by Alan Paul
Stevie wrote or cowrote with Doyle Bramhall six of the album’s ten tracks, which were rounded out by such blues staples as Buddy Guy’s “Leave My Little Girl Alone,” Howlin’ Wolf’s “Love Me Darlin’,” and Willie Dixon’s “Let Me Love You Baby.” The disc closes with the Stevie-penned instrumental masterpiece “Riviera Paradise.”
WYNANS: Everyone was so excited. Every track seemed to jump off the record. Radio picked up a song or two. We knew we created the music that everyone in the public and even in the band had been waiting to hear. We thought it was a step up, grounded in the blues but not as traditional and more accessible without being calculating at all. I thought there was some really good songwriting on In Step as well. It was probably our masterpiece.
SHANNON: Back on the road, Stevie was so great, it was just frightening.
LAYTON: Everyone even quit smoking, and it was quite a switch from just a couple of years earlier. Things were starting to get really good.
RICKERT: We had a surge in attendance. In Step was fresh and new, and the label was putting money into marketing and advertising. We did interviews, promotions, radio station stops—all the things that one did to break a record, and we put a lot of effort into it. We also started adding a lot of college towns with fresh audiences. Stevie never failed to impress.
SUBLETT: I had Stevie back. He was sweet and could be the goofiest guy in the world. He wasn’t the serious guy with the hat. He was that guy onstage, but the Stevie you hung out with was this really fun, silly guy. He took his music seriously, but he didn’t take himself seriously. That guy had vanished, and I felt like I had him back.
BRAMHALL II: Stevie was like a big brother to me, and he would always make me feel special and welcome. As his success escalated, there might be twenty thousand people at a show and a crazy scene with a lot of demands on him—photographs, interviews, meet and greets, autograph signings—but he would always make sure to make me feel special. He’d take me back to the bus and play me a bootleg or Jimi Hendrix demo that only a few people had ever heard. No matter what else was going in his life, he was always the same person to me: gracious, kind, sweet, and open.
RICKERT: One time, we had a day off in Philadelphia, near where I grew up. My sister called and said she was going to get the whole family together since I hadn’t seen many of them in a long time. Wonderful! So I asked Stevie if it was okay for me to be gone most of the day, saying that I would grab a cab to go see my family. He looks at me, serious, sad, and a little angry, so I asked what was wrong, and he says, “So, I’m like chopped liver?”
I said, “Stevie, this is my family, dude! I can’t vouch for them.” But he really wanted to come, so I invited everyone. We packed the bus, stopped at a grocery store and loaded it up, and piled out at this suburban home in Levittown. I had blue-haired aunts and uncles who had never seen a tour bus and had no idea who Stevie was or why he was wearing cowboy boots, and younger cousins and nieces and nephews, telling them, “He’s as big as Bob Hope or Johnny Carson.” And they’re like, “That guy with long hair?” Stevie rolled right into the kitchen and started chopping up stuff and making salsa and going out and flipping burgers, and everyone loved him and we all had a ball. Stevie was so happy to immerse himself in a family.
Salmon fishing in Alaska with Skip Rickert, 1990. (Courtesy Skip Rickert)
GARY WILEY: Steve was very much a family person. He came to every family get-together he possibly could and would pick some tunes with Uncle John. The fame that he achieved did not go to his head. It was just like when we were kids; we always had fun, and he blended in. Unless you asked him directly, he didn’t say much about his life as a musician. We were so happy to see him there, just one of the members of the family.
CASCIO: Stevie and Jimmie both were always real generous whenever they were playing in town. Martha would get the head count of who wanted to go, and they’d provide tickets and passes and sometimes a limo that would drive us right to the backstage entrance.
SUBLETT: I did three California shows with Stevie and B. B. King on the In Step tour [August 25–27, 1989]. The first night at Concord Pavilion, Stevie said, “I want to show you something.” We went into his dressing room, and he opened up this briefcase filled with herbs and showed me this spirulina that he drank every night for energy. He said, “Come back five minutes before we play,” and we drank it. He transferred the obsessive gene into being a healthy guy. He still had a ritual before he played, but now it was all about being a clean machine.
BRAMHALL II: After he stopped doing drugs, I said to him, “You’re playing on .011s now. What happened to the big strings?” And he said, “I stopped doing cocaine, so I can’t do that anymore—I can actually feel my fingers now!”
LUCKETT: When Stevie got clean, he still had the hunger for adventure. My company bought him a motorized skateboard, which he loved to zip around on. As soon as sound check was over, he’d grab me, and we’d jump on and go all over the place. He’d have his hat on, and we’d ride through the filling parking lots, and people were just amazed to see him. “Look, it’s Stevie Ray Vaughan!”
RICKERT: Stevie got more and more interested in doing stuff on the road, and usually much of the band and road crew would come along. So we went salmon fishing on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska and out to the easternmost part of North America when we were in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
But one of the most memorable nights was one of the simplest. We were playing close to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, staying in a motel where the doors faced the parking lot. We dragged our chairs out, and eight or ten of us sat there in a line and talked about the world for hours. We were so close to the battlefields where so many people had lost their lives and contemplating that spurred a great discussion. The flow was organic and easy, and we all enjoyed each other’s company.
Stevie with his motorized skateboard, July 4, 1990, Lake Compounce, Bristol, CT. (Donna Johnston)
Throughout 1988 and 1989, the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Stevie and Double Trouble toured together extensively as legitimate co-bills, with neither band dominating the other commercially. It was the most time Jimmie and Stevie had spent together since they were very young, and they began to reestablish a closer relationship.
“They were constantly together on the bus and began to develop the relationship they really had not had time to develop,” says Mark Proct, at the time the Fabulous Thunderbirds’ manager. “Their relationship absolutely improved and deepened. It had been difficult for Jimmie to deal with his little brother who had started out idolizing him becoming a huge star. The success of ‘Tuff Enuff’ made it easier, because it put them on a closer level of success—and no one was happier about that success than Stevie.”
Double Trouble with Skip Rickert (far right), visiting the furthest point east in North America, outside of St. John’s, Newfoundland. (Courtesy Skip Rickert)
Says Wynans, “Stevie talked about Jimmie all the time. He was Jimmie’s biggest fan, and we wanted the Thunderbirds to play with us as often as possible.”
“There was normal sibling rivalry between Stevie and Jimmie,” says Denny Freeman. “Stevie worshipped his big brother, who gave him a rough time trying to guide him in a normal way. But that all just disappeared as they toured together. Jimmie was just so proud of Stevie and loved him better than anything in the world. The truth is, there were no two people that Stevie and Jimmie loved more than each other.”
On September 2 and 3, 1989, Stevie and Double Trouble and Jimmie and the T-Birds opened for the Who at the Houston Astrodome and Dallas’s Cotton Bowl, performing in front of over sixty thousand people at each show. Before the Astrodome gig, they also performed in the afternoon in the parking lot, with singer/songwriter Joe Ely opening.
“I was playing with Joe, and it had to be at 110 degrees onstage,” says David Grissom. “I thought Stevie would be looking to save energy and not sweat out a gallon of water, but he gave it everything he had. The parking lot was just solid bodies as far as you could see. I
stood right next to his amp, a single two hundred–watt Marshall Major into a Dumble 4×12 cabinet, and the best way to describe the sound is, ‘Oh my God!’”
“Texas Flood” outside the Houston Astrodome, 9/20/89. (Tracy Anne Hart)
Jimmie and Stevie were also both part of an Austin City Limits fiftieth birthday tribute to W. C. Clark filmed on October 10, 1989, along with Angela Strehli, Lou Ann Barton, Denny Freeman, Kim Wilson, and Clark’s young protégé Will Sexton. Afterward, Stevie and Double Trouble performed a twelve-song set, marking their second appearance on the venerable show. Vaughan delivered a breathtaking performance, resulting in a show that Terry Lickona has often called his most memorable in over forty years of producing Austin City Limits.
LICKONA: This was Stevie Ray completely clean and sober and at the very top of his game. He was blowing everyone else away, and with ease. It was like a higher power channeling through him and his guitar, and to see him play up close during that time was overwhelming. And it was such a contrast to the first time he appeared on the show. For all those reasons, it’s the show I cite as my favorite whenever I’m asked after forty-three seasons.
I certainly knew that he had cleaned up and was a much different person to deal with; you could actually sit down and talk to him. Still, it’s only natural to be skeptical when you hear these things about an artist who has had abuse issues. You wonder if they really changed for more than a week or two. That day, he was having really bad allergies and struggling with his voice because of congestion, and I offered him allergy medicine, which he kindly accepted. I gave him the little white pill, and he looked at it very carefully, asking, “You’re sure this is allergy medicine, right?” He was very mindful about avoiding temptation and any people who might be likely to take him over the edge again. His playing and singing that night were absolutely peak.
Two weeks later, on October 25, 1989, the Fire Meets the Fury tour, featuring Stevie and Jeff Beck, launched in Minneapolis. It would run through December 3 in Oakland, California, twenty-nine cities with Beck and Vaughan alternating opening and closing the shows. The tour was put together by Epic, in part to promote Beck’s new album, Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop.
HODGES: I got the phone call about the Beck tour and thought it would work musically and maybe present an opportunity to move from civic centers and large theaters to arenas as co-headliners rather than support for a Robert Plant or Moody Blues tour. Stevie was in favor, and we began negotiating who would open and close which shows. I wanted Stevie as the headliner in Dallas and New York, because Madison Square Garden is simply a special place. We sold it out, and it was a fabulous night. The whole tour was special all the way through, and most nights Stevie and Jeff did “I’m Going Down” together at the end.
With Jeff Beck during the Fire Meets the Fury tour, at the Centrum, Worcester, MA 11/8/89. (Donna Johnston)
LAYTON: We were playing big sold-out arenas and selling records, and everyone was going, “The only place we can go from here is up.” For the first times in our lives, all of us really had our shit together on every level.
GLAUB: I hung out with them in the locker room at the sports arena in LA when they played with Jeff Beck [December 1, 1989]. This was the first time I’d seen him since that night in London before he got sober. He seemed like a completely different person. He was with his girlfriend, and it was clear he was in a much better place. He seemed real calm.
SHANNON: When we got sober, it was our first introduction to “life.” Bank accounts, insurance, taxes, payments on this and that, investments—the realities of life that most people deal with. We escaped that for so long, living in this musicians’ dream world all of the time with somebody else doing everything for us. Stevie started to mature in many ways, and he became more comfortable with who and what he was.
LEEDS: During the Jeff Beck tour, we did a radio giveaway where Stevie and Jeff signed twenty-four Fender Stratocasters. I brought them to their hotel in Minneapolis at 1:00 a.m. after the first show and laid them out on the lobby floor. It was a hotel with big tube elevators that you can see descending. I have twenty-four new Strats in open cases and a handful of Sharpies, and I hear the elevator and look up, and there’s Stevie descending with his arms full of dirty laundry. The guy just played an amazing show and could have had someone take care of this, but part of being in recovery is taking care of your own shit. He walked by and said he’d be right back and went over to the front desk to fill out the paperwork. Then he came back, got down on his knees, and happily signed all twenty-four guitars. I can still hear the Sharpies squeaking.
SRV: I feel like I’ve gotten more in touch with [the blues]. It’s usually when I go and see somebody play who’s playing clubs and isn’t used to running around in a fancy tour bus and playing arenas. There’s a difference there. On one side of the coin, it’s like, “The guy sounds that way so we can’t sell him,” but on the other side of the coin is, “I’ve been sold, so I can’t sound like that.” Every time I get to hear somebody sound real, once again I get the chance to come home, inside. That makes me want to play that way even that much more and still snicker when someone says, “Hey, the record sold!”
SHANNON: I never got used to playing with Stevie or took it for granted. It only got more and more exciting.
PAUL SHAFFER: Every time Stevie was on our show, I was struck by how great he was but also how easy he was to work with and how willing he was to try anything, to follow us right out of his comfort zone on songs like “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Baker Street.” His easygoing nature was unusual for a star lead guitarist. If you are going to be that great, there’s got to be something that makes everyone follow you, whether it’s confidence or bravura. He certainly had that leadership quality, and everyone did follow him, but he didn’t have a superstar ego at all.
Vaughan’s lack of rock star attitude extended toward his personal and musical relationship with the band. “He never told us what to play,” says Shannon. “He just played and we followed.”
He also treated his crew and anyone else he came in contact with as equals. “I would drive the merch truck all night to the next gig, then sleep in the cab in the parking lot,” recalls Luckett. “Stevie always told catering to bring me plates of food, and I would be very touched just that he knew I was there and thought about me.”
HODGES: Stevie was unique in his sensitivity towards his bandmates and his awareness of their emotional issues—even if he was the cause of them. I don’t think he ever lost sight of his skills at motivating people and being aware of who they were. No one was just a something or somebody. Any person at any job at any level was a person of interest to be respected. If someone said, “I’m just the bus driver,” he’d say, “You’re not just anything.”
LAYTON: That was one of the things most precious about Stevie. One time at Madison Square Garden, [publicist] Charles Comer was looking for Stevie, who was riding his motorized skateboard through the bowels of the hall. He saw an old janitor sweeping and stopped to chat with him as the guy leaned on his broom. Charles said, “We’ve got very important people waiting for you in the dressing room, and you have to get up there.” Stevie said, “I’m talking to this gentleman, and when I’m done, I’ll go on up.”
LUCKETT: I was ready to accept an exciting offer to go on the road with someone else and I was trying to figure out how I could tell Stevie, who I loved. He came walking off the stage, and I was right behind the curtain, thinking I might talk to him, and as soon as he exited the spotlight, he saw me and said, “Your gold record for In Step is in the mail!” I almost cried. Who gives the merch guy a gold record? I realized right then that I could never leave him and felt ashamed I had even considered it.
HODGES: I think Stevie had an awareness of underpaying, overpaying, paying right. He was smart and generous and had a real balanced constitution about being fair that was unique and refreshing. He was keenly aware of the importance of the band—but also of whose picture was on the cover of every album
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FAMILY STYLE
When the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Double Trouble toured together, the brothers would often play duets on a single instrument, a one-of-a-kind doubleneck guitar made for Stevie by Robin Guitars. Stevie would sit while Jimmie stood behind him, reaching his arms around his little brother’s back as they played the Ventures’ surf instrumental hit “Pipeline,” an early Vaughan brothers favorite.
“That whole idea came from something we saw the rockabilly kids, the Collins Kids, do in the ’50s,” says Jimmie Vaughan. “Joe Maphis [country guitarist] would come up behind Larry Collins, and they’d play his Mosrite double-neck at the same time.”
All that playing together got them talking with more frequency and seriousness about something they had kicked around for years: recording an album together. “I want to make a record with Stevie—just me and him,” Jimmie Vaughan said in 1989. “I don’t want a ‘guitar battle’ record; I want to see what kind of parts we can both come up with.”
Less than year later, in early 1990, the time had come to make the “brothers” album.
“Jimmie and Stevie had been talking about doing that album for a long time, but even once they were committed, it was slow going because of their scheduling,” says Denny Freeman. “Finally, they both just decided they were going to do it.”
A Family Style outtake. (Lee Crum/ Courtesy Sony Music Entertainment)
