and references, and we took advantage of all of them and found meetings all over the country. We’d call them to assure the time, get cabs, or walk over. He was very dedicated to it. After a while, he would take care of it himself; he’d just ask me to help get a cab, and off he’d go.
WYNANS: He and Tommy and the other people who had straightened up would have long conversations about the different steps.
SRV: Finding some kind of perspective is the hardest part, because I want to stay alive, and I want to stay as healthy as possible and grow in that way. My best thinking just about killed me, okay? Now, more so than ever, if I don’t play the best that I possibly can—and really try to play better than I think I can—then I’ve wasted it. ’Cause I’m playing on borrowed time. Now I have a new chance.
HUEY LEWIS: Stevie’s music was far more important than whatever substances he was taking. He was gonna play guitar and sing and write, so when it got to the point where that shit was interfering, the music had to win out. He was a true artist and a tough, disciplined guy, which you have to be to get that good. He was a star, and I had to believe he had enough sense of himself to withstand all that—and he did.
LEEDS: Even when Stevie had his issues, there was never any drama. He seemed like a guy who wanted to be left alone. He was quiet and shy offstage, then would walk out and become a full-on guitar hero, only to go back into his shell afterwards. He was sweet and easy to deal with but not really there with you. He was always the guy behind shades, with the hat on. Now, all of a sudden, the hat’s off, the glasses are off, he’s awake, and it’s like, “Wow, I never met this guy before.” There was now a guy smiling and talking to you. It was like meeting someone for the first time after knowing him for years.
WYNANS: A lot of people talked about getting Stevie back, but I never knew him another way, so it was like meeting an entirely different person—a more quiet, introspective guy, but one who was just as passionate and fired up about music. Maybe even more so.
SRV: It is getting a lot easier, in some ways. However, every time I think I’ve learned something, I realize that I’ve just uncovered a big hole! A big empty spot, or one that’s going, “ARGHHH!”
LAPIDUS: There was such a dramatic transition. Some of that angry person was gone, but he would still stand up for what he believed in. I think that’s a really important part of his personality. He was so sweet and kind, but he also maintained his integrity. If he heard someone make a racist joke, he’d call them on it, and I heard him do it more than once. He’d always say, “I can’t respect anyone if they don’t respect me.”
FREEMAN: I was at one of his first gigs after he got sober, and it was the most cohesive, enjoyable show I had ever seen him perform. It was just night and day compared to that thing at the Opera House the previous year. That gig was really, really good, and I was really happy for him and excited to see what he would do next.
DR. JOHN: I saw an absolutely phenomenal consistency in his playing after he got clean. It was so pure and flowing, like water through an open tap.
B. B. KING: The ideas continuously flowed through Stevie. I don’t have that, and not many people do. But Stevie had it, in a way that reminded me of Charlie Parker or Charlie Christian. Most of us play maybe twelve original bars when we solo, then it’s all repeats, but not with him. The more he played, the better he’d get. And his execution was flawless, but no matter how fast he played, he never lost that feel. I would say you could feel his soul in his playing. I know I did. His guitar was his means of speech, and he spoke beautifully.
CLARK: Music came through the top of his head, and he just played it.
SUBLETT: We weren’t the kind of guys to blow smoke up each other’s butt. It was understood that we could play, so we didn’t praise each other all the time. But one night, he just killed me, and I asked him how he can keep playing solo after solo and never run out of ideas, and he said, “Joe, every time I play guitar, it’s like I’m breaking out of jail.” He was saying that there are no half measures. A lot of people never reach that point where they are beyond being analytical.
EDI JOHNSON: When you saw Stevie onstage, that was the real Stevie.
SRV: One thing I’ve noticed [after getting sober] is that songs I used to sing at people, I should have been singing at myself. At least I think that way. I
hear the words more now, and different songs mean different things than I used to think they meant, too. To put it mildly, a lot of blues tunes have to do with resentments, big-time!
Take “Cold Shot.” I used to sing that at certain women that I’ve been involved with over the years. Even though I didn’t write it, I had in my head the way I related to it. Since I sobered up, I realized that I left; I was the one who gave the cold shot. And it hurts when you realize that you’ve hurt somebody, as opposed to, all this time, you’ve been telling yourself how bad they’d hurt you. A lot of times, if I stop and look at it, those words could really be telling me that I hurt myself. There are also other songs that are kinder than I thought. They make me feel better than I knew.
LAYTON: After Stevie nearly died, through our instincts, our willpower, and the fact that we all had shaped up, we were able to put our lives back together in a more structured way that allowed us to open up again. Once again, we could grab ahold of that spiritual well to draw from. Following the ordeal of ’86, we were headed towards great places again and coming back to the place where inspiration would fill our lives. We had come through hell, and we were finally back to our fighting weight. We were rested, energized, in shape, and ready to play better than ever. At that point, we discovered that some things were better than they had ever been.
WYNANS: We’d get on the bus after a gig and unwind and sometimes listen to the show and discuss how it was. Then Stevie would often want to put on a video of a legend like Albert Collins or Muddy Waters. That part wasn’t that different than before, but there was so much more clarity. And in the morning, he would be up reading his twelve-step book. He was still passionate about the music, but now he was also passionate about sobriety, about Janna, and about his relationship with his brother and his family. I think he became even more of a family guy.
