Talking with the Master
source: MUSICIAN MAGAZINE - p.37 & 38 - June 1991 text by Timothy White
It was a kind of World Series of archival cutting contests. Stevie Ray Vaughan, hunched over his "sweetheart" axe, a chocolate brown '59 Stratocaster with a'58 Gibson jumbo bass neck, sat in a semi-darkened Mangattan studio trading licks with the greatest heroes of yore, He swapped lacerating Robert Johnson - derived lines with Elmore James on "Goodbye Baby," merged growling riffs with Howlin'Wolf on "Moanin'at Midnight," barked out a shifting cadent blues alongside John Lee Hooker on "Boogie Chillen" and huddled with Lightnin' Hopkins to share a tart Texas shuffle on "Gimme Back That Wig (I Bought You Babe, and Let Your Doggone Head Go Bald)."
Stevie Ray's musical cohorts were present in spirit courtesy of a vintage Kent Records compilation album called Underground Blues, but the face that Vaughan could accompany these legends, duet-style, on a blink's notice, spoke volumes about the kind of artist - and appreciator - he surely was. This interview with Stevie Ray Vaughan took place in October 1989 at Sound On Sound Studios on West 45 th Street. The entire conversation unfolded with Vaughan's guitar cradled in his arms. The encyclopedic grasp he had of his heroes' myriad individual styles was further deepened by a unique tenderness toward their individual intentions. Stevie Ray was as understanding of the reasons why a person played the blues, the needs and desires behind the notes, as he was of the end results. A student of humanity, he also knew that it's the amateurs who usually make the most history by inventing their own place in it.
As the last strains of Underground Blues faded away, Stevie Ray looked up
from his guitar, smiled broadly and said, "Man, that album is a journey - just
fantastic. You got any others like that here?"
No, he was told, but we had him as a resource to continue the trek through the
living musical heritage he so loved. This talk with the late, great Stevie Ray
Vaughan is a moving reminder of how much we lost when we lost him, and how much
he left behind for us to learn to appreciate.
MUSICIAN: "Riviera Paradise" has a beautiful bittersweet quality. But no matter what you're playing, fast or slow, you never crowd your notes and phrases. Everything's rounded out, right on the dime. Is there a philosophy to that sort of attention to detail in your playing?
S.R.V.: What I'm trying to do in those things is find that clarity, when I can let go of whatever it would be, ego or self-consciousness. Since I can't read music, I find I do the best when I just listen to where I'm trying to go with it and where it can go. And not try to rush it. Not try to make up things as I'm going necessarily, but just let them come out. Then I'm a lot better off. If I start trying to pay attention to where I am on the neck and the proper way to do this or that, I end up thinking that thing through instead of playing from my heart. When I've played from my mind I get in trouble.
MUSICIAN: There's a nice sense of intuition in your playing. It's the idea that you feel so close to your instrument, you're trying to think out loud with it.
S.R.V.: I don't know if it's think really , but just feel and express. I've spent many years married to these guitars, especially this one...I found this one in '73, I believe, at a store in Austin. I had my first Stratocaster at about that time and I was having problems with the intonation and it was driving me nuts! I went to get it worked on, but as I walked up I saw this guitar just hanging there in the window and looking at me, and I was looking back. I walked straight up to the counter and handed the guy my guitar and said, "Will you trade me this guitar for that one over there?" He said, "Yes." And I said "Even?" and he said, "Yeah" and I said, "Give it to me!" and I picked this one up and went and plugged it in and it sounded just like I wanted it to, just like I thought it would, It felt just perfect for me - had ever since.
MUSICIAN: "Riviera Paradise" is like good brandy going down. How did you come to write it?
S.R.V.: It's actually like an extension of the style of "Lenny" off the first album. Originally I came up with it about '84 and I was looking for those same qualities - there were some rough times going on at home. A lot of us go though really drastic up-and-down hardships between relationships, when we don't know really how to love someone right. "Lenny" was written to soothe, and "Riviera Paradise" comes from the same place. I wasn't wanting to just copy myself, I was wanting to go ahead and say something with the song and it was down to where if I couldn't find the chords I needed, I started just sticking my hand on the neck, pushing my fingers down and saying, "What's that sound like?" The song went through a lot of different meanings between '84 and now. Finally I got back to where I was coming from originally, which was looking for the willingness to make things right with the people that had been hurt in these relationships. That's really where it comes from.
MUSICIAN: Yeah, it seems to come from a very humble, very compassionate place, wanting to build those bridges and keeping those bridges strong.
S.R.V.: Yeah, building bridges instead of tearing them down, that's exactly what it's about.
MUSICIAN: Your vocals on "Crossfire" were as strong and new as your playing had always been.
S.R.V.: Well thank you, man. The way I see it, it's a learning process every time I go in the studio, actually every time we do a gig or I'm just walking around the house or in the shower or whatever, trying to learn how to sing. I've always wanted to work that out. It's something that doesn't come quite so easily as guitar playing to me. And a lot of the direction that I've had has been of course through records and through contact with a lot of people that I've really looked up to all my life. But a lot of it goes to Doyle Bramhall who I had the pleasure of writing a lot of the songs with on In Step. I've known him since I was about 11,12 years old and always really liked the way he sang, and his influences were a lot of the same singers that were mine. Everybody from Ray Charles, Bobby Bland, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters. I’ve always liked how they sang and I’ve always liked how Doyle sang, but for me it’s just taken a lot more work.
MUSICIAN: It’s interesting where you pick up these bits of inspiration both from people who are right there in the fabric of your own life, like Doyle, and from the old records. People might not realize that even old heroes of yours like Magic Sam learned to play the blues by listening to Muddy Waters and Little Walter records. So many people did that; even back to the earliest days when they were playing the oldest Robert Johnson 78s, that was a tradition.
S.R.V.: Yeah, and you can also go and see the people. But by listening
to the records you can sit at home and start it over, find where you’re coming
from. It’s a real neat deal! And you can dress up like you want to in your room
and nobody knows!
[laughter]
MUSICIAN:"Let Me Love You, Baby" is so focused, both Buddy Guy’s famous 1963 live approach on Folk Festival of the Blues and your modern interpretation of it. His music obviously brings out a lot of spirit in you. It’s a good place to build from because it’s so direct.
S.R.V.: It’s the simple direct things that seem to get to the point, and it’s not all polisbed over with over-production or anything. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d had to start off my learning process in music with so much production going on. I wouldn’t have known what to do. I’m really glad that my crystal radio worked real well to get Ernie’s Record Mart [in Gallatin, Tennessee] and things like that! And back in the time when you’d hear B.B. King and Jimmy Reed and Buddy Guy, things like that on Top 40 radio - I was just real fortunate in that way.
S.R.V.: "If you try to cover up those things that are really hard to look at, they end up coming out like razor blades in our lives and tear things up."
Here is another interview wit Stevie Ray Vaughan.(incomplete though)
S.R.V.: "....play with someone until the energy was gone and before it was a really deadbeat kind of thing, we would have the sense enough to go ahead and change members so we could keep fresh. It was a real neat growing experience.
Blackbird ended up moving to Austin New Year's Eve of '72. It was great. We decided to move there on the way there and I moved into a club called Rolling Hills that a friend of mine owned. I slept on the pool table, the stage, the floor, whatever the weather permitted. And to tell you the truth, it was some of my favorite times. I didn't have a dime, but who cares? I was doing what I wanted and around people I wanted to be around and it was always good music. A lot of other bands had gone to Austin because in Austin you could play what you wanted and that was all there was to it. You didn't have to go by some club owner's idea of what you ought to sound like or play this list of songs that he handed you. You might as well have had a quarter slot in your ear, you know? The whole scene in Austin was when someone needed a fresh bit of energy in their band - kind of like every three to six months, something like that - all the bands would just shuffle the cards of players. Everybody learned a whole lot, and eventually everybody found slots with other musicians that they really wanted to stay with."
MUSICIAN: You were roughly 17 or so in '72. Wasn't it a little on the cold side that winter in Austin?
S.R.V.: Yeah, it didn't bother me, though. I don't know, I don't think that I really want to lose everything right now, but it was a real neat thing for me, a real growing experience, and it's something I never could regret.
MUSICIAN: People know Austin as a place where rock and country kind of got together in the '60s. Places like Threadgill's Bar, Armadillo World Headquarters. But there's also a real rich blues and R&B tradition coming out of that town, a lot happening in the R&B bars on Sixth Street.
S.R.V.: There always has been. W.C.Clark's one of the people who's been involved in that for years and years, as will as the Jets and Bill Campbell. There was a real rich deal, Like you said, it's been going on for years and before I knew about it, obviously, but that's where Jimmie had moved, probably late '60s I guess, maybe as late as '70. He had been involved with a lot of young kids growing up and doing the same thing. Now Sixth Street, even though it can be a little bit, uh....I don't know....it seemed as if it was going to turn into more than a Bourbon Street and get out of hand for a while. But now it seems there's a lot of clubs lining Sixth Street and you can just walk up and down the street and hear all dinds of young cats playing what they're really trying to find home with. It's happining all again. It's a great thing. But in Dallas blues clubs like the Cellar, if you were black you could not get in! Thank God we got to get out of Dallas and go down to Austin, where that whole hypocritical deal wasn't so evident.
Source: MUSICIAN Magazine