SO
THINGS
ARE COMING TOGETHER.
Vaughan, Shannon and Layton together, talking about the new
record could scarcely contain their excitement. A lot of
people have wondered how far yet another Texas guitarslinger
could carry the blues thing, and Vaughan has attempted to
formulate an answer. He wanted to make a happy record, he
said, full of buoyant moods. Shorter songs, less heavy
breathing from the guitar, some new instrumental
combinations. On Soul to Soul, you hear a lot of the Stevie
Ray Vaughan trademarks, but it still has a good-time, uptown
feel — a strong trace of r&b — that separates
it from Vaughan’s first two albums. The guitar
showpieces are there, but it’s clear that Vaughan sets
out to accomplish something different with this record.
“I’m real close to it, and so it’s hard to
get a good perspective on it,” he said, “but
there’s a lot of rockin’ songs and then some that
we’ve never played before. There’s definitely blues
in it — not less blues than before — but it’s
a type of music that we haven’t really tried before,
some different kinds of changes. There are a few other
players here and there that people won’t expect, some
keyboards [ex-Delbert McClinton ivories tinkler Reese Wynans
has been added to Double Trouble. — ed.].
At that particular time, the band was working nightly at
Dallas Sound Laboratory, a 48-track digitally-capable
facility in the Dallas Communications Complex at Las Colinas,
just northwest of the city. They’d booked the studio in
great 24-hour chunks of time, and had even recorded
rehearsals, and Vaughan was finding those sorts of conditions
pretty luxurious — one of the benefits of having two
successful albums under his belt. It helped shape the
character of the music on the new record.
“It’s helping a lot,” Vaughan explained,
“because we’ve gotten to work on individual
technique and things, so that we’ve come down to playing
more like we wanted to play in the first place. To do that we
had to cut in the studio and sit down and listen to it.
We’ve always been forced to work a lot faster than this
before, and we play so many gigs on the road that we
don’t have the time to listen to ourselves as closely as
we should all the time. You go and play for an hour and a
half and then go to the next place, and you don’t get a
chance to catch what’s changing in your music,
what’s working and what’s not working. We love to
play shows — don’t misunderstand me on that —
but it’s hard to ask how did we improve, or did we? We
have fun when we play, but the studio is a blessing that a
lot of people forget about, maybe.”
He said that we were recording the album the “old
way”, live, in the same room together, and without
headphones. “I’ve got every amp I own in the studio
and all going all out at once,” Vaughan laughed.
“They had to build a new monitor system for us.”
The studio, he explained, was set up like a stage, but with
the amps aimed in such a way that the other players could
hear what was coming out of them. Vaughan even played drums
on one cut, but it was too slow, so the song was speeded up
to raise it’s pitch a half-step.
“We’re recording the old way and using the best
modern equipment we can find, and it’s a good
combination,” Vaughan said. “We go in and cut a
song a few times if we need to, or just do a set. At this
point, we’re pretty fine tuned, and we’re watching
it grow as it goes. We’re all looking at it, and we have
a lot of ideas, things we’ve wanted to have a chance to
work with.”
Double Trouble had toured for 18½ months prior to the
release of Couldn’t Stand the Weather in ‘84, and
then they took two months off before starting a new project.
“We didn’t realize how hard it was to just go play
cold, without playing in front of people again. I’d
never thought about that before. We’d rehearse —
try to play this and that — but we didn’t play in
front of people. You’d be amazed how hard it is not to
play in front of people.”
In any case, you don’t get the sense that a lot of
career planning goes into a Double Trouble album — no
big calculations about how it should sound or how may units
it should sell. What’s charted, mainly, is the growth of
Vaughan and the band.
“We’re trying for feeling. We try to accomplish
something with the music, which is to feel through things.
I’ve been trying to grow up some myself, in my heart,
and it’s happening quick. I feel good about it, and I
want that to come out in the music”.
Meanwhile, Vaughan remains — like many Texas
guitarists — a diehard Stratocaster player who uses a
minimum of effects. For the new album, he’s stuck mostly
with the white, Strat-style guitar he posed with for the
cover of Couldn’t Stand The Weather. Built in 1983 for
Vaughan by his friend, the late Dallas guitar dealer and
repairman Charley Wirz, the guitar features Danelectro
pickups and custom wiring. The instrument’s sound is
exemplified by the light quickly strummed break in “Tin
Pan Alley Blues,” which was recorded with only a low
Leslie effect.
A simple message is engraved a the metal plate where the
neck joins the body on the back of the guitar: “To
Stevie From Charley. More in ‘84.” It’s rather
characteristic of the generous spirit that Vaughan’s
early success inspired in many of his old Texas fans —
indeed, Soul To Soul is dedicated to Wirz.
“I’ve been going between that guitar, the
beat-up ‘59 Strat and the other guitar that Charley
found for me, a ‘61 Strat” said Vaughan.
“It’s brutal. They a have that neck, and I
associate them with Charley — I didn’t get the
‘59 from him, but he worked on it so may times that it
feels like I did, I guess. I like the white one. It sounds
like my old beat-up one, but it’s cleaner, not quite as
full-sounding. And Charley never told anybody but me what he
did when he wired it.
“But that’s the sound,” he added.
“That Leslie and that guitar, if the amp’s working
clean. You have to use the right amp, like a Super, with the
Leslie and a Vibraverb head — it’s really a steel
guitar head. If you set ‘em all up in a live room, it
sounds great. I don’t use a chorus — I like to get
that sound with a Leslie too. It’s old-fashioned, but
I’m trying to bring it up-to-date.”
Vaughan is fairly vague about his amp set-up, though he
admits to keeping two Vibraverbs, two Super Reverbs, a Dumble
150-watt Steel String Singer (which he’d stopped using
for a while, but returned to recently) and the Leslie all
hooked together. The actual combination, he explained, was
determined over a period of time by which amp worked when,
until he accidentally came up with a combination that he
liked.
Other amps seem to come and go — indeed, in the
several weeks between interviews, he’d acquired another
Fender. “They’re hooked up pretty straight I
guess,” he grinned. “I have a Tube Screamer, a wah
and the Leslie on my pedal board, and a on-off switch for
everything, so that when I switch it off, between the guitar
and amp there ain’t nothin’. When I do a song like
‘Third Stone From The Sun,’ I can’t control
the feedback with the effects on. It goes crazy, so I switch
‘em all off ad then kick it back in when I’m done.
It’s mostly straight though — a weird set-up —
but pretty straight.” In addition to that, he continues
to play with his guitar tuned a half-step low —
“E-flat tuning” he calls it — and he said that
before Wirz died earlier this year, they had discussed
building a custom-scale neck that would allow Vaughan to use
the tuning without transposing with concert-pitch
instruments. It sounds like a impossible idea, but who knows?
When two stone guitar fools like Stevie and Charley got
together, anything was possible.
Vaughan’s use of the low-pitch tuning was Hendrix
inspired, in any case. He did a lot,” said Stevie Ray.
“It gives you different overtones. It’s an
interesting sound, and I find it a lot easier to sing
to.” He’s also acquired the wah pedal used by
Hendrix to record “Up From The Sky.” He speaks
without any self-consciousness about Hendrix, with whom he
has often been compared. In May, Vaughan played a solo
version of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the
Houston Astros’ home opener at the Astrodome.
Immediately, people recalled the world-weary, apocalyptic
version played by Hendrix at Woodstock in 1969. And the
performance triggered yet a new round of comparisons between
Hendrix and Stevie.
“I heard they even wrote about it in one of the music
magazines said Vaughan. “They tried to put the two
versions side by side. I hate that stuff. His version was
great.” And yet the comparison exists — if only
because Vaughan includes at least one, or two (and sometimes
three) Hendrix songs in each live show, because he featured a
well known Hendrix song (“Voodoo Chile”) on his
second album, and most of all, perhaps, because he captures
the spirit of the improvisational Hendrix on stage more
accurately than any other contemporary guitarist.
An affinity obviously exists. In Texas, Vaughan is
regarded by his old crowd as a hot blues player with a tight
band and a lot of rock and roll in his sound; the blues
variations are still common in Texas clubs. His music has
been refined and expanded by all the work and opportunities
that have come his way in the past two or three years, but at
its core, it’s still the steamy, torrid blues he played
in the late-Seventies. The people outside Texas — those
less familiar with his story, who know his work only from
records and the hype of the last few years — have turned
Vaughan’ s long-standing love for Hendrix’s work
into a point of comparison. Vaughan himself feels it’s
all been overplayed.
According to one person in his organization, Vaughan
labored long and hard over the decision to add “Voodoo
Chile” to Couldn’t Stand The Weather, and that he
finally decided to include the song because he felt that his
younger audience hadn’t heard Hendrix, and he wanted to
spread the word.
“I loved his music, and I feel like it’s
important to hear what he was doing, just like anybody else,
like Albert, B.B. or any of that stuff,” Vaughan
remarked. “I wanted to do the song, but I didn’t
want to mistreat it. I try to take care of his music, and it
takes care of me. Treat it with respect, not as a burden-like
you have to put a guy down ‘cause he plays from it.
That’s crazy. I respect him for his life and his
music.”
At a Dallas Show in late April, Vaughan used the Wirz
Strat and the ‘59, and, when a string broke on that
guitar, a custom Hamilton. On slow blues like “Tin Pan
Alley,” the white guitar had a thin, edgy, cutting
sound, sweet but hard. The ‘59 Strat is a fuller,
chunkier-sounding guitar, more of a rocker, more typical of
the thick tones on Couldn’t Stand The Weather; it is
Vaughan’s instrument of choice when he does Hendrix
covers.
While they weren’t airing many new tunes that night
— it was a free concert with Lonnie Mack, in front of a
hometown crowd — Double Trouble were debuting their new
keyboard player (who appears on Soul To Soul), Reese Wynans.
Vaughan himself played beautifully that night: his slow blues
remain vehicles for gorgeous displays of phrasing and tone,
and he has a growing arsenal of tricks and techniques, from
his flowing, syncopated strum (“Pride And Joy”) to
funky, overstated string-snapping effects. In the past two
years, he’s learned a lot about working an audience as
well. In the clubs he was a straightforward, stand-up player.
Today he’s a good showman as well. “Getting that
passion,” says Stevie Ray, “that’s what I try
to do.”
Within days of the Dallas date, the new Lonnie Mack album,
Strike Like Lightning (Alligator), finally hit the stores; it
was the first record from the legendary guitarist in some
seven years. While Vaughan downplays his role as co-producer
— it’s his first production effort outside Double
Trouble — it’s clear enough from the handful of
guitar duels included on the album that Vaughan helped create
a heck of a guitar album. Vaughan, of course, has always
acknowledged Mack’s influence on his own playing —
“Wham!” was the first single he ever owned —
and the two hit it off wonderfully when they finally began
working together. The empathy and interplay is obvious.
Vaughan remembered the first time he met Mack. It was 1978
or ‘79, and an earlier version of Double Trouble
(without Layton) was playing in a club in Austin when Mack
walked in. “I was playing the second chord of
‘Wham!’ that night when he came through the
door,” Vaughan said. “We did the shit outta
‘Wham!’ It was cookin’. And there was Lonnie
Mack. At first, I didn’t even recognize him. Man, it was
like magic.” At the time, Mack was assembling a new road
band, and he approached Vaughan about joining him. That never
came to pass, of course, but the two remained friends over
the years. When Alligator signed Mack in mid-1984, Mack and
Alligator president Bruce Iglauer talked to Vaughan about
producing the record, and he agreed instantly.
“They were his tunes, and I just tried to help him
with what he wanted to do with the record; that’s what I
think producing is,” Vaughan said. “A lot of
producing is just being there, and with Lonnie, just
reminding him of his influence on myself and other guitar
players. Most of us got a lot from him. Nobody else can play
with a whammy bar like him: he holds it while he plays, and
the sound sends chills up your spine. You can’t do that
with a Stratocaster. “I just didn’t want to sound
like I was trying to direct the record.” Things are
moving pretty fast for Vaughan, but he has a feeling that
this is only the beginning. The beginning wasn’t David
Bowie’s Let’s Dance, which helped showcase his work
to the greater rock and roll public, or even Texas Flood,
whose chart success seemed to surprise just about everyone,
because of how far-removed it was from the pop mood of that
moment.
The beginning is now — this new attitude, the
self-sustenance and self-reliance, the sense of faith in the
future. What Vaughan stands to accomplish, perhaps, is an
important service to the blues. The music is widely enough
recognized as the foundation of rock and roll, but Vaughan
may have the opportunity to bring the blues back into the
current mainstream of rock in new ways, at a new level. He
may, in fact — as Albert King has suggested — take
the color out of the blues.
“I do feel as though I’ve grown as a player
through all this,” Vaughan remarked at one point.
“It’s funny — I’m trying to get back to
how I used to play years and years ago, and yet, at the same
time, to make those ideas grow, tie them into what we’re
doing now. I guess I’m just remembering where all these
things come from. It’s all pretty regular music to me,
what I grew up with: the Glorytunes, Johnny G. and the G-Men.
I used to hear some of those old bands in Dallas, at the
Heights Theater in Oak Cliff, in ‘62 and ‘63.
“Now, I use heavy strings, tune low, play hard, and
floor it.” He laughed. “Floor, it.” Another
chuckle. “That’s technical talk.”
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