He speaks with urgency and conviction, and when he
makes a point, he stares me down with an intense
gaze, as if to make sure I absolutely understand his
drift.The new SRV is focused, physically together and
spiritually anchored. He's learned about things like
humanity, commitment, responsibility. He's got the
proverbial new lease on life, and is glad to be
sharing the lessons he learned on the road back to
sobriety. In concert nowadays, as he performs the
anthemic ballad "Life Without You" (a
soulful, "Dock Of The Bay"-type
set-closer), he cautions his young audiences against
getting caught up in bad habits and making the kind
of mistakes he did.
On the 1986 LiveAlive album, he used this same
song to lecture about the evils of apartheid in South
Africa. Now, after having experienced the humiliation
of falling drunkenly from a concert stage, succumbing
to a total physical collapse and finally entering a
Georgia treatment facility in October of 1986, he has
transformed "Life Without You" into an
anthem against the evils of drugs and alcohol.
In the fervor of his rap, Vaughan takes on the
aura of an evangelist preacher working a crowd. But
this is no hollow pitch; Stevie Ray means every word
he says, from the bottom of his heart — from the
bottom of his pain. He had, in fact, hit rock-bottom,
and is now re-dedicating his life to his music and
his friends, and to appreciating each new day as it
comes. Every day that passes without a drink or a
snort is another victory for Stevie Ray Vaughan. So
far, he's winning big.
"I can honestly say that I'm really glad to
be alive today," he begins with that
dead-serious gaze. "Because left to my own
devices, I would've slowly killed myself."
He takes a sip of coffee, and continues
contemplatively: "I'm just doing the best I can
now to keep this going… trying to grow up and
remain young at the same time. I got a lot of
paradoxes in my life. I guess I'm a real confused
person. But there are some focused parts to my life
now, and I'm slowly trying to put all the pieces back
together." One important part of his therapy is
hard work. For the past 18 months, Stevie Ray has
been touring relentlessly. Backed by Double Trouble
(drummer Chris Layton, bassist Tommy Shannon and
keyboardist Reese Wynans), he opened the first leg of
Robert Plant's North American tour, before flying to
Europe to headline summer blues festivals in Italy,
Germany, Belgium and Holland. He's been so booked
solid with one-nighters that he probably won't get
into a studio to begin working on his next album
until August — perhaps not even until September.
Meanwhile, touring is good for him. And now that
he's a picture of physical fitness (he and the crew
now spend free time on the road working out with
weights and playing hoops — instead of
imbibing), he's performing with a vitality that just
wasn't there before.
"It had gotten to the point where-you know,
you can't give somebody a dollar if you ain't got
one. You can try all you want, but if you're out of
gas, you just cannot give any more. This was around
the time we were mixing the Live Alive album. It was
a real crazy period for all of us- for a long time we
had a schedule that was just completely out of hand.
And the only reason we put up with it was because,
partly from the situation we were in and partly from
doing too much coke, we thought we were super-human.
I mean, the whole deal is that when you walk on
stage, you're up there bigger than life. People
idolize you. And if you let that go to your head,
you're in trouble. You have to keep those things in
perspective, but that's hard to do when you're high
on cocaine and drinking all the time."
Stevie Ray sighs. "We began to see that this
schedule was taking its toll. During that period we
were touring and making a record. My trick was not to
sleep at all. I would stay in the studio all night
long, doing mixes of the live stuff and choosing
tunes. I'd leave the studio about noon, go to the
hotel to grab a shower, go to the soundcheck and play
the gig. Then I'd come back to the studio, stay there
all eight doing mixes, come back to the hotel the
next noon, grab a shower, go to the sound check and
play the gig. Then I'd come back to the studio. And
then the whole thing would start all over
again."
He shakes his head in disbelief. "For two
straight weeks I did that. We had spread ourselves
way too thin, tried to put our fingers in too many
parts of the pie at the same time. It was taking its
toll, and the only way we could see to deal with that
was, 'Oh, you're too tired? Well, here, snort some of
this.'
"And between the coke and the alcohol, it had
go the point where I no longer had any idea what it
would take to get drunk. I passed the stage where I
could drink whatever I wanted to and be able to hold
my liquor, so to speak. One day I could drink a
quart, and then the next day all I'd have to do was
drink one sip to get completely smashed."
He doesn't remember exactly how much he drank the
night he fell off the stage in London. Two, maybe
three drinks. Maybe a quart. But it was painfully
obvious at that point that something had gone
dreadfully haywire with the reigning star of the rock
and blues scene. John Hammond's promising protege was
drowning in a morass of self-destruction.
"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'd try to say 'hi' to somebody, I would just fall
apart, crying and everything. It was like… solid
doom. There really was nowhere to go but up. I'd been
trying to pull myself up by my bootstraps, so to
speak, but they were broken, you know?"
He exacerbated his mental, physical and spiritual
decline with the help of some unfortunate
"recreational" activities, the most
effective of which involved pouring cocaine into his
drinks to prolong the buzz. "I tore up my
stomach real bad by doing that. I didn't realize that
the cocaine would crystallize in my stomach and make
cuts inside there. Finally, I had a breakdown. I
mean, everything fell apart. I surrendered to the
fact that I didn't know how to go without the stuff.
I had envisioned myself just staying high for the
rest of my life, you know? But I had to give up to
win, 'cause I was in a losing battle."
In September of 1986, he entered a clinic in
London, under the care and supervision of Dr. Victor
Bloom. "He filled me in on the disease of
alcoholism and made me realize that this thing had
been going on for a long time with me, long before I
ever started playing professionally. Fact is, I had
been drinking since 1960 — when I was six years
old. That's when I first started stealing Daddy's
drinks. When my parents were gone, I'd find the
bottle and make myself one. I thought it was
cool… thought the kids down the street would
think it was cool. That's where it began, and I had
been depending on it ever since." Stevie Ray
readily admits that just prior to his breakdown, the
constant intake and build-up of drugs and alcohol in
his system contributed to a decline in the quality of
his playing, and in his band's overall performance.
"Sure, it affected my playing. 'Course, my
thinking was, 'Boy, don't that sound good?' And there
were some great notes that came out, but not
necessarily always by my doing. It was kind of like I
was getting carried through something. I just wasn't
in control; nobody was. We were all exhausted. You
could hear it on the tapes of the stuff we had to
cull through for the Live Alive album. Some of those
European gigs were okay; some of them sounded like
they were the work of half-dead people.
How, Stevie Ray is asked, was he able to continue
as a working artist under such terrible
circumstances?
"Part of the deal," he replies,
"was that this kind of behavior is so accepted
in this industry. It's a classic line: 'Golly, he
sure is screwed up, but he sure can play good.'"
Like so many others, Stevie Ray found there were
fringe benefits to living the "high" life:
"I found out that if I stayed loaded all the
time, my ego got patted on the back, and I didn't
have to worry about things that I should've been
thinking about. It was a lot more comfortable to run
from responsibilities. There were a lot of things I
was running from, and one of them was me. I was a
33-year-old with a six-year-old kid inside of me,
scared and wondering where love is."
Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix, Jaco Pastorius
— all were musical geniuses who drowned their
fears and sorrows and anger in drugs and drink.
Stevie Ray came perilously close to sharing their
terrible fate. "But I didn't have the nuts to do
it all the way," he confesses. "And I had a
lot of help and support from people, so 1 was able to
see my problem. I came to realize that the alcohol
problem, the drug problem and the fear were all
symptoms of an underlying problem that's called lack
of love. Once you really become an addict or an
alcoholic, the drink and drags just take the place of
people you care about, and of those people who care
about you. You forget how to love, you reject love.
You become consumed by fear.
"I was walking around trying to act cool,
like I had no fear at all. But I was afraid —
afraid that somebody would find out just how scared I
was. "Now I'm finally realizing that fear is the
opposite of love." These days, when Stevie Ray
sings "Ain't Gone 'N Give Up On Love" in
concert, the song holds a new, deeper meaning for
him. And when he comes to the verse "Love's not
gonna give up on me," he's quick to add:
"or you!" Having seen the light, he's
spreading the message, reaching out to those hordes
of guitar freaks and blues lovers who have loyally
followed and admired him.
"The music, to me, has become really
important. All along, there have been good reasons to
play — I like it, a lot of other people like it,
it's fun. But beyond that, it can help us out in all
kinds of ways. Music really is a way to reach out and
hold on to each other in a healthy way. I'm finding
that out now. It's helped me to open up more and take
a chance on loving people, instead of just isolating
and suspecting everybody that I ran into."
A smile breaks across his somber face as he adds,
"There's just a lot more reason to live now. I
can't blame the music for what I got into. I had just
kind of misplaced what was really going on with my
life. There were a lot of mistakes made and now I can
try and learn from those. It took all the crap I went
through to come out on this side, and now I can try
to make amends wherever I can. I've been sober now
for eighteen months and six days, counting today. I'm
discovering that it's really a wonderful world out
there; I just have to open my eyes to it."
During his month-long stay in the treatment
facility, Stevie Ray was able to slow down, take
stock of himself and begin building a new, healthier
life. But the battle is far from over, as he
explains.
'To show you how crazy this disease of alcoholism
is, on the way to the treatment center I borrowed ten
dollars from my mother, telling her I was going to
buy some duty-free cigarettes. Instead, I went
straight to the bar and spent all the money as quick
as l could on doubleshots of Crown, 'cause I realized
that I had never been on a plane sober before. Here I
had just come out of the clinic in London, had gotten
some information about what was wrong with me,
learned all about what the problem was and how to
deal with it, and still fell right back into that old
thinking. I mean, I was on my way to go into a
treatment facility, yet my first thought was, 'Wow,
I've never done this straight before.' That's the
type of thinking that we alcoholics have to defend
against for the rest of our lives, though we take it
one day at a time. Take care of today — that's
the idea."
While in the Marietta treatment facility, Stevie
Ray was visited by friends who'd been pulling for him
all along. "I had tremendous amounts of
support," he sighs. "I still do, from
people in the band, the road crew, my mother, my
girlfriend, other people who were in the program
themselves. A lot of people wrote, called and gave
support, 'cause they had gone through things like
this. Those people saved my life, and now every day
that I live, it never fails somewhere along the line,
in the course of a day, I get reminded about those
people."
Jackson Browne is one of those people. He first
met Stevie Ray in 1982, at the Montreux Festival in
Switzerland, before the Texas blues man had a record
deal. Stevie Ray's blues prowess so impressed Browne
that he invited him and his band to use his home
studio at no cost. The two remained friendly through
the success of Texas Flood ('83), Couldn't Stand The
Weather ('84), Soul To Soul ('85) and Live Alive
('86). And when Stevie Ray finally crashed, his old
pal Jackson was there with a helping hand.
Another visitor to the treatment facility was Eric
Clapton, himself no stranger to the evils of
self-abuse. Clapton had tried counselling Stevie Ray
about his drinking problem years earlier, but as
Vaughan recalls, "Back then he could sense that
I wasn't ready, so he didn't push it. See, you can
by, you can let somebody know what's going on, but if
they're not ready, you can't make 'em quit. They're
gonna despise you for it, and resent the fact that
you tried to tell them how to live their life. People
in that situation get defensive, they try to act
tough and convince themselves, 'Oh, they don't know
what they're missing.' And they die inside that way.
They really want to say, 'I need help,' but don't
know how anymore."
Clapton met Stevie Ray a few years ago, when both
were touring Australia. "He was leaving the
hotel, and I went out to talk to him, hangover and
all. He was sober, of course, and was really calm the
whole while I sat there downing two, three shots of
Crown. And he just sort of wisely looked at me and
said, 'Well, sometimes you gotta go through that,
don'tcha?' If I had been ready to stop then and
there, he would've gone on with the next part of it
— but he understood that I wasn't. I wouldn't
reach that point until I was literally falling off
stages, about a couple of years later."
One man who tried to set Stevie Ray straight along
the way was blues hero and father-figure Albert King.
"He's someone I've respected all my life,
somebody I've looked up to musically and as a person.
In fact, there were several times when he said he I
was Like my Daddy. He tried to talk to me on several
occasions, but I never listened. Why? Because I was
hooked, man. I had to learn for myself. I had to
reach the bottom before I could see clearly.
"One time in particular," he says of
Albert, "we were doing a show together, and he
walked in backstage and said, 'We gonna have a
heart-to-heart. I been watching you wrestle with that
bottle three, four times already. I tell you what,
man: I like to drink a little bit when I'm at home.
But the gig ain't no time to get high.'
"He was trying to tell me to take care of
business, to give myself a break, but I did my usual
deal of trying to act like I had it all together, you
know? 'Hey, ain't nuthin' wrong, man. I'm leading the
life,' and all that bullshit. I was trying not to see
it, but I realize now that it's like this: I don't
drink or get high because I have all these problems;
I have all these problems because I drink and get
high. I realize now that nothing's so bad that
getting drunk or getting high is gonna make it any
better. Period."
He laughs aloud and adds, "Man, sobering up
reallyscrews up your drinking. And for that I'm real
grateful."
STEVIE RAY, A
WHITE PLUME
in his black Zorro hat fluttering behind him, plays
"Pride And Joy" and does the stroll across
the huge stage of Felt Lauderdale's Sunrise Music
Theater. It's a little crowd-pleasing trick he may
have picked up from fellow Texan Albert Collins. He
beams as he comps on his beat-up old '59 Strat,
raking the strings in smooth, circular motions to
accentuate the shuffle groove. On the slow blues of
"Texas Flood," he digs for roots, dipping
deeply into the Albert King bag, just as Jimi Hendrix
did on "Red House" and a host of other
tunes.
On Howlin' Wolfs "Tell Me," Stevie Ray
reaches for some of the raunch of Hubert Sumlin or
Lowell Fulson or Jimmy Rogers. And on "Mary Had
A Little Lamb," he pulls out the smooth,
fleet-fingered licks that made Buddy Guy a guitar
hero. He pays tribute to Freddy King with the classic
instrumental "Hideaway," before launching
into his own hard-rocking "Scuttle
Buttin'," stretching each tune to ten searing
minutes or more.
Stevie Ray is a bit hoarse this night, so he tries
to preserve his voice as much as possible. Backstage
before the show, he had a certified massage therapist
work him over with a little shiatsu on the back of
the neck, to loosen up those tight muscles and
alleviate strain on the voice box. "I've got an
acupuncturist who does wonders for me," he says,
"but he's back in New York. He won't travel, so
I gotta do what I can on the road."
After a rousing shuffle blues version of the
Beatles' "Taxman," Stevie Ray introduces
special guest Otis Rush. The Chicago blues man,
another boyhood hero of Vaughan's, steps onto the
Sunrise stage toting his [rusty righty Gibson Stereo
345 (which he flips over and plays lefty, a la Albert
King and Jimi Hendrix). The two guitarists have not
rehearsed together, and Rush barely had time for a
sound check. He's playing through a Marshall stack
and his semi-hollow Gibson feeds back terribly
through the first couple of songs, until the soundmen
finally zero in on the proper eq adjustments.
Stevie and Otis jump into a mid-tempo shuffle.
Otis is warming up now, and the crowd is clearly
warming up to him. By the time he lays into
"Stormy Monday," he has this auditorium of
young blues fans in the palm of his hand. Many in the
crowd have probably never heard of him before, but
after a blazing rendition of "Got My Mojo
Working," they're well-acquainted with the man.
Some will no doubt follow up this first encounter
with a trip to the record store, and head straight
for the blues bins.
And for this, Stevie Ray Vaughan deserves all the
credit in the world. He is the premier figure in
today's blues world; his drawing power at the box
office is even greater than that of B.B. King. But
Stevie Ray reveres his blues fathers-B.B., Albert,
Freddy and Earl King, Albert Collins, Otis Rush,
Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin, Jimmy Rogers-the list goes
on and on. And whenever possible, he goes out of his
way to repay his debt to them. The wild cheering for
Otis Rush at the Sunrise Music Theater reflects, and
is the outgrowth of Stevie Ray's gratitude.
It is boundless. At this year's New Orleans Jazz
Heritage Festival, Stevie Ray brought out special
guest Albert Collins, and the two exchanged licks
well into the Chicago Blues Festival a couple of
years back, he mixed it up on stage with the great
Buddy Guy. And down around his home stomping grounds,
the Austin-Dallas-Fort Worth network, he regularly
goes toe-to-toe with the local celebrity
six-stringers.
It's all a matter of personal and musical
responsibility, says Stevie Ray. "Those guys are
the ones who really ought to have the
recognition," he maintains. "They're the
pioneers and the innovators, and they deserve respect
for that. All the great records by Albert King and
Albert Collins, Otis Rush, B.B. King's Live At The
Regal — there's millions we could talk about,
and each one of them is unbelievable in its own
right. They're like books, in a sense. You can
re-read them and gain a new insight each time. They
never sound the same-not to me anyway. There's always
something new to learn in each one. So these great
blues men, they've all been like my teachers.
"I think I've got something special to say
with my music. But I have to keep these things in
perspective, because they're gifts. It's all a gift,
and I have to keep giving it back or it goes away. If
I start believing that it's all my doing, it's gonna
be my undoing. And I'm committing myself to doing the
most I can with the gifts I have, so that they do as
many people as much good as possible."
Stevie Ray has stopped running from himself. He's
been through some rough times, and now he's all the
stronger for it — physically, mentally,
spiritually and musically. You can hear it in his
voice when he sings. You can hear it in his solos.
All the crutches have been removed, leaving… the
new and improved Stevie Ray Vaughan.
"And now I realize that it's my
responsibility to stay sober, and to reach out to
anybody who's got a problem with it. If I'm in a
position to give any kind of help to them and don't,
then what have I done? Hell, if it hadn't been for
people reaching out to me, I may not have made
it."
He pauses, sets his last cup of coffee on the
table and points to a small, white lapel-pin bearing
the familiar, frizzy-haired visage of Jimi Hendrix.
"You know," he begins urgently,
"there's a big lie in this business-that it's
okay to go out in flames. But that really doesn't do
anybody much good. I may be wrong, but I think
Hendrix was trying to come around. I think he had
gotten a glimpse of what he needed to change and that
he really wanted to change. And I found myself in a
similar position."
His voice drops to a solemn whisper as he adds,
"Some people can be examples about going ahead
and growing. And some people, unfortunately, don't
make it there, and end up being examples because they
had to die. I hit rock bottom, but thank God my
bottom wasn't death."
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