(upbeat music)
Voiceover: In the early 1970s, in Austin Texas,
a young guitarist began to make his name
on the local blues circuit.
Tirelessly committed to a musical form
many thought outdated.
Ten years later, that same guitarist
became an international phenomon.
A player of passion, energy,
and awe-inspiring technical virtuosity,
Stevie Ray Vaughan not only brought
the blues heritage of his home state
to a global audience,
but also reinvigorated the genre itself,
and introduced it to a new generation of listeners.
Angela: Stevie just seemed to live and breathe music
every single minute.
It was just his whole life.
Marc: This was a burning fire
that didn't have anything to do with what people thought.
You've witnessed some of his live gigs,
where you would think, "You know,"
"he's gonna just break the guitar in half with his hands".
It's genuine, it was sweet.
It's not the kind of intensity you think,
"Oh, why does he have to act like that, you know?"
Only he could come up with that type of emotion
without it being an act.
Voiceover: This film not only looks
at the formative years of Vaughan's career,
his influences, his first recordings,
and the various bands in which he honed his craft.
But also traces the history of Texas blues itself
and identifies Vaughn's place within a larger tradition.
It is the journey
of both a musical form and the single-minded musician
who brought it back into the spotlight.
Reese: His guitar playing just jumps right off the record.
It just grabs a hold of you
and it's just undeniable.
Alex: What he did with the sound was totally unique
and nobody has come close.
Stevie just did it because he had his own ideas
and he was committed to his music.
If he'd end up just playing clubs all the rest of his life
rather than sacrificing who he was musically,
he probably would have chosen
playing clubs the rest of his life.
He knew what he wanted to do.
Joe: Stevie brought respect back to blues.
He brought recognition back to blues.
But by making it
a completely unique, original, and modern sound again.
This guy was really a master artist.
(electric guitar music)
(lively guitar music)
Voiceover: When Stevie Ray Vaughan
broke into the mainstream in the early 1980s,
he cut a distinctive and contradictory figure,
seemingly archaic and out-of-date,
yet also explosive and refreshingly different.
He was a standard bearer for a form of music
that had been dismissed
as unfashionable and unmarketable
for over a decade,
the blues.
And his global success revitalized the genre.
Angela: Blues has always had ups and downs,
but it had been down for a long, long time.
Record deals were very few and far between.
Just being taken seriously was not, not happening.
For Stevie to make such an impact worldwide changed that.
All of a sudden, people were starting to pay attention
and it really helped everyone from the ground up.
(Blues guitar music)
Nigel: Nobody else is making this music by this stage.
Or, nobody is making it and selling it
in any sizable quantities.
He refreshes the blues.
He makes the blues hip again.
So here's the significance,
both in terms of its influence on white rock and roll,
but also in what it does to black music.
Johnny Hooker in the 1980s and early 1990s
sells more records in that decade
than he sold in 40 years up until that point.
Stevie Ray Vaughan
has one hell of a lot to do with that.
Stevie Ray Vaughan almost single-handedly
there are other people, there's George Thorogood,
there's Robert Cray,
but Stevie Ray Vaughan is the superstar.
He's the man who puts blues back on the map
and makes people want to listen to the blues again
and realize that there's something worth hearing.
Voiceover: Vaughan wasn't only creating
a resurgence of interest in the blues,
but in particular, he and his band, Double Trouble,
presented a distinctive, region-specific strand
of this genre.
Born from a rich tradition of music
eminating from the American territory
in which they were raised, Texas.
This large state, briefly a republic in its own right,
had a singular history that would itself become etched
into the music that emerged from it.
Propelled by a philosophy of rugged individualism,
at first it was the home of ranchers and cowboys,
the icons of the American frontier.
Yet where these inhabitants looked to cultivate the land,
Texas would soon become forever associated
with the riches found under its soil
at the dawn of the 20th Century, oil.
(acoustic guitar music)
This discovery changed the state
from a vast, yet sparsely-populated rural province,
into one of the largest economies in the country.
Yet the musical tradiiton
that inspired Stevie Ray Vaughan
and countless other white Texans
sprung from the laborers
of one of its other key industries
in the early 20th Century.
In the cotton fields of east Texas,
and in the poor black communities set up around them,
the sharecroppers developed the blues.
It was from this marginal world,
that the first notable Texas bluesman emerged,
Blind Lemon Jefferson.
Nigel: Blind Lemon Jefferson
is the first great male blues guitarist.
He was born, we think around 1893,
the son of sharecroppers.
By 1917, he's in Dallas, playing the guitar
on street corners, and already becoming a big star.
It's said that he was earning $150 a week
in tips on the street.
Now, in 1917, that is one hell of a lot of money.
He starts recording in 1926 for Paramount
and he goes to Chicago to record.
Very short recording career.
He's only recording for four years before he dies.
But the recording industry is in its infancy
in 1926 when he starts
and prior to that, we've had Mamie Smith
and some of the female blues singers really singing
backed by what you'd have to call a jazz band.
Blind Lemon Jefferson
is the first solo guitarist playing the Blues on record.
(acoustic guitar music)
♪ (lyrics) I ain't got no mama now
♪ I ain't got no mama now
♪ She told me late last night
♪ You don't need no mama no, no
♪ Mmm black snake crawling in my room ♪
Nigel: He's got this kind of haunting moaning voice,
these fantastic songs I can see the migrators
kept cleaning their Black Snake Moan.
He's a phenomenal guitar player
and you can hear that
even through the hiss and the crackle of the records,
because the quality of the preservation of these recordings
is not that great
but he's a phenomenal guitarist.
He's playing these single-note lead runs,
and then these bass lines
and these choppy rhythms and pulls and tremolos.
In a way, you can hear all the techniques
that we have come to associate
with electric guitar playing being essayed really
on this rudimentary acoustic guitar.
Voiceover: Where Jefferson provided the template
for the Blues guitarist, two of his protegees
would further his style and develop the sound
of Texas blues beyond its acoustic origins.
They too, would become hugely influential figures,
T-Bone Walker and Lightnin Hopkins.
Nigel: T-Bone Walker was born in Texas in 1910,
so he is about 17 years younger
than Blind Lemon Jefferson.
He hooks up with Jefferson in the 1920s,
becomes his eyes, leads the blind man around,
and of course, while he's doing that
learns all his guitar tricks.
(mellow blues music)
Alan: The hallmark of Texas blues
has always been the guitar,
that's what defines the Texas sound
is the playing of the guitar.
The way one approaches that instrument.
T-Bone emulated the style of Blind Lemon.
He does take a lot of the patterns
and the kind of single string arpeggio runs
that one hears in Blind Lemon.
But he's applying them to an electric guitar,
an elecrified guitar.
T-Bone introduced the electric guitar
as a lead instrument in rhythm and blues
T-Bone was highly sophisticated.
T-Bone was a showman.
He electrified the audience.
Not only with his guitar playing
which was incredibly virtuosic,
but in just the way he presented himself on stage.
(blues music)
♪ (lyrics) Mother says son you was born lucky
♪ But remember you gotta die one day
♪ Woah, yes you was born lucky
♪ Remember you gotta die one day ♪
Nigel: Lightnin' Hopkins
is another pioneering Texas blues guitarist.
Like T-Bone Walker,
he hooks up with Blind Lemon Jefferson in the 1920s.
At this point, he's playing an acoustic guitar
but he too, picks up an electric guitar
there is some sessions that are particularly significant
in this context, which he recorded
for the New York-based Herald label in 1954
where he plugged in.
I guess he took the T-Bone Walker style
of electric guitar and just amped it up,
rocked it up, a little bit more.
So you can see all of these things
as different stations of the cross, really,
on the journey to a fully electrified Texas blues sound.
♪ (lyrics) Woah she an evil hearted woman
♪ Woah she won't treat nobody right
♪ Yeah, she an evil hearted woman
♪ She won't treat nobody right
Nigel: There's a further link
to the kind of blues rock element
that Stevie Ray Vaughan eventually comes to represent,
because he gets taken up by the rock and roll crowd.
He's opening shows for The Grateful Dead.
I think at one point, in the late 60s,
he even records an album with the 13th Floor Elevators,
who were this Texas garage band.
Again, the blues and the rock
are coming closer together
in the person of Lightnin' Hopkins.
There's a nice symmetry, really,
because he lives on until 1982,
which is when he dies, and of course,
is just when Stevie Ray Vaughan is getting going.
Voiceover: For white Texans
in the 1940s and the 50s however,
awareness of the work of Walker and Hopkins was minimal.
Although Texas was in part culturally distinct
from the deep south states to its east,
it shared their appalling racial politics.
Segregation was firmly in place,
and popularly supported across the state.
Yet the music of the bluesmen
did enter the consciousness of young white artists.
As the melding of styles that was rock and roll
exploded across America,
white Texan bands began to incorporate the sounds
pioneered by these black musicians into their own work.
Joe: One of the great things about music in Texas,
we didn't pay much attention to segregation laws.
The law said blacks and whites,
and even browns, Mexican Americans,
weren't supposed to mix.
They always did with music.
In the fifties, for instance in Dallas,
the best-known rock and roll act,
really the first local band of any prominence
was called The Nightcaps,
and they were white boys doing rhythm and blues.
♪ (lyrics) Go to school around nine
♪ I get in the corner and I drink my wine
♪ Drinkin' wine, wine, wine
♪ Wine all the time
♪ You get your girl, and I'll get mine
♪ Here for a while then buy some wine
♪ Drinkin' wine, wine, wine
Joe: Wine, Wine, Wine was an anthem
for all kinds of kids growing up in Texas.
Certainly the song Thunderbird,
which Stevie Vaughan later covered,
many people have covered,
it was always there.
(electric guitar music)
Voiceover: As the next wave
of the popular music revolution hit the US
in the mid-1960s,
following the coming of the British Invasion,
a handful of white Texans
were again bringing their distinctive Blues heritage
into the spotlight.
This time, to both national and international audiences.
Yet, many of these acts,
like the psychedelic garage band, the 13th Floor Elevators,
had to travel to the west coast to make their name.
The most prominent, singer Janis Joplin,
actively disassociated herself from her home state.
At the close of the decade however,
a figure emerged who aimed to carry the torch
sparked by Blind Lemon Jefferson
back at the start of the century.
Johnny Winter, signed in 1968 to Columbia Records
with the biggest advance in the history
of the recording industry
was a white singer and guitarist
who proudly identified himself as a Texas bluesman.
Joe: Winter was the guy that started all this.
It was Columbia signing him
and offering him crazy money at the time,
that changed the rules and changed the way
music was being looked at in Texas.
♪ (lyrics) Yeah, I work for a dollar could not save a lousy
♪ Man couldn't save a dime
♪ Ain't nobody worried and there ain't nobody's crying ♪
Joe: Columbia signed him
Steve Paul made him into a star,
basically selling black blues
as played by an albino white as rock and roll.
Of course Johnny Winter played Woodstock,
with his band, and it was very telling
he had a power trio, basically,
which really set the stage for bands like ZZ Top,
and later, for Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble,
and in his band was a bass player
that came out of Dumas, Texas, up in the panhandle,
by the name of Tommy Shannon
and a drummer by the name of Uncle John Turner.
(rock music)
Alan: If you think of Texas Blues
as being dirt road through the countryside,
Johnny Winter paved it.
He put the asphalt down.
In part, what distinguishes Texas Blues
from, say Mississippi Blues,
is that the black population in Texas
was much more dispersed throughout the state.
There wasn't this heavy concentration.
There had been in east Texas, but when the cotton fields
were devastated by the boll weevil,
people moved to the cities of Houston and Dallas,
to some extent to Austin.
It was a much more diverse community.
Johnny Winter grew up in the golden triangle,
in the area around Beaumont and Orange
which produced Janis Joplin and others.
These were people who were connected
to a kind of swamp loose,
and they were connected to the Cajun and Creole sounds
that they grew up hearing, being so close to Louisiana.
Johnny Winter created a certain mythos
about the whole idea of Texas blues and Texas music.
In that way, he influenced young musicians musically
but I think in a bigger sense
he helped define the marketplace,
the branding for what the world began to recognize
as being Texas blues.
Voiceover: Despite Winter's swift rise to prominence,
in the 1970s new musical forms flourished.
The blues, once again returned to the margins.
It would remain there for more than a decade
before another artist emerged,
who both revitalized the genre itself
and re-established the brand that Winter had developed.
(upbeat music)
Dallas, Texas,
it was here in 1954 that Stevie Ray Vaughan was born.
At first, raised along with older brother Jimmy
in the Cockrell Hill area of the city
by parents Jim and Martha.
After numerous relocations, the family settled
in the district of Oak Cliff in 1961.
Joe: Jimmy and Stevie Vaughan grew up in Oak Cliff,
which in the context of Dallas, Texas, even today
it's south of the Trinity River.
It's blue collar working class.
Whenever you think of Dallas as this new shiny,
you know, the TV series, the Dallas Cowboys,
glittering buildings, that's all north Dallas.
That's not Oak Cliff,
that was traditionally the black part of town,
and today, remains very African American,
Mexican American, Mexican immigrant,
and talk about a music history.
Oak Cliff is where T-Bone Walker really got his chops.
Aaron T-Bone Walker
was also known as Oak Cliff T-Bone.
Craig: Stevie's family was, I think,
relatively typical in the sense that his father,
who they called Big Jim, was a blue collar worker
that traveled wherever the jobs were.
The family was uprooted, at least temporarily
on occasion while he worked particular jobs.
Stevie's mother also relatively typical
in the sense that to make ends meet,
she worked as an office worker, as a secretary.
That left some time
for Stevie and Jimmy at home alone.
Who knows, maybe that contributed
to their interest in playing guitar,
because they had to fill their time with something.
Thomas: The brothers' interest in music
was more than just a time filler however.
It soon became a passion.
When they moved to Oak Cliff in 1961,
first Jimmy and then Stevie had begun playing the guitar.
Yet the popular music of the time was far from stimulating.
Despite being an incendiary force in the mid-to-late 1950s,
by now the rebellious fervor of rock and roll
had died down, and the charts were dominated
by crooners and doo wop ensembles.
For youngsters growing up in the segregated world
of the south however, the radio provided access
into a far more raw and vital musical world
that was emanating almost unnoticed,
from the black communities around them.
These stations and shows
inspired a whole generation of white blues musicians.
Joe: Kids in Texas, kids growing up in Dallas,
at night, when you had AM radio
and you had these stations
that were called clear channel stations,
50,000 watt stations, where you could hear
their signal from all over the place,
in Dallas and in Fort Worth where I grew up,
you could pick up WLS in Chicago.
They had Top 40 radio.
WLAC in Nashville, the John R. Show
where John R. [laid] some pretty serious blues
and he also sold blues music through Randy's Record Shop.
Also, you cannot discount the border blasters,
the Mexican radio stations on the border,
on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande
that would exceed the power limits of the United States.
From the big X XERF, XEG, XELO,
that's where I heard Wolfman Jack
turn me onto a generation of blues artists.
Angela: Late night on the radio,
I could get those powerful stations
out of Louisiana and Del Rio, the Wolfman Jack.
When I heard blues, I had to find out what it was.
The music just captured my imagination.
I didn't even know what to call it.
Denny: There was a radio station in Dallas
called WRR, and at 10 or 11:00 at night
Jim Lowe came on with Kat's Karavan
and everything was all different then.
Of course, I was supposed to be in bed asleep
and I was in bed, but I wasn't asleep.
It's the typical thing, you have that radio right there,
you've turned it up loud enough
where you can hear it but mom and dad don't.
That's when Jim Lowe, he was playing Lightin' Hopkins
and all the accello records,
that's where I first heard Lazy Lester, Lightnin' Slim,
all the accelo stuff, and all the other stuff
that was more bluesy and more hardcore R&B
that was a little bit too deep for Top 40 in the daylight.
(lively music)
♪ (lyrics) I've been out west
♪ I'm headed east
♪ I want my baby
♪ Back home with me
♪ Well, she don't grab that
♪ Mean old train and gone
Denny: Now we knew what labels to look for,
so we'd go to our record store
and just go through stuff,
and when we saw Duke Records, or Chess Records,
or Accelo Records, VJ Records,
when we saw those labels, it was like,
"Oh, red flag."
We discovered a lot on our own,
with some help from Jim Lowe and late night radio.
Voiceover: The subterranian nature
of this interest in blues music shifted almost over night
with the coming of the British Invasion in 1964.
♪ (lyrics) I am the little red rooster
♪ Two lays and I crow for days
As the Beatles, The Rolling Stones,
The Yard Birds, and many others acts
introduced a wider American audience
to music that had previously been marginalized,
blues was elevated into the mainstream.
In Oak Cliff, Texas,
Jimmy Vaughan was becoming a serious scholar of the genre
and passing his knowledge on to his younger brother.
Voiceover: What has inspired you throughout
who is your [unintelligible]?
Stevie: My brother, Jimmy Vaughan.
He's the reason I got started,
and he's also the inspiration for a lot, lot of musicians.
Because of him, I was able to hear B.B. King,
Freddie King, Albert Collins,
Albert King, Lonnie Mack, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters,
Alan Wolf, Kenny Burrell, Jimmy Smith
on and on, on and on.
They're all very big influences.
Craig: Stevie was fortunate growing up
to have an older brother who was bringing home music.
He was bringing home everything
from blues to rock and roll.
Then also about the same time
you've got The Beatles coming on Ed Sullivan,
and the whole British Invasion music,
exposing Americans to blues music.
Certainly, Stevie got all of those influences all at once.
Voiceover: With popular music entering its most fertile period
since the initial wave of rock and roll,
in the mid 60s, both Jimmy and Stevie
joined their first high school bands,
The Pendulums, and The Shantones.
Playing cover material at dances and talent contests.
The Pendulums soon progressed to a wider circuit however,
and in this group, Jimmy Vaughan began to attract attention.
By 1966, he was drafted into The Chessmen,
who had enjoyed some local success,
and soon the elder of the Vaughan brothers
was being singled out
as one of the best guitarists on the Dallas scene.
Joe: In Dallas,
there were labels like [Abnet] Records,
which had these pop acts,
John and Robin and the In-Crowd.
Scotty McKay, who was really trying
to imitate The Yardbirds doing blues.
The Five Americans had national hits
broke out of Dallas with I See the Light.
One of these bands that kind of rose to prominence
was The Chessmen.
Now, Jimmy Vaughan joined it
after The Chessmen were already kind of established.
They had had a couple of local hits
and when I say "hits" there were singles
that probably sold 5,000 copies maybe.
That would get you gigs
at teen canteens, and clubs like Louanns,
and maybe if you were lucky enough
you could back up someone like Jimmy Reed.
When Jimmy Reed came and played Louanns for the white kids,
what it did for Jimmy is it gave him exposure.
Paul: They were a big deal in Dallas.
What's really strange about that is
when Jimmy joined the band
he was like 15 and just almost overnight
he became the man at 15.
All the guitar players are going,
"You gotta hear this kid".
Denny: Jimmy's name got around,
and I finally heard him in 1967.
He got a gig with the band The Chessmen,
and there was a Sunday afternoon matinee
at this club, and I heard Jimmy.
I was excited to hear this kid that I'd been hearing about.
I was seven years older than him.
When I heard him,
even though they were just doing covers,
I went, "Well, I see why I had heard of him".
I thought he was, at 17, I thought this guy's better than -
He is good.
We will hear more of Jimmy.
Most people felt that way.
Voiceover: If The Chessman
offered Jimmy Vaughan exposure,
the group provided something else for his younger sibling.
Stevie was befriended
by their drummer and vocalist, Doyle Bramhall,
who gave the 12-year-old both encouragement and support.
The pair would become lifelong friends
and occasional musical allies.
Yet, it was through Jimmy's record collection
that the young guitarist found his inspiration.
In 1967, he was introduced to an artist
that would prove a significant influence
on his subsequent style and sound,
Jimi Hendrix.
Craig: When Stevie was just getting started on guitar,
Jimmy brought home a Jimi Hendrix record, Purple Haze.
I think this really knocked Stevie for a loop.
(lively music)
♪ (lyrics) Purple haze was in my brain
♪ Lately things don't seem the same
♪ I'm acting funny but I don't know why
♪ 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky
♪ Purple Haze
Nigel: Jimi Hendrix is probably
the single most significant figure
in the fusion of blues and rock.
It's a much derided word these days,
but in making it progressive
and by that I mean the genuine sense of the word
of moving this music into new, uncharted territory.
Technically, he's a phenomenal guitarist.
He's got a deep reverence for the roots of the blues
but he's also played R&B with the Isley Brothers
and so on and so forth,
so he's got all the bases covered.
(energetic guitar music)
He's got this fantastic technique
coupled with this fertile inventive imagination,
which leads him to experiment with sounds
that you wouldn't previously have associated
with an electric guitar.
One of the things that's interesting is these people
who have such a huge profound influence
on everything that follows them,
so many of them are recording
for such a short period of time.
We've talked about how Blind Lemon Jefferson's
recording career only lasted for four years.
Of course, pretty much the same is true
with Jimi Hendrix as well.
[He has] session work prior to that,
but he begins recording with Jimi Hendrix Experience
in 1966, and by 1970, he's dead.
Voiceover: In the wake of Hendrix,
rock music became heavier.
The spotlight shifted from frontmen
to virtuoso lead guitarists.
First Cream and then Led Zeppelin emerged from the UK,
ushering in a new era
of lengthy solos and extreme volume.
Stevie incorporated these new trends
into his own playing.
Now at high school
and a member of the band, The Brooklyn Underground,
although a shy and quiet teenager,
he was beginning to make his presence known
to fellow musicians.
Roddy: I met him in the lunch room
at Campbel High school.
In probably '68, '69,
I think it was his sophomore year,
and it was my senior year.
He just came up to me one day,
"Hi Roddy!" (laughs)
I didn't know who he was.
He said, "Well I'm Jimmy Vaughan's little brother".
"Okay", you know.
I was already playing with bands
from three or four years.
The first time we jammed together,
I knew this guy's a serious guitar player.
He would call me occasionally,
"Hey, can you come by?"
Because I had a car and he didn't.
We started going around town a little bit.
I remember the first time he said,
"Hey, let's go down to the Aragon Ballroom",
and it was this black club way over in south Dallas.
We go in this place,
and the guy at the front door, he's got one eye,
"Stevie, go on in, man!".
Here I am, I'm 18
I can't even get into the clubs
and Stevie's getting me into the door.
We'd go in and sit in and play.
His big jam song was always Crossroads,
the Clapton version.
That was the big song.
He'd get up there and tear it up,
everybody loved it.
♪ (lyrics) I'm going down to Rosedale
♪ Take my rider by my side
♪ Going down to Rosedale
♪ Take my rider by my side
♪ You can still barrelhouse, baby
♪ On the riverside
(lively music)
Clapton had a huge effect on Stevie.
He could lip-synch and air guitar every riff.
He spent hours and hours learning his style.
At the same time,
my brother gave me a Albert King album one Christmas.
It was Live Wire Blues Power.
I loaned it to Stevie,
and said, "Hey man, you gotta hear this".
A year and a half later,
I get the album back. (laughs)
I still have it, it has my name on there
to make sure that he would know whose it was. (laughs)
Voiceover: It was Albert King,
a Mississippi-born guitarist and singer,
who had only risen to prominence in 1967
while he was in his late 40s,
who would become the dominant influence
upon the young Vaughan.
Drawing the teenager's attention away from British players
to the authentic heart of the blues.
(blues music)
Voiceover: What were some of the tunes, if you can remember,
some of the slow blueses, and what were some of the things
that helped you develop your style?
Stevie: Albert King records, for one thing.
B.B. King Live at The Regal,
Albert King Born Under Bad Sign,
I guess it was called at first.
Or was it King of the Blues Guitar?
I think it was Born Under Bad Sign,
is what they were calling it at the time.
I remember seeing, believe it or not,
Albert King on TV,
doing Born Under Bad Sign, and I was like "Yes!"
(laughs)
Voiceover: When singer-songwriter
and future collaborator Marc Benno
was first joined on stage by Stevie in 1969,
King's style had by now become the key inspiration
for the young guitarist.
His technique impressed the more-established musician.
Marc: He got up there and he played
a kind of a skeletal Albert King.
He didn't really have all the cards
in the deck put together yet
but he had a really sweet vibrato and an incredible tone.
I remember people were screaming,
and it was already a phenomenon
but he was no master of the guitar
but he was really talented for a 98 pound kid.
He had a lot of obstacles, being Jimmy Vaughan's brother.
At the time, Jimmy was really not nice to anybody.
It's not all sweet Mary Poppins stuff here.
I think Jimmy had some tough guys
that he patterned himself after.
Guitar players don't generally like each other
very much anyway.
It's a competitive, gunslinger-type deal
and it sure was back then.
I remember he told Stevie,
"Listen you start teaching yourself"
"how to play guitar."
"Don't ever play one of my licks again."
"You play that lick again,"
"and I'm gonna beat your butt."
What happened that night,
at the end it goes he played that lick again,
which was one of Jimmy's favorite licks.
Let's just say that I witnessed something
that kind of shocked me.
He encouraged him to teach himself to play
after that night.
Voiceover: Although Jimmy Vaughan
had begun to treat his younger brother
in a harsh and irritable manner,
other musicians on the scene were more nurturing.
No longer interested in playing covers of Top 40 material.
In 1969, Jimmy had formed the blues group
Texas Storm with Doyle Bramhall
and singer Paul Ray.
These bandmates actively encouraged
Stevie's development.
Paul: Jimmy and I were playing in a band together
called the Storm, Texas Storm.
Big Jim and Martha came in with Stevie
and he was just a little kid in '69,
so whatever that made him.
At the break, I had this old gretsch
[unintelligible] club fat guitar, looked like furniture.
It looked like a coffee table.
Stevie was enamored of the look of the guitar and all
so during the break,
he came over and he said,
"Can I look at your guitar?"
Because Jimmy was playing it once in a while,
just to be playing it.
He got it and was sitting there on the stage
and he said, "Let's do Stormy Monday."
I felt to play, and I see the Stormy Monday
and I said, "If you're sitting right here, okay."
This is good, we're sitting on the edge of the stage,
and it was break.
Just me and Stevie did Stormy Monday.
That's when I went,
"He has learned some lessons",
but he wasn't there yet.
He had it all T-Bone and Jimmy and all the people
that he'd heard.
Voiceover: Stevie was bringing these influences
and techniques into his own ensembles.
Having graduated from The Brooklyn Underground
and another blues rock cover band, Southern Distributor.
In 1970, he joined a far-larger unit,
Liberation, who had already established themselves
in the Dallas club circuit.
Here, he met saxophonist Jim Tremmier.
Jim: Liberation was a ten-piece horn band
We had two lead singers.
I had tonsilitis in my senior year in high school.
When I came back after tonsilitis,
Stevie was in the band
and my impression of him
was he played better than anybody I ever heard,
up to that point.
Stevie, although he was a rock player back then,
he was totally steeped in blues.
He liked playing Clapton licks,
he liked playing Crossroads,
he liked playing Jimi Hendrix,
but his first love was blues.
I had a car.
We would drive after school,
he would have his guitar with him.
He sat in the car the whole time playing guitar.
He would play guitar, he would play guitar.
He would play this and that,
and he would repeat things over and over again.
We would go to his house,
listen to records.
He loved John Lee Hooker.
There was a John Lee Hooker album
he would listen to over and over and over again.
♪ (lyrics) Daddy taught me how to do the [hook a book]
♪ I'll tell you one thing I know
♪ How to boogie, boogie, boogie, boogie, boogie, boogie
♪ All night long yes, yes
♪ I said boogie, boogie baby, boogie all night long
♪ All right we're going to boogie woogie [now] ♪
One of my memories
is a song called Boogie Woogie All Night Long.
Stevie would play that song over and over.
There was sort of a false ending
where John Lee Hooker kind of go uh-ah-ah-ah
and Stevie loved the ending.
He copied it exactly like John Lee Hooker
and he would play it 50 times in a sitting.
Voiceover: Liberation was a short-lived outfit.
Yet its live shows initiated the 15-year-old Vaughan
on the Dallas club circuit.
Shortly after he left the band in September 1970,
he was then offered the chance
to record in the studio for the first time.
Local businessman John Bovewell
was funding an album project entitled "A New Hi"
which would compile the work
of five Dallas high school bands, and Stevie was invited
to join Cast of Thousands on the record.
A unit formed by songwriters Bobby Foreman and Jim Rigby.
Jim: Bobby Foreman had heard him play
and then he calls and says, "This guy's unbelievable."
"You're not gonna believe how good he is."
At the time Jimmy Vaughan,
everybody said was the best in Texas.
There's no question.
Stevie was sort of the little kid brother.
I would see him in school but he was so quiet,
and we all thought he was a druggie.
Which he may have been too
but the reason he was like he was,
was because he was sneaking out at night
and playing in clubs at 15, 16 years old.
He was somehow playing all night,
maybe getting a couple hours sleep,
and coming back and getting through school.
Craig: The project was to be five bands,
one from each of the south Dallas high schools.
Each band would do two songs,
so there was an album with ten songs.
The boys in the band would sell these albums as fundraisers.
They would actually get a little bit of money,
a dollar here and there,
and the promoter would submit this to local radio stations
and whichever band got the most airplay
was going to get to record their own album.
Jim: There'd been a group in Fort Worth
called Blood Rock, who did a song about a traffic accident
where somebody bleeds to death.
They were like a one-hit wonder.
That was enough success for this manager to think,
"Okay, I can do this."
"I'll put this together, I'll pay for the recording studio."
"I'll promise these kids the moon."
Possibly he was planning on delivering someday.
Stevie Ray, Stevie at that point, signs on.
We start rehearsing, and instantly I realize
I've never seen anybody like this kid.
We practice, we go to the studio
and they like our stuff.
We get to cut two songs.
When Stevie starts to play,
the people in the sound booth start leaning forward.
It's like they're almost pressing their face on the glass.
I look over, and he hadn't done this in rehearsal,
but his hand looked like a hummingbird.
It was moving so fast
that I couldn't make the fingers out.
The studio was blown away by Stevie.
We're sitting there trying to concentrate
on playing and singing and things.
I could see them out the corner of my eye
almost like a child looking into a candy shop,
just kind of leaning over,
"What in the hell is this?"
Because he was like a force of nature already.
♪ (lyrics) I heard a voice last night
♪ As I lay here last night
♪ And it said yes it said the word
♪ Like the scene in the [unintelligible]
♪ I heard a voice
Jim: To me, it was a great moment,
and we weren't trying to make it permanent
It's a high school band
but you see the potential there.
At that time, he hadn't found his own style,
so he was imitating Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix
and that's where the speed stuff was coming from.
(electrifying music)
Craig: The band members admit
that they didn't give this project their best material
because they were afraid it was going to get stolen.
They were kind of holding back a little bit
so the song selection limited Stevie a little bit
because it wasn't the band's strongest material.
But still, we see
that Stevie can take an original song
and put guitar to it.
He doesn't have to hear something on the radio
and mimic it.
This is new material, this is new guitar stuff.
It's stuff created by Stevie for these songs.
The engineer who recorded on these five bands
for the project
said that after listening to all these bands
and seeing Stevie play,
he said, "That guy's a ringer."
"This guy's got an unfair advantage."
"He must have been brought in"
"specifically to win this competition".
But he wasn't.
He was just the best guitar player around.
Voiceover: Upon the record's release,
Cast of Thousands received more airplay
than any of the competing bands on the LP.
Yet the project fell apart
when organizer John Bovewell was arrested for murder.
Yet Stevie Vaughan had already moved on by this time,
working his way through a number of new outfits,
including Pecos and The Derek Jones Party.
It was in the band Lincoln, however,
that he first worked with Christian Charles de Plicque,
a vocalist whom he had long admired.
In August 1971, no longer attached to any group,
de Plicque brought Vaughan
to the home of organist Noel Deis,
where rehearsals were taking place
for a new ensemble, Blackbird.
It was in this band
that Stevie first came to prominence.
Noel: I think he was 16 or 17 when I first met him.
He was kind of reticent.
Kind of a little bit of a shy kid.
I went "Wow, this is Jimmy's brother, huh?"
Because Jimmy was the guitar god
of the Dallas area at the time.
You can't overemphasize the drive that Stevie had
to be at least as good as his brother.
He really wanted to be
at least as good as Jimmy was.
When he came to play with us
it was kind of his chance, I think.
It was his chance to get away from the house,
and get out of the house
and get into a band that could take him some place.
Voiceover: Blackbird fulfilled that need.
Initially a six-piece ensemble,
the band developed their act
during regular shows at the Cellar Club in Dallas.
Unlike Vaughan's previous groups,
although Blackbird still played cover material,
their repertoire was inspired by a new band,
whose unique sound was bringing southern roots music
directly into the mainstream.
In 1969, shortly after Johnny Winter's rise to prominence,
an act emerged who would spearhead a new wave of music
emanating from the American south,
The Allman Brothers Band.
Drawing firsthand from the blues and soul artists
around whom they had grown up,
this Floridian unit exhibited an authenticity
that their British forebearers could never deliver.
They became the inspiration
and the template for Blackbird.
Noel: The Allman Brothers got our attention
because they had, first of all, Gregg Allman,
who's a wonderful singer.
Between the two guitarists,
and the Hamman B3,
and the drive, the sheer drive,
and creativity those guys had.
They were also a jam band,
which we loved to do.
We wanted to be a jam band,
and that was part of out schtick.
The way they synthesized all those elements together
was just food for us.
(mellow music)
Voiceover: For Stevie, the key inspiration within the band
was their talismanic leader
and virtuoso guitarist, Duane Allman.
(mellow music)
Roddy: The Derek Jones party,
their manager, Dan Louis,
his dad ran the ushering service
at the state fair music hall
so we would get free tickets.
I remember the night
that we got two free tickets
to see The Allman Brothers Band.
Stevie and I sat up in the balcony
right over the stage,
and watched the show
and its like blew us away.
The two drummers slamming it
and jamming and Duane Allman and all of them
at the top of their game at that point.
Two weeks later, Duane Allman died.
(lively music)
Noel: Stevie would study people.
He studied Clapton and I mean studied him.
He learned every lick on the record
and same thing with Duane
we listened to all their stuff.
That slide guitar style that he developed
was new.
It broke new ground
and Stevie wanted a part of that action.
One thing that's never mentioned much
is how great a slide player he really was.
In that band, he just caught fire.
You could just see smoke coming off of the fretboard
when he got a slide out
and just really went at it.
We had lots of practice at The Cellar
so we're forever indebted to The Cellar
to this day, in a way.
Voiceover: By late 1971,
Blackbird were becoming a prominent fixture
on the Dallas circuit.
Vaughan's lead work
opposite fellow guitarist Kim Davis
was establishing his reputation.
In October, after years of poor attendance records
and average grades, the band's success
convinced him to quit high school
and to pursue his musical ambitions
on a full time basis.
Noel: This was a time when Stevie
was really developing his tool set.
He started as a reticent shy kid
and he learned to be a showman in that band.
He just caught fire.
All that dueling with Kim
and all the back-and-forth,
that was a key part of our whole thing.
Plus, we had a black singer.
Now, that was also a big deal in Dallas.
Roddy: You just didn't see
that many black guys in a rock band, for one thing.
Then the way that Christian dressed
he wore these big earrings
and had these sort of mumu things on,
it's like really cutting edge.
We sort of took off in a different way
than the copy bands that I previously played with.
We sort of got a little bit of a cult following
and they were sort of catching on.
We had a friend, Lou Stokes,
he would draw these great posters.
We would start packing little mini concerts
that we were doing.
The kids were starting to kind of catch on to it.
We would have three or 400 people at a gig.
We thought we were on our way to stardom.
(laughs)
Voiceover: Blackbird's local success
was, however, limited by the lack of opportunities
in Dallas itself.
Yet, there was another city, 200 miles south,
that had a growing reputation as a musical hotbed,
Austin.
At the suggestion of their bassist, David Frame,
it was here that the band relocated
at the close of 1971.
Roddy: Mike Hendrid, the pianist
he played with The Mystics,
and a really great pianist also,
he started playing with this band, Crackerjack,
down in Austin.
Frame was really good friends with them.
Frame was going down to Austin
to visit with Mike and watching this band Crackerjack
it was Johnny Winter's old rhythm section,
Tommy Shannon and Uncle John Turner.
He would go down there,
he came back and says,
"Man we've gotta move to Austin. We've got to."
I think David Frame
had a whole lot to do with us moving down there.
Voiceover: Austin was a progressive oasis
in the heart of conservative Texas.
The countercultural revolution that had spread
through the US in the late 1960s,
had been harshly repressed across the state.
Yet, this small college town
had embraced it.
The Vulcan Gas Company,
the first major psychedelic club in Texas,
had opened its doors in 1967.
Showcasing the most groundbreaking acts
then emerging on the national scene,
alongside local bands and blues and R&B legends.
It had been followed
by the Armadillo World Headquarters in 1970.
The venue from which progressive country would blossom.
With numerous smaller venues
scattered throughout the city,
it was an obvious destination
for the frustrated musicians of Dallas.
Joe: That's what happened in the 1970s in Austin.
There was a whole load
of young, ambitious players.
Like Paul Ray, Danny Freeman, Jimmy Vaughan,
Stevie Vaughan, Doyle Bramhall.
They all drifted down from Dallas.
Denny: There was just more of a sense of community
It was just a small -
Dallas is a big town, big spread out.
There was a lot of longhaired people up there,
but it was a big, fast city
compared to Austin.
Austin was a sleepy little college town
with a whole lot of pretty girls in it.
There was a few cities around the country
that kind of had a rep
as being havens for long-haired people and stuff.
Austin was just one of those places.
There was a community of people like that.
There was just a community of like-minded people,
so you felt kind of safe,
and, of course, that would attract musicians.
Austin became a music town in the '70s,
really in my opinion.
Voiceover: Jimmy Vaughan
and his sometime bandmates, Denny Freeman,
Doyle Bramhall, and Paul Ray,
had gravitated to this music town in mid 1970,
looking to establish their brand
of traditional blues among the divergent musical styles
that were flourishing in Austin at the time.
Although he was again following in his brother's footsteps,
when Stevie Vaughan arrived in the city
in late '71 with Blackbird,
he entered a totally different circuit,
playing the popular rock clubs.
Within weeks, he and the band were propelled
to the very top of the scene.
Noel: There was a tendency
for people to follow the local acts
and people were always interested
in who's got the best guitar player,
who's got the best music,
and where's the best scene happening.
Our competition was a band called Crackerjack.
These were founded by two former members
of Johnny Winter's band,
basically his whole band
Tommy Shannon and Uncle John Turner.
They were a great band.
They had a great concept.
They had more original stuff than we did
so it was really between Blackbird and Crackerjack
dominated the scene.
People would go from one bar to the other,
or one gig to the other
just to follow us.
Denny: Jimmy had already moved here,
and so I'd gotten to know Jimmy
and I'd been playing with Jimmy and stuff.
Jimmy and I had become friends
and so Stevie would come down here.
I started getting to know Stevie a little bit.
I think I probably first heard him here
playing with that band, Blackbird.
He was maybe 17, maybe, not much more than that.
"God, now there's two of them."
It was obvious pretty early on to a lot of people
that we're gonna be hearing more from this kid too.
Voiceover: Unlike in Dallas,
audiences in Austin at the time
were more aware of Stevie Vaughan's talents
than those of his older brother.
While Blackbird played at the South Door,
the Waterloo Social Club,
and other venues on the rock circuit
to packed crowds,
Jimmy's band Storm were playing residency
at the One Knite Club, struggling to draw attention
to a musical form that was no longer in demand.
Noel: There was a pure blues scene in Austin, no question,
and Jimmy was right at the center of it
but it was a very separate scene from our circuit.
Some people crossed over
to go hear Jimmy and Storm at the One Knite,
but a lot of people didn't.
They really followed either Crackerjack or Blackbird.
Denny: It wasn't really happening.
People didn't ...
It was like, you gave a gig and nobody came.
I mean sometimes we'd make three or $4 a piece there.
It was like I was really surprised because I thought that -
I mean, I don't know how good we were.
We couldn't have been that bad,
because Doyle was singing and playing drums.
Jimmy was playing guitar, I was playing guitar
and I thought well "Gosh, it couldn't be that bad".
Whether we were good or not,
Jimmy was in the band.
I just thought "Well, he's got cash A already".
It appeared that the further Jimmy got into blues
it was kind of inversely proprotional
to the people that had the interest in him or something.
But we were stubborn,
and determined,
and we had some fairly significant members
among our number,
and so we didn't go away.
It was not easy.
Voiceover: While the blues players
remained in the margins,
in the second half of 1972,
the short reign of Blackbird on the rock circuit
came to an end.
Despite the popularity of the group.
internal differences and a lack of progression
caused band members to depart.
By the end of the year,
similar problems had beset their rivals, Crackerjack.
This led to the initial, brief union
of bassist Tommy Shannon and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Roddy: At a certain point,
David Frame, our bass player,
he decided he wanted to leave the band.
He went with this band Too Smooth.
I think they had a record deal too.
David left and it kind of left us with no bass player
and Crackerjack was starting to dissolve,
so we got Tommy to come over into our band.
Not too long after that,
Christian left the band
and then Bruce Bowland was the singer,
so it was Stevie, Shannon, Bowland, and myself.
We played that way maybe six months.
Voiceover: By December '72,
the constant lineup changing
saw Stevie Vaughan drafted into a reformed Crackerjack.
Yet this lasted only two months before disbanding.
Despite these disappointments,
a new project was about to pull the young guitarist
out of Autstin and back into a recording studio.
Mark Benno, whose career had gained significant momentum
since Stevie joined him on stage back in '69,
was looking for fresh inspiration.
Having moved to the west coast at the tail end of the '60s,
successfully establishing himself,
first in the group The Asylum Choir with Leon Russell,
and later as a solo artist.
Benno returned to his home state in March 1973,
looking to assemble a Texas blues band
for his new record.
The first player he approached was Jimmy Vaughan.
Marc: He said, "No, I don't want to play any rock."
"I'm done with rock.
"I'm just gonna play pure blues and that's it."
"Okay," I said.
"I don't know if I'm just gonna play Jimmy Reed."
"But I'm gonna play that far."
"No, no. That stuff you play is rock and roll"
"compared to what I'm gonna do."
I thought, "Well that's kind of an insult,"
but he's probably right.
He said, "But what about my brother?"
Jimmy had me follow him
over to Mother Blues, a club in Austin,
to see his brother playing.
When I walked in, they were already playing.
He was great
and I thought, "Oh, that probably could work".
Then what happened was,
Jimmy had told Stevie, "You better do it".
"This guy's got a contract."
"If it was me I'd do it."
"Go to Hollywood, go."
And he did.
Voiceover: With Stevie on board,
Benno also enlisted ex Chessmen
Doyle Bramhall and Billy Etheridge
into his new ensemble, The Nightcrawlers.
At the close of March 1973,
the band flew to Los Angeles
and headed to Sunset Sound Studios
in Hollywood,
to begin work on the album.
Brushing shoulders with an array of musical legends,
and introuced to the narcotic exesses
of the LA music scene,
Stevie Vaughan was thrust
into a totally new environment.
Yet, despite his lack of studio experience,
the youngest member of the ensemble
provided both consistency and creativity.
Marc: He never ran out of ideas or made mistakes.
There was no two takes for him.
We'd go in the studio and we'd be trying something
he's playing along with it, it'd be beautiful.
"You wanna do it again?"
"Okay."
He'd play something else beautiful.
We never, ever did a second take
because Stevie was nervous or something, made a mistake.
He was neither.
He would loosen us up.
He kept us loose.
Then he could play such serious parts
that you'd hear them and they just was ...
It burn your sideburns off.
(upbeat music)
♪ (lyrics) Take me down easy
♪ Take me down slow
♪ If you drive like that
♪ You may never want to go
♪ You take me down easy yeah
♪ You take me down slow
Craig: I think in the recording department
we hear that Stevie has refined his style.
He's not as haphazard.
He knows where he's going,
and he can get back to where he came from
more easily in his solos.
Just a more professional approach.
Voiceover: The sessions for the album
not only showcased
Vaughan's growing stylistic and technical abilities,
but also developed previously untapped skills.
Although the project was ostensibly a solo album
for singer and songwriter Marc Benno,
he encouraged his band,
in particular Stevie and Doyle Bramhall,
to collaborate in the composition of certain tracks.
Marc: If I brought anything to the table,
when I was a young guy, I was a songwriter.
These guys began to see it in me
and take the suggestions and ideas from me.
Which I had gotten from Leon,
who's a brilliant sonngwriter.
JJ Cale, who began to write these original tunes,
rather than just do Jimmy Reed or somebody else's tunes,
so these guys picked up quick.
Like and as they were great drummers, great guitar players,
they became great songwriters immediately.
They'd pick that stuff up, and go,
"Whoops, you're not gonna need me much longer."
(slow music)
Craig: This was really Stevie's first foray
into songwriting.
With a big help from Doyle.
They were good at it.
They were a good songwriting team.
Dirty Pool ended up being recorded by Stevie
on one of his albums.
It stayed one of the staples of his stage show
really for the rest of his life.
He came out of the chute with Doyle really fast
and then the band with Mark Benno,
also recorded a song called Crawling.
That originated out of an instrumental
that Stevie created.
The band itself put together some lyrics
and the rest of the music.
Stevie, here at age 19,
has started songwriting.
He didn't really continue it that we know of,
with little exception,
until he started his own band about five years later.
♪ (lyrics) True love is gone
♪ And I was being played for a fool
♪ Love, true love is gone
♪ And I was being played for a fool
♪ I'm turnin' tables on you
♪ 'Coz you been playin' dirty pool
♪ You said you'd call the shots darlin'
Marc: When he would do an interlude
or just anything on the record,
it would just jump off the record.
I always had an expression that
the more of a person that you are,
I don't know if this is true or not,
but the more of a person that you are
and the more substance you have in your being,
then when you make that record,
it's like a thumbprint.
The bigger the print,
the bigger the soul of the person.
He had such a big print,
that when he would play, "Whoa,"
"it would just jump off the record to everything."
You'd go, "Well there he is".
The same with Doyle,
Doyle's voice would just be huge.
Now you have some people,
with a great voice go in to record a record,
the presence is not there,
the soul is not there,
the person, something's not there.
I call it the print.
Both of these guys had gigantic prints.
Voiceover: Despite the obvious talents
of the players he'd selected for these sessions,
when Benno delivered the results to A&M Records,
they were disapoointed by the recordings
and lost interest in the project.
During the summer of 1973,
the band briefly hit the road
as Mark Benno and the Nightcrawlers,
and played a series of shows supporting Humble Pie.
Yet, their drink and drug comsumption
was now out of control.
They were dropped from the tour.
Benno made his way back to Los Angeles
in an attempt to rebuild his career,
while Vaughan and the other band members
returned to Austin.
They stayed together, however,
and continued to play as The Nightcrawlers,
with Doyle Bramhall taking over as the frontman.
Yet, unlike Blackbird,
they had little interest in the rock circuit
and the band settled into a residency
at the One Knite Club.
Stevie Vaughan was now a part
of Austin's marginal blues scene.
Jim: At one point, Marc Benno left.
They became just The Nightcrawlers,
a quartet with Doyle and Stevie,
Bruce Miller, Billy Etheridge on keyboards.
They played around Austin,
and they played around Texas.
Played in Dallas, all over the place.
I roded for The Nightcrawlers.
As far as Stevie's technical abilities,
he was always great.
He always had great technical ability.
He just got more and more intense and more refined.
The Nightcrawlers
was the first time I heard Stevie
start to sound more like a blues player
than a rock player.
He had gotten hold of a,
I believe it was a Howard Roberts
hollow body electric guitar,
which has a very fat body.
He was learning to play Wes Montgomery
Octave Runs
and he was getting that,
there's a song called Chitlins Con Carne.
I don't remember who did it,
but Stevie learned it.
He sounded like a man with a Howard Roberts guitar,
not a man with a rock guitar.
That's the first time
I heard Stevie as a blues player.
Voiceover: Although Vaughan remained on and off
with The Nightcrawlers for over a year,
in Austin, the blues scene still had a very limited appeal
and the band struggled to gain popularity.
Yet in December 1974,
they supported an Austin ensemble,
who was successfully bringing blues and roots music
into larger venues, Paul Ray and The Cobras.
Featuring two ex-members of Jimmy Vaughan's
earlier group, Storm,
this band represented a possible next step for Stevie.
Craig: In the 70s, Paul Ray and The Cobras
were top of the heap in Austin.
They were the hottest band in town.
The music they played was rhythm and blues.
It was easy to dance to.
That brought the girls in
and the girls brought the guys in
but it was the music that held it all together.
The Cobras were the best.
Paul: It was a New Year's Eve in Dallas,
we were playing in a place called Taco Flats.
We had a deal
where the Nightcrawlers were opening.
During the break between bands,
Stevie came up and said, "Can I play with you guys?"
I went "Sure. Of course."
"We could use another instrument."
That's how he got up on the stage
and started playing and everything just picked up.
It was just, he fit.
He was so differential to everybody, and so genuine and all.
He didn't have any sort of an attitude,
he wanted to just keep playing.
He's ready to play some more.
Kid was phenomenal.
Denny: To be honest,
I was going, "Well, gosh."
"I've been carrying it for a year,"
"and it kind of would be nice"
"to have, maybe a piano player really."
But I really liked Stevie, and he was real good.
He was younger than me,
but he was a really good player.
Besides that, everybody else wanted Stevie in the band.
Why wouldn't you?
He always was really nice to me.
He treated me with respect,
and I treated him with respect.
We supported each other, and so it actually
worked out good.
Voiceover: Stevie's inclusion in The Cobras
propelled the band to even greater popularity.
By March 1975, they began a residency
at the Soap Creek Saloon.
Here they would develp a reputation
as one of the most exciting acts on the Austin circuit.
With Vaughan and Denny Freeman's incendiary
and complementary guitar work,
a highlight for audiences.
While they were expanding their fan base,
a new venue appeared in the city,
that single-handedly pulled blues music
back into the spotlight.
Antone's Nightclub, dubbed Austin's home of the blues,
opened on July 15th, 1975.
Its owner, Clifford Antone,
looking to establish a setting
where the greatest names on the national scene
could play alongside less established local talent.
Almost overnight, it changed everything.
Denny: The importance and the significance
of Antone's Nightclub, it couldn't be exaggerated.
It was a great place for blues and for Austin
because if you're into what we were into,
it was the cream of the crop
that was playing here at Antone's, little Austin.
Angela: Clifford Antone tried to make it really easy
by having people stay there,
maybe as long as a week,
make it worth their while to drive down.
A lot of people don't like to fly, or couldn't afford,
or whatever,
so it was hugely important.
Then for all the rest of us,
it was like blues college,
to get to know all of your heroes.
Before that,
I had to go to Chicago
because I wanted to hear
Howlin' Wolf and Magic Sam and Otis Rush and Muddy.
I got to meet some of those people and everything
but it's rather inconvenient
to go all the way to Chicago, to hear Chicago blues.
It was a huge support for all of us
who really did take blues seriously
and realize, because we'd done enough playing around
that it wasn't in demand.
It had gone off of the radio.
There were no longer blues shows on the radio.
None of that kind of support.
People just didn't think
it was hip or cool or anyhting else.
Joe: You've got a club owner
that's willing to basically underwrite all of this
and that's a big difference.
You're not playing little shitholes anymore.
The one night's no longer good enough.
Antone's university is what built the blues scene here
and what made possible
the success of Stevie Ray Vaughan
as well as many other blues players out of here.
Voiceove: With the club booking Muddy Waters,
John Lee Hooker, Lightin' Hopkins,
and the who's who
of the greatest living blues players available,
it soon became a venue
of international renown.
As the white Austin musicians
began to sit in with these legends
it enabled them to develop their own techniques.
In some cases,
to build friendships they'd previously had only dreamed of.
Angela: Back in the early days of Antone's,
we had Albert King.
Albert was one of those really serious guys.
Didn't take any fooling around.
He never felt gratitude
that white people had finally come to the party
and started attending blues shows and so forth.
It was one afternoon,
and I know Clifford. (laughs)
Clifford just realized how much it would mean to Stevie
being a huge Albert fan,
if maybe, maybe he would let him go up on stage with him.
That night, Albert's up on stage wailing of course,
and he gets little Stevie up there with him.
Well, in a very short while,
he realized that Stevie was,
half of Stevie's playing was in agilation
of his own style.
I've never seen such a big smile on Albert King's face.
Well, of course, everybody was thrilled
and especially thrilled for Stevie.
They went on to be (laughs) great friends.
That was a wonderful moment at Antone's.
(blues music)
Voiceover: With the Austin blues scene
given a much needed injection of energy through this venue,
over the next year and a half,
Paul Ray and The Cobras remained
one of the most exciting local acts on the circuit.
Eclipsed only by Jimmy Vaughan's new outfit,
The Thunderbirds, who had become
the house band at Antone's soon after their formation.
Yet, in an attempt to spread their appeal outside of Austin,
it was The Cobras who first entered the studio in late 1976
to produce a 7-inch single.
Craig: With Paul Ray and The Cobras,
Stevie got another opportunity
to go into the recording studio.
The band recorded two songs.
Texas Clover, and the other was Other Days.
The recording was made, essentially,
as a business card for the band.
They needed to be able
to give a demo or something to promoters and club owners
to show them what the band could do,
and so that was the primary purpose
of having this record.
♪ (lyrics) Other days
♪ I see the sun looking to shine
♪ Other ways [unintelligible]
♪ But from my mind
♪ What can I say
♪ Your [unintelligible]
♪ Should be so kind
Paul: Back then it was like a calling card.
Back then you gave them your record.
"Here, here's my record."
On the other day aside,
Stevie just takes off.
There was a space for him and he just jumped at it
and took off playing that solo.
(lively music)
Denny: Stevie played a nice solo on Other Days.
I'm just not sure that it was that exciting
a performance over all.
The song on the other side,
it was an interesting song.
Paul Ray had written a song called Texas Clover,
and it was a nice song.
It was almost kind of country,
the way he originally wrote it,
and we were just messing around with it,
trying to figure out -
Paul wrote it on an acoustic guitar,
and we were trying to figure out what to do with it
and I remember saying, Stevie saying,
"Let's try it with a reggae beat".
I remember going,
"Let's do. Good idea."
♪ (lyrics) Getting down that old highway
♪ When I should be on that
♪ Just do roll
♪ Looking for something going my way
♪ I'm getting [unintelligible]
Joe: The covers single was significant
because it was a single.
It was a local product.
It wasn't like the 60s,
when every band was cutting 45s,
this was a different kind of environment.
There was no music business in Ausitn.
There was like, a couple of recording studios
that were okay.
People weren't making a whole lot of records out of here.
This was a live scene, a live town.
Well, they made a single.
To me, it was okay.
It got a little bit of a local airplay.
The general impression was,
"Yeah, it's good they've got a record out,"
"but that ain't the band."
If you wan to go hear The Cobras,
go hear The Cobras live.
Voiceover: As The Cobras, live,
were going from strength to strength,
their victory in the Austin Sun reader's poll
in March 1977, in which they were named Band of the Year,
secured them better pay and bigger audiences.
For Stevie Vaughan, their performances
were not only showcasing his virtuosity as a guitarist,
but over time,
were also allowing him space to develop as a vocalist.
Paul: I think he learned a lot in The Cobras.
I think it was kind of like graduate school for him
because I don't think he'd ever sung with a band.
I don't think he'd ever fronted a band.
The way I had it set up, me and Denny,
we wanted it to be like a review.
It'd be Denny instrumental, Stevie instrumental,
Rodney were to sing.
Then they'd bring me up
and I'd do the rest of the set.
That's where Stevie learned to front a band
and do all that.
♪ (lyrics) I said all you kids from Texas
♪ Grow so big and tall
♪ All you kids from Texas
♪ Grow so big and tall
♪ All of you like to roam in that g-bird hall
♪ Get high, everybody get high
Denny: To me, it was just kind of obvious
that he had tried to learn from Doyle.
I mean, he'd played with Doyle a lot
when Doyle was singing.
Doyle was, we thought a great singer,
and Stevie could carry a tune,
and it was a manly voice -
I'd be real happy if I could sing that well.
I thought it was good, it was good.
Plenty good enough.
♪ Get high, high, high
♪ Way up in the sky
♪ Really want to move and groove
♪ Like you love to do
Stevie sang with authority.
I always thought that he sang with authority.
From the word go, you know?
Voiceover: By mid 1977,
Vaughan had grown sufficiently confident
fronting The Cobras
that he decided it was time to move on.
After years of weaving in and out
of other people's bands,
he was now ready to form his own.
Angie: He always was looking ahead,
and trying to figure out what to do.
He realized, "You know, I should sing."
"And I should put the pressure on myself"
"to just do that, and have a tie band."
I really admired that
and that's actually, he came to me and said,
"How do I start singing?"
"How do I do this?"
I think he knew he could,
he just sort of needed some suggestions.
Well, I told him, "Pick a favorite song."
"Just start with one song, and do it."
Of course he picked Texas Flood,
which I'd been singing for a few years (laughs)
and haven't been able to sing since.
Since it became his song.
I thought that was the most practical suggestion.
Pick something you like and just go for it.
Paul: He came up to me at a rehearsal
and he said, "Well I'm thinking of getting my own band".
I said, "I think you should, I mean you're a star."
"You know how to lead a band,"
"and you've got all that stuff you wanna play,"
"and I think it's a great idea."
Denny: I think all of us knew
that at some point he was gonna have to do that.
Nobody really knew when,
but I think all of us, I think everybody,
was just kind of waiting for him to be ready to go out
and be Stevie Ray Vaughan.
We just said, "Go do it".
Voiceover: In forming the band,
which he would call The Triple Threat Review,
rather than assemble
whichever Austin players were available at the time,
Vaughan decided to handpick his ensemble.
He approached pianist Mike Kindred,
drummer Freddie Walden, singer Lou Ann Barton,
and Austin blues legend WC Clark,
and successfully convinced them all to join him.
Joe: That was a pretty big leap for him.
It was very ballsy for him to go
approach WC Clark at [Macmorest] Ford,
where WC had his day job,
and here was a guy that was a soul singer,
blues singer, a black man from east Austin,
that had had success.
He'd seen the world,
and here's this scrawny little kid,
saying, "I want to start a band and I want you in it".
Balls, big balls.
Craig: It's possible to characterize Triple Theat Review
as a sort of Texas supergroup.
He'd heard about Lou Ann Barton.
She was a great blues singer out of Fort Worth
and he knew WC Clark.
WC had been in a band called Southern Feeling
with Angela Strehli and others.
Stevie brought all of these elements together
from these other bands and other parts of Texas
into one cohesive unit.
Voiceover: This unit, Triple Threat, was heavily inspired
by the review format of Paul Ray and The Cobras,
in which every member of the band had their time
in the spotlight.
Although he would be handling some of the vocals, himself,
Stevie looked to both WC Clark and Lou Ann Barton
to take the majority of the lead parts.
When the band debuted in August 1977,
they immediately made their mark on the Austin circuit,
in particular, the sultry Barton.
Denny: She was just a sassy little sex kitten
that could sing.
She was just a force, you know?
You couldn't help but acknowledge it when you saw her.
Lou Ann: We're gonna do a song now, the blues,
featuring Stevie Vaughan on slide guitar,
called, "Will My Man Be Home Tonight?".
(blues music)
One, two, three.
(blues music)
♪ Wonder why
♪ Why my man don't treat me right
♪ Wonder why
♪ Why my man don't treat me right ♪
Paul: On opening night, I went to see them,
and I was just blown away at how,
obviously not rehearsed too much
and just enough to "You know that song?"
"You know, okay."
"It's in this key and -"
but it knocked me out.
There was three-part harmony when they needed it
but also everybody got their shot out front.
It was a great band.
Voiceover: Yet, over the coming months,
despite their prestigious lineup,
the band struggled to make too much of an impact
on a scene dominated by Jimmy Vaughan's
now-seasoned Fabulous Thunderbirds,
and the ever-popular Cobras.
Joe: They weren't that successful.
Again, this is like, on a good night,
can pull in maybe 150, 200 people
to some place like Austecks or After Hours
or maybe the Continental Club.
Let me put it in this context,
on Monday night, the Thunderbirds
had the hottest little weekly residency
at this club by the university called The Rome Inn.
That was the biggest thing going.
Sunday nights belonged to Stevie Ray Vaughan
and Triple Threat Review.
You'd be lucky if you get 50 people in there.
Voiceover: Not only were the band
unable to break into the top tier
of the blues circuit,
but the five strung personalities within the ensemble
were also pulling in different directions.
In early May, 1978, Triple Threat Review split up.
Stevie immediately set about forming a new unit,
Double Trouble, with he and Lou Ann Barton
now the sole lead vocalists.
By September, they had settled into a lineup
that included bassist Jack Newhouse,
saxophonist Johnny Reno, and young drummer Chris Layton.
It was as the leader of this unit
that Vaughan began to truly develop.
Yet he still lacked the confidence
to front the band on his own.
Craig: Stevie and the band would come out
and do an hour, 30 minutes or an hour.
Lou Ann would come out
and do the last few songs of the first set.
Then they would feature Lou Ann
pretty much through a second set.
Then for a third set,
Lou Ann would come out, do a few more songs.
Then she would sit down for the evening
and the rest of it would be Stevie's.
It's all incremental steps
to making Stevie the frontman.
He was inching closer and closer to being a trio.
Essentially the early days of Double Trouble,
with Lou Ann, it was a trio plus Lou Ann.
Voiceover: Yet, for audiences,
Vaughan was now becoming the main attraction.
Returning to songwriting for the first time
since the Los Angeles sessions
with Mark Benno and Doyle Bramhall,
he added new originals to the sets,
and became the creative driving force of the group.
In April 1979, a young booking agent, Joe Priesnitz
was invited to attend a Double Trouble concert
to see whether he'd consider signing them
to his newly established agency, Rock Arts management.
Joe: We were trying to build our roster.
and my partner came in one day, and said,
"Hey, we're gonna go see Stevie Vaughan tonight".
I remember like it was yesterday.
We walked into The Armadillo
and they've just gone onstage and just started playing
and it was just one of those moments
where I just went, "Yeah. That's it."
"He has it."
(blues music)
Not that there was anything wrong with Lou Ann,
she was certainly a great part of the band,
and the rhythm section was good.
It was Chris Layton and Jackie Newhouse at that time.
It just swept over me
that yeah, he's got it.
Voiceover: Priesnitz instantly signed Double Trouble
and Rock Arts aimed to spread their appeal beyond Austin.
To aid the promotion of the band,
in June 1979, with the backing of local DJ Joe [Greysi],
Stevie and Double Trouble traveled to Nashville
to work on sessions with legendary Sun Studios engineer
Jack Clement.
The resulting recordings disappointed the band
and went unreleasd.
Yet they remained the only document
of the short-lived lineup.
Nigel: These early recordings
are very interesting because at this stage,
they're kind of a bar band.
It's roadhouse blues.
It's the sort of music
that in your dreams you would like to imagine
every little bar or roadhouse you go into in Texas,
there'd be a band in the corner
playing this kind of music.
It's quite instructive
because some of the tracks in those early recordings
or some of the songs from those early recordings
turn up in more developed versions on Texas Flood,
so you can make that comparison
and they're a lot rawer and earthier.
I think you can still hear in Stevie Ray Vaughan
that this guy has got something special.
♪ (lyrics) Well sittin' here so lonely
♪ Feelin' oh so blue
♪ My baby's tryin' to mistreat me
♪ And I don't know what to do
♪ So I'm cryin'
♪ Why do I have to feel this way
♪ If I can't love my baby
♪ I can't live another day
Craig: We really start to see
the Double Trouble
that is eventually going to take the world by storm.
Stevie and the band
recorded Pride and Joy, Lovestruck Baby, Empty Arms,
I'm Cryin'.
These are some songs that were staples
for Stevie for the rest of his career.
He already had Chris Layton in the band
and with the exception of the fact
that Tommy wasn't in the band yet on bass
this is Double Trouble.
Lou Ann was still there.
She did about half the songs
but on the other half,
it's all Stevie and Double Trouble.
♪ (lyrics) Well I don't have to worry 'bout money
♪ Don't have to worry 'bout clothes
♪ Don't have to worry 'bout anything here's my baby
♪ Goodness knows she got
♪ Sugar coated love
♪ Yeah sugar coated love
♪ He's a real gone baby and I don't mean maybe
♪ He's mine
Nigel: Lou Ann Barton is a fairly limited vocalist, I think.
You can hear this phenomenal guitar player,
and then you can hear this,
well I shouldn't be rude,
average female singer.
I think at this stage,
Stevie Ray Vaughan sees himself as a great guitarist.
There's no false modesty here.
He knows he's got the chops, as they say.
Like a lot of guitarists,
he's probably far less confident about his vocal abilities.
He probably figures that at this stage,
the band needs a specialist vocalist,
if we can put it like that.
When, all the time, as he would shortly prove,
he was more than capable of doing the job himself.
Voiceover: By the Fall of 1979,
Rock Arts' strategy to expand Double Trouble's reach
outside of their Texas comfort zone proved successful.
In November,
they embarked on a tour of the east coast.
Yet, by the end of these dates, with little warning,
Lou Ann Barton quit the band.
With shows already booked throughout Texas in December,
a decision had to be quickly made
about how the band would cope
with the loss of its main vocalist.
Joe: We got the call
and I think it came from Stevie
that Lou Ann left the band.
The band came back.
We had a meeting.
Because we just wanted to figure,
"So should we get another singer?"
"What's the plan here? Should we cancel the dates?"
Which nobody wanted to do.
We were talking about different ideas,
and finally I just said, "So who's gonna sing?"
Stevie looked at me with this dead glare
and said, "I am".
He didn't finish the sentence,
but I know what he was thinking. (laughs)
He was going to call me an expletive
but he didn't.
He held off, he just said, "I am".
I said, "Okay. We'll see you at Steam Boat."
I think it was within three nights of that.
Voiceover: Now a trio,
the loss of Lou Ann in fact strengthened the band.
Stevie discovering
he finally had the confidence and ability
to become a full time frontman.
In 1980, they resumed touring
across Texas and the east coast.
On occasion, performing alongside
Jimmy Vaughan's Fabulous Thunderbirds,
who by now had secured a record deal.
As the world moved into a new decade,
there was also growing support for Vaughan and his band
from a number of interested parties
looking to advance his career.
Stevie had met accountant Eddie Johnson
back in 1978.
This led to a chain of events
that would by 1980, see his day-to-day management
taken over by a pivotal figure, Chesley Millikin.
Craig: Eddie Johnson saw Stevie perform
in Austin, in the fall of 1978.
Stevie was just in a band.
They didn't have a team behind him
to help promote or publicize the band, or an agent.
They had nothing
as a support.
Eddie approached her employer, Frances Carr,
at Manor Downs, in Austin,
and said, "Look, this guy deserves to have a team"
"behind him to back him"
"and to help make the band successful enough"
"that they can survive".
Joe: Frances was a woman of considerable wealth
coming from a really storied Texas ranching family,
the O'Connors, which is one of the first
ranching families in Texas
going back to the 1840s.
She had been road manager for the Grateful Dead.
She ran with a lot of folks,
and that was where she met Chesley Millikin,
who'd been a player in the Ash Grove folk club in LA,
but was a British gentleman
who was the head of Epic UK at one time,
Craig: Chesley was critical to the band's success
from that point, into expanding into larger markets.
Partly because Chesley hired Charles Comer
as a publicist.
Stevie now really had a full team behind the band
with financial backing, accounting, publicity,
and day-to-date management.
Voiceover: Millikin initially attempted
to expand the group.
Yet after numerous unsuccessful auditions
with assorted instrumentalists and female vocalists,
he then looked to strengthen the appeal
of the existing trio.
The band leader himself took on his full name,
Stevie Ray Vaughan, and his rhythm section
would now be identified through the group name,
and Double Trouble.
They would no longer be billed, or even promote
themselves as a blues act,
thus distancing them from a specialist marketplace.
Yet over the coming months,
despite several record companies
expressing interest in the band,
a contract failed to materialize.
Joe: I became kind of the de facto rep for the band
because people would fly in to see him,
certain record company people,
and they would ask me,
so and so's flying in from MCA,
and can you kind of show up
and meet him at the venue
and do the whole thing, which I would.
I can't tell you how many times.
Dozens of these people would watch him play
and then at the end of the night just say,
"Well there are great blues band".
(electrified music)
I would just be dumbfounded.
"What do you mean it's just a great blues band?"
"Can't you see this guy?"
"He's one of the (laughs) most phenomenal players"
that's ever gotten onstage".
To me it was down the road
certainly going to happen at some point.
Somebody was going to recognize his talent
at some time.
It didn't matter what kind of music he liked.
If he saw this guy play,
it was my belief, that he would like him.
Voiceover: Yet no major label offerers
were forthcoming.
Even prominent figures
within the record companies themselves
struggled to secure any interest
in Vaughan and his band.
Jack: A lot of people are telling me about Stevie Ray,
so I was aware of his playing
and I saw him play a couple times
and saw the excitement that people had around him.
I got some tapes from a friend of mine,
and I actually sent those to New York,
and I sent them to the head of A&R at that time
in New York.
I recieved a letter back, with the tapes,
saying, "We're not really interested"
"in signing a blues artist like this."
"Or we would sign a B.B. King or something like that."
Which I should have kept the letter and the tapes,
but I didn't.
I saw there was no interest in him,
and so unfortunately,
I dropped the cause and didn't do anything.
Voiceover: With record companies failing to commit,
in January 1981, the band made a final crucial change
to its lineup.
Bassist Jackie Newhouse
was replaced by the player
who had previously made his name
with Johnny Winter, back in the late 60s,
Stevie's brief Blackbird bandmate, Tommy Shannon.
Joe: The band had been coming together,
Double Trouble, for a while.
It was finally waking up to this trio concept.
One of his heroes, Jimi Hendrix,
that's how he was performed at his best,
and can really play.
I think that made sense.
Also, this predecessor,
the one guy that really made a noise doing Texas blues
and doing it to a rock audience was Johnny Winter.
I don't look at it as
Stevie was going hunting for a name,
but he knew Tommy's work,
and he knew the context that he worked in,
which in the power trio thing was perfect.
Joe: I recall when it went down,
I thought it was kind of sudden.
Then I saw Tommy play
one of his first nights with Stevie,
and it was like, "Okay, I got it".
"This is the combo. This is the combination."
Voiceover: Yet even with a tight band
and an experienced team behind him,
still Stevie struggled to secure a record deal.
After a year of heavy touring,
in 1982, Chesley Millikin passed a video tape
of the trio to Mick Jagger,
and then arranged a private performance
for the Rolling Stones at New York's Danceteria.
Amidst rumors in the national music press
that Jagger was going to sign Vaughan to his label,
after the show, he was impressed,
yet unconvinced of the commercial prospects of the band,
and nothing materialized.
Yet a more ironic and coincidental turn of events
would work in Stevie's favor.
Back in Austin,
producer and Warner Brothers executive Jerry Wexler
had arrived in town to support the release
of Lou Ann Barton's debut album.
At the launch party,
witnessed a Vaughan and Double Trouble performance.
Blown away by the show,
Wexler called Claude Nobs,
the founder and organizer of the Montreux Jazz Festival
in Switzerland,
urging him to book the band
for his summer event.
Nobs duely obliged,
and the subsequent performance would single-handedly
alter the course of the band's career.
Yet Vaughan's flamboyant Texas blues
was far from universally appreciated
when they stepped onto the stage on July the 17th, 1982.
Chris: We didn't have a record.
It wasn't like we had product to go with
and so it was our first unsigned act
to play the festival.
We were just going over their and do a gig.
We were booked on a night in Montreux
where it was predominantly acoustic music.
Where there was somebody sitting with a guitar,
acoustic guitar, upright bass.
No drums.
Or maybe there was, but it was kind of
a brush use situation that kind of thing.
It was a very quiet night.
Emcee: So let's welcome
with Chris Layton on drums, Chris Layton.
(crowd applauding)
Tommy Shannon on bass, Tommy Shannon.
(crowd applauding)
Stevie Ray Vaughan, Stevie Ray Vaughan!
(crowd applauding)
Alan: When Stevie Ray Vaughan appeared at Montreux in 1982,
it had a shocking effect upon the audience.
People were expecting acoustic blues.
They got this heavy duty electric blues sound.
In the recordings of this that have been since released,
you hear the boos and the cat calls
and people just wanting him to get off stage
but then on the other hand it also had great appeal.
(lively blues music)
Joe: I wasn't at Montreux, I'm not in the audience,
but I got the sense it was a fairly purist crowd,
kind of like at Antone's.
The crowd that believed The Thunderbirds were really it
because they did it just like the old guys did it.
Here comes this brash band
that's a little louder and playing kind of rocked up.
Even if it is Freddy King
and he's quoting a guy from his hometown in Dallas,
and he's playing it flawlessly,
maybe it's too loud.
At the end, you hear,
it's a mixed reaction.
It's like, the crowd, there's some cheers.
There's some boos
and the boos are audible
because everybody's not going nuts.
(cheers and boos)
Stevie: Thank you so much.
(cheers and boos)
Joe: But Montreux signified the arrival
of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble
and the revival of American blues music.
There was a lot preceding it.
There was a lot going on.
This just busted it through,
and it made it accessible
in a way that it hadn't been made accessible
in the United States, I think, since Led Zeppelin
and The Yardbirds and the British Invasion bands
were doing blues.
♪ (lyrics) Well it's flooding down in Texas
♪ All of the telephone lines are down
(electrifying music)
♪ Yeah it's flooding down in Texas
♪ All of the telephone lines are down ♪
There'd been this lapse
and when it was least expected,
and certainly not expected from this kid,
he did it.
By wisely infusing all the things that he learned,
so he rocks it up.
Yes, there's a lot of Hendrix in it,
and it's the first guy since Hendrix
that sounds like Hendrix without imitating Hendrix.
(electrifying music)
♪ (lyrics) Well I'm leaving you baby ♪
Stevie was [riffing] off of Hendrix
and the blues he grew up with
the Jump Blues,
and look at it this way,
he was carrying on just as what Johnny Winter had done
and what ZZ Top had done.
He was carrying on that power trio tradition.
It was like straight out of Cream.
You had to take them on that kind of a basis.
They needed to be regarded,
"Are they better than Cream?"
Those are fighting words, man.
"Is this guy going to do Clapton?"
Well, maybe, maybe even better.
Montreux was the throwdown.
Here we are.
It became very clear
with the recordings that followed it
that Stevie brought respect back to blues.
He brought recognition back to blues.
By making it a completely unique, original,
and modern sound again.
Voiceover: In the audience for the show,
where David Bowie and John Paul Hammond,
the son of legendary producer John Hammond,
and both were astonished by Vaughan
and Double Trouble's performance.
The following night,
the band played an impromptu gig
in the more private setting
of The Artist Bar at the festival.
and here they were joined onstage
by singer songwriter Jackson Brown,
who was equally impressed by the Texan ensemble.
Jackson: The atmosphere of the club was really,
it was like a blues club.
It was smoky, after hours, small, you know.
I was playing Montreux and I didn't know anything,
actually I'd heard about Stevie from his manager,
from Chesley Millikin, who was a really old friend of mine.
I didn't see the show
and I really only heard about it.
Actually I was being interviewed
guys from my band came up to where I was sitting
in this restaurant,
really excited, and said, "You have to come down here."
"Excuse us, but whatever you're doing,"
"you've gotta stop and come see this".
Voiceover: The opportunities that these fresh connections
subsequently presented to Stevie and his band,
were invaluable.
While Bowie proposed
that Vaughan play a role on his forthcoming album,
and Hammond enthusiastically passed recordings
onto his influential father,
Brown offered recording time to the band
at his LA studio.
In November 1982, still yet to secure a record deal,
Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble
headed to the west coast,
and sessions began on the material
that would eventually become their debut album,
Texas Flood.
Chris: We thought, "Why don't we take Jackson"
"up on that offer, and let's go to Los Angeles".
Which, we couldn't really even afford
to just go there and go do that,
even if that part of it was for free,
so we booked a small tour.
Jackson: And he showed up
and there was a voice on the end of the phone
saying, "Well, we're here",
and I said, "Hello, who's this?"
He said it was them,
and they were here and that they were ready to record.
I went, "Well, you know its -"
"Okay, wait a second."
"Who wants to record this guy?"
Because it was about to be Thanksgiving holiday
and everybody was planning on leaving
and stop recording.
In that respect, it was really great timing.
The guy that stepped into the spot
was James Gess, who was the second engineer.
A very capable engineer,
and who I later recorded a couple records with.
Chris: We went in, set up and did
played through our show a couple of times each day,
is what it amounted to.
Jackson: It wasn't a recording studio with other people
and other musicians coming in and out
it was just this sort of funky downtown location.
They had a week to do whatever they do
when they were at home or when -
Voiceover: 1983 was the year
in which Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble's
fortunes changed.
Not only did the band
have professional recordings completed for the first time,
they also had a team behind them
trying to build on the momentum
created by the Montreux shows.
In January, Stevie traveled to New York
to begin a week of sessions
for David Bowie's latest album, Let's Dance.
The following month
in an attempt to expand the band's presence
on the live circuit,
Chesley Millikin decided to drop Joe Priesnitz'
Austin-based Rock Arts
and approached Alex Hodges,
a booking agent who had been pivotal
in breaking the Allman Brothers Band
and other southern rock acts across America.
Alex: I got a call,
"Alex, you gotta come see this guy."
"You gotta come see Stevie Ray Vaughan".
It so happened I'd heard his name before,
but I'd never seen him and hadn't heard any product.
Turns out there was no album out.
He had not been picked up by a label,
and time was moving on
but Chesley really believed in him
and said, "Come see Stevie Ray Vaughan"
"and Double Trouble".
I agreed, I sent a guy
instead of going to Texas myself.
My friend, an employee, a youngster,
came back and said,
"We just gotta sign this guy."
"This is your cup of tea, Alex."
I said, "Okay, so what's the criteria?"
Chesley had given a mandate
that Stevie was working clubs.
Chesley Millikin had given a mandate
of no gig under $1000.
Voiceover: Hodges immediately
booked Vaughan and Double Trouble
to support Greg Allman at a show in Atlanta.
Shortly thereafter,
the guitarist who had been trying his trade
in Austin for over a decade,
would finally transcend theTexas club circuit.
On March 15th, 1983,
through John Hammond's influence,
the band signed a record deal with Epic Records,
a subsidiary of CBS.
Two days later,
the title track from David Bowie's forthcoming album
was released.
Let's Dance became the fastest selling single
in the artist's 20 year recording career,
and his first US number one.
The album, issued in the April,
was equally successful, and provided a perfect platform
to introduce Stevie Ray Vaughan to a global audience.
(upbeat music)
♪ (lyrics) Let's dance
♪ Put on your red shoes and dance the blues
♪ Let's dance
♪ To the sound their playing on the radio
♪ Let's dance
Redbeard: The Bowie connection was a mantle of significance
to this new, at that time, unknown guitar player.
Mick Ronson, Earl Slick, Carl [Salamar],
later Reeve [Zebrows],
We better pay attention, this guy knows talent.
With saxophone, Bowie had discovered David Sandborn.
These are some of my favorite players,
that David Bowie had introduced.
He seemed to have a very keen ear and eye
for taking unknown talent
but integrating it into his music brilliantly.
(upbeat music)
♪ (lyrics) Let's dance
Joe: It's a disco song,
and it's a number one dance single.
There's a break in there where you hear
Texas blues.
There's a genuineness that I don't pick up in Mick Ronson.
Mick Ronson, great technician,
figured out a lot of different styles
and plays them all very well.
This is the Texas difference,
and this is where when you get the blues
it's the old line,
"You can't live in Texas"
"if you don't have a lot of soul".
I can't qualify that soul.
It's just either you got it or you don't.
You listen to Let's Dance
and that little guitar track
in the middle, on the break - that's soul.
Voiceover: Not only had Vaughan made an impact
with his appearance on the record,
by late April, he was also beginning rehearsals
with Bowie's band for the singer's
Serious Moonlight world tour.
With an offer for the guitarist in Double Trouble
to also open certain shows,
this appeared the perfect vehicle
to expose them to a global audience.
Yet there were conflicts,
with Epic also wishing to release the recordings
made at Jackson Brown's studio the previous November
as a debut album.
Jack Chase,
who was overseeing the marketing of this proposed LP
across the southwest for Epic,
was among a number of skeptics,
who believed that the Bowie tour
might in fact prove detrimental to Vaughan's career.
Jack: If we didn't break them,
the rest of the country at that point
was going to say,
If you can't get him broken out of Texas,
why should we play them in New York or Seattle or whatever?
Jesse came over and we talked about it and so on.
He asked me what I thought and what I could do.
I told him, "On a new artist like this,"
"it really takes us working together with the group,"
and so on, and that my feeling was him playing with David
was going to get him seen by a lot of people,
but what was it going to do with his career,
as far as working this new album?
I told him, "When you release a new artist in the fall,"
"a new artist."
"You're not going to get anything done with him"
"because all the superstars come out with their artists,"
"and you release a new artist like Stevie Ray Vaughan."
"He's going to be put way in the back of the store,"
"and you're going to lose focus on that artist."
He seemed to understand what I was saying,
and he said, "Let me call you back,"
"and we'll talk to Stevie".
He came back about three hours
and said, "Stevie's off the tour".
Voiceover: It was a key moment
in the young artist's career.
Immediately following the announcement,
the music press began to ask questions
about this young Texan upstart
who had walked out on Bowie.
Yet, what appeared to be career suicide,
instead gave Vaughan an unprecedented amount of publicity,
only a month before the issuing of his debut album.
Seizing on this unexpected good fortune,
Stevie and the band went to work
promoting their forthcoming release.
Jack: He worked every radio station,
every club he wanted to work,
every end store.
I'll say this about Stevie,
it was always true from then until the end.
Stevie was an artist that never said no.
He did every end store you wanted him to do,
no matter what his physical condition was.
He would do everything.
He'd sign every autograph.
He would do everything you wanted him to do,
and that made a big deal for us.
Tommy and Chris were the same,
they would do everything for us,
so that made a big difference.
Voiceover: With over a decade
as a professional musician behind him,
in June 1983, Stevie Ray Vaughan
finally saw his work released to the public.
Although it divided critics at the time,
Texas Flood would become a landmark
in popular music.
The album that revitalized a genre
written off as irrelevant,
and introduced the world
to one of the greatest guitarists of all time.
Nigel: Texas Flood is one of the great debut albums.
I think one thing we have to remember,
is that by the time he comes to record this,
Stevie Ray Vaughan is 29 years old.
There's a maturity there already.
He's comfortable in his skin.
He's taken all of his influences,
and he wears them on his sleeve pretty openly.
He's learned what to do with them,
and how to blend them into his own sound.
I sometimes think, listening to Texas Flood,
that nobody should be allowed
to make their debut album until they're nearly 30.
Because there's a strength there,
it's fully formed, it's fully developed.
(upbeat music)
♪ (lyrics) Well I'm a love struck baby, I must confess
♪ Life without you darlin' is a solid mess
♪ Thinkin' bout you baby gives me such a thrill
♪ I gotta have you baby, can't get my fill
♪ I love you baby and I know just what to do
♪ I still remember and let it be said
♪ The way you make me feel take a fool to forget
♪ I swore a ton of bricks had hit me in the head
♪ And what you do little baby ain't over it yet ♪
Redbeard: I first heard Stevie Ray Vaughan in April 1983.
It was on a cassette, it was a promotional.
I was in my '66 LeMans, Pontiac LeMans
and I drove from the radio station
over to get a hamburger,
and I popped this thing in,
and Pride and Joy was the second song on side one
and I thought, "This is really good".
The thing is, it didn't sound like anything else
in America at the time.
♪ (lyrics) Yeah I love my baby, my heart and soul
♪ Love like ours won't never grow old
♪ She's my sweet little thing
♪ She's my pride and joy
♪ She's my sweet little baby, I'm her little lover boy
♪ Yeah I love my baby, she's long and lean
♪ You mess with her, you'll see a man gettin' mean
♪ She's my sweet little thing
Let's be honest, okay?
It was Men at Work and Duran Duran
and The New Romantics, okay?
Boy George and Culture Club.
I mean, these people were at the top of the charts.
Even if you go rock, you've got Rush and ACDC.
selling gazillions of records.
Police, Synchronicity was that year.
Believe me, I can rattle off to you
the big albums that came out in 1983.
Blockbuster, multi-million sellers, okay?
It's like a tugboat among all these big battleships.
The tugboat was Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble
was this Texas Flood album.
This was the only flavor like that.
I was the program director and the music director.
I went back to my station in Memphis, Rock 103.
We added Pride and Joy what's called "out of the box",
meaning the first week it's available
to play on the radio, we added it.
(electrifying music)
Joe: I've always been foolish
for songs like Love Struck Baby and Pride and Joy.
He synthesized, learned all the stuff,
and then spat it back out, and that's his.
It's not someone else's song.
Texas Flood the album announces to the world,
"Hey folks, Texas blues is back."
"It's dominant, it's better than ever".
Yet, Lenny, this is Stevie Ray Vaughan
the complete musician.
(mellow music)
Lenny's like a whole other side
and that's the first hint, this guy isn't just a blues man.
He isn't just a power trio band leader.
He is truly a great guitarist.
and instrumentalist of his own right.
That's transcending whatever kind of categories
you want to stuff him into,
so that album, wow.
Voiceover: Following the album's release,
the band immediately hit the road,
playing shows across the US and Canada,
as well as the Redding Festival in the UK
and a subsequent European tour.
Yet, to reach larger audiences,
Vaughan was still going to have to open shows
for more popular artists.
With a sound that was so conspicuously absent
from the modern marketplace,
looking for the right supporting slots
in which to fit the band proved difficult.
Although they were placed on bills
opening for contemporary artists,
Alex Hodges also considered
booking them to support older classic rock acts.
This led to their first arena tour with the Moody Blues.
Alex: We debated that.
My own staff said, "Don't do that."
"It's too old of an audience."
I thought that this audience
would appreciate Stevie's music, A.
B, Stevie would be geared to just blow them away.
And, also that he would be on a big stage.
It was an arena tour
when we accepted the opportunity to go out with Moody Blues.
We did it, and that worked.
We bridged the gap between
a little bit younger audience who
was finding him in the clubs
they're going to listen to his records,
and take an advantage to some of that style of music
that was out there and that had been so successful.
Voiceover: Shortly after the closing show
of The Moody Blues tour in December 1983,
Vaughan headed to Ontario, Canada,
to be reunited with Blues legend Albert King.
The performance filmed for the In Session tv show
saw a guitarist who had suddenly been propelled
to international fame, return to the music
that had taken him there,
alongside his greatest inspiration.
(soulful music)
Alan: With Texas Flood, Stevie Ray Vaughan
demonstrated his mastery of the guitar.
When he recorded with Albert King,
he showed his ability to lay back.
♪ (lyrics) Born under a bad sign
♪ I been down since I begin to crawl
♪ If it wasn't for bad luck,
♪ I wouldn't have no luck at all
♪ Hard luck and trouble is my only friend
♪ I been on my own ever since I was ten
♪ Born under a bad sign
♪ I been down since I begin to crawl
It's very impressive, the extent to which Stevie
was able to feed and nurture young musicians.
Young musicians
often want to blow the music away
and he held back.
It was reverential in a way.
A great amount of respect.
Joe: That was the best validation of all,
because that was the bad ass
who would never give anyone any quarter,
acknowledging "This is my guy."
"This guy does it, he does it like I do it."
"He may even do it better"
"but I respect the hell out of him."
Getting respect from Albert King
does not - you can't buy that.
(soulful music)
Very few players could play Albert King
and do it well, and do it authentically,
and get Albert King to even acknowledge,
"Hey, they can do me pretty good".
Stevie was that one guy,
and to me, that's when you realize,
this is not a local thing.
This is not a fluke.
This got nothing to do with management,
or talent scouts, or record labels.
This is a musican getting respect
from the musician he respected most.
Voiceover: Having both reinvigorated Texas blues
and firmly established himself internationally,
over the following years,
Vaughan would blaze a distinctive trail
through the contemporary music world.
Denny: Stevie loved to come to Antone's
and just walk up there with his buddies
and play some blues.
I don't think he liked anything better than that
but when it came time for him to write songs
or make record, I don't think
he wanted to be limited to just playing blues.
Joe: Stevie became a rock star.
When I say rock, that means,
you can be a blues man,
but rock star is something much bigger,
and more all-encompassing.
People were hearing him
in a different context then matched up
with Albert King or Larry Davis.
It's a new period of exploration.
You don't know where he's really going to go with it
but he's definitely out of his comfort zone
and taking more risks.
Voiceover: Yet these risks,
included seriously jeopardizing his health.
As his popularity soared,
Vaughan's lifestyle of excess
would spiral out of control.
The end of the final decade of his life,
was however remarkable,
not only for his successful rehabilitation,
but for the renewed passion he brought
to his music.
Janna: The schedule is so hectic,
and so supported in that way,
because you just keep going,
because there's money to be made, right?
The human element and suffering gets taken out.
He's getting frail, he's trying to keep up.
He knows there's issues he's trying to deal with
and this isn't the way to be dealing with them.
It was a new beginning.
It was like, "Okay, this is my bottom."
"I don't have many choices here."
"It's either I die, I end up in jail,"
"or I get better."
Reese: He was concerned
about, would he have the fire in his plan
that he had before.
He just didn't know,
because he'd never gone through rehab before.
It turned out to be a groundless worry.
Redbeard: All he had to do was look into the In Step album.
The sound was unbelievable.
What happens is, over time,
you don't realize how sloppy somebody gets
when they're in the throes of substance abuse.
It all came together.
It all became in focus.
This really healthy Stevie Ray Vaughan
playing just outside of himself
and singing like he'd never sung before.
To me, what's important
about the life and music and legacy
of Stevie Ray Vaughan
is that he confronted his demons,
and he won.
(lively music)
(mellow blues music)