Texas Flood Read online

  BOB GLAUB, Jackson Browne’s bassist: After we played our set, I was wandering around the casino and followed the sound of muffled music. I opened the double doors to the bar, and it was like a 747 jet engine going off in my face! They were playing an up-tempo song—a real fast double shuffle with incredible power, intensity, and volume—and I was mesmerized. I stood at the back of this small, dark room, with maybe a hundred people at tables until the end of the song, when I ran to the phone, called everyone in the band, and screamed, “You’ve got to get down here right now!”

  Jackson Browne jamming with Double Trouble at the musician’s bar in Montreux, Switzerland. This is where it all began. (Donnie Opperman)

  RUSS KUNKEL, drummer for Jackson Browne and countless others: Bob goes, “You have come down to the bar immediately.” I ask why, and he says, “I don’t have time to explain. I have to call Jackson and everyone else. Just come!” So I go down, and there’s a little club with a tiny corner stage that could barely fit a drum kit. Something very special was going on, and we all sat there with our chins on the floor, amazed at the sounds three people were making.

  GLAUB: Almost everyone in Jackson’s band came in one by one. They invited us all to sit in, and almost everyone did.

  RICK VITO, Jackson Browne’s guitarist: I may have been the only guy who didn’t come. I was visiting with a friend when Bob called with great excitement and said this guy sounded like Hendrix. I said, “I don’t want to hear another blues guitarist imitating Hendrix.” What a mistake!

  KUNKEL: Visually, Stevie was beautiful. He looked like an angel with a devil’s smile, and he had this uncanny ability to deliver so much power with a light touch, a combination that made him so unique. He lit it up. I didn’t play. I thought they were perfect and was yelling, “Play all night!” There were no frills, but Stevie’s guitar playing was spot-on, and he had a great voice. It was just raw, beautiful All-American blues, and it was sensational.

  GLAUB: Stevie had that incredibly powerful X factor and played with an intensity that I hadn’t heard beyond guys like Albert King and Albert Collins. And the sound of the three-piece band was killing. I was with Chesley and Lenny, who could not have been nicer. On a break, I met Stevie, Chris, and Tommy, and we immediately struck up a lifelong friendship.

  Montreux postcard from Stevie to Cutter. (Courtesy Cutter Brandenburg Collection)

  LAYTON: We jammed until 7:00 a.m. When we were done, Jackson said that he had a studio in LA and we were welcome to come record tracks free of charge anytime.

  RICHARD MULLEN, producer/engineer of Texas Flood, Couldn’t Stand the Weather, and Soul to Soul: Chesley was dating Jackson’s sister, which is how that came about.

  VITO: Chesley knew Jackson. Before Montreux, we played a festival in Ireland, and afterwards, he and I were sitting in our bus when this guy came on and he and Jackson hugged, and Jackson introduced me to his old friend Chesley. He asked Chesley what he was up to, and he said, “I’m working with this brilliant Texas guitarist Stevie Vaughan—Jimmie’s brother—but having trouble getting him a recording deal or into the studio.” And Jackson said, “I have a loft studio in downtown LA, and if you’re working with him and say he’s good, he is welcome to use it for free.” He had already made that offer.

  LAYTON: The truth is that, after all the excitement of Montreux, we were back to square one, with no real prospects at all other than the offer from Jackson.

  OPPERMAN: When we got back to the States, it was back to the grind.

  12

  CALIFORNIA DREAMING

  Big Jim and Martha Vaughan see Stevie and Double Trouble off to Switzerland. (Donnie Opperman)

  Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble returned from Switzerland to Austin on July 23, 1982, and went back to grinding it out on the club scene. On September 23, they opened for the Fabulous Thunderbirds at Nick’s Uptown in Dallas, earning a rave review from The Dallas Morning News. They played a triumphant twenty-ninth birthday show for Stevie at Antone’s on October 2, going until 3:30 in the morning, and opened for Johnny Winter at the Austin Opera House a week later. They were firmly established as hometown heroes, but events in Montreux and over the previous year had provided at least a glimpse of the possibilities of something much larger.

  “We needed to make something happen and thought, ‘Why don’t we take Jackson up on the offer and go to Los Angeles?’” Layton recalls. “I don’t think Jackson expected us to do so, but Stevie called, and he agreed to give us seventy-two hours of free time over Thanksgiving weekend. Even though the studio time was free, we couldn’t really afford the trip, so we had to set up gigs on the West Coast just to cover things.”

  Double Trouble drove the 1,500 miles from Austin to Los Angeles in a roundabout way, stopping for two shows in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and then heading north for a trio of gigs in the Bay Area—with John Lee Hooker and Elvin Bishop at the Keystone clubs in Palo Alto and Berkeley and with the Doors’ Robby Krieger in San Francisco. They arrived in Los Angeles on November 22.

  LAYTON: All of us and our gear crammed into our old milk truck that leaked oil, gas, coolant. Any kind of liquid that could leak, leaked.

  SHANNON: The Sky King!

  LAYTON: It was aptly named because we got airborne on the trip out there, when I hit an entrance ramp on I-20 a little too fast. We had a bed in there that we took turns sleeping on, which was suspended on this track …

  SHANNON: Every time you hit the brakes, the bed would go flying forward. We had just enough money for gas to get to our gigs in California.

  LAYTON: We had to play the gigs to survive. Two full days were set aside to record. We were just making tape, hoping that maybe it would result in a demo a real record company might actually listen to. We rolled into Jackson’s Downtown Studio, and the guys working there were mildly annoyed because it was Thanksgiving weekend. We were like, “Hey, you guys got any tape?” We actually recorded over some of Jackson’s demos for Lawyers in Love.

  VITO: Jackson had just set up the studio for Lawyers in Love. The first thing we did there was “Somebody’s Baby” for the Fast Times at Ridgemont High movie, then the Lawyers in Love album. Then Stevie and the guys came in.

  SHANNON: Downtown really was just a big warehouse with concrete floors and some rugs thrown down. We found a little corner, set up in a circle looking at and listening to each other, and played like a live band.

  LAYTON: Jackson’s engineer, Greg Ladanyi, was there to take care of us, but I don’t think he really wanted to be there.

  VITO: Greg didn’t dig it. He thought it was just loud blues.

  LAYTON: We’d brought in Richard Mullen, and the first thing that happened was that we almost came to blows! We said, “Hey, we brought our own engineer,” and the reaction was, “Jackson sent me here to set this up for you guys, and I’m taking care of the studio.”

  SHANNON: That was within the first minutes of being there, and suddenly, it didn’t seem like such a good idea after all.

  LAYTON: We didn’t want a big hassle; we just wanted to put some songs on tape.

  Not wanting to ruffle any feathers and grateful for the free time, Vaughan had not objected when Browne and Ladanyi balked at having an outsider behind the console, but by the time they broke for dinner on the first night, the guitarist was vocally upset about the results.

  “I was just standing in the corner with my hands in my pockets, and Stevie kept looking at me, like, ‘Help!’ He was not happy with the way things were going,” recalls Mullen. A Texas musician and friend of the band who had been coming to their shows and running sound gratis, Mullen just happened to be in town, recording with singer Christopher Cross, who was working on his second record, Another Page.

  Over dinner, Mullen urged the shy front man to exert his will, reminding him that this was his shot and his show. “I told him he was the only one with any clout, and he could do things if he wanted to,” says Mullen.

  Returning to the studio newly emboldened, they found that Ladanyi ha
d left. In his place was James Geddes, Browne’s second engineer, who Layton says did not think his job involved more than “pushing the Stop and Record buttons.” So Mullen took over, tuned the drums, and dialed up the sounds he wanted to hear on Vaughan’s and Shannon’s amps. He also employed some sound baffles between the players to decrease leakage and allow cleaner tracks of each instrument without forcing the band to physically separate and lose the “live” vibe.

  MULLEN: We had recorded one track and were listening back to it when Jackson walked in. He took one look at me and asked what was going on. After listening to what we’d done, he said, “Well, it sounds a hundred times better than when I left. You obviously know what you’re doing, so the studio is yours for the next two days.”

  LAYTON: We’d spent about half a day going through this political stuff, so it was already late when we tried to get down to the business of recording.

  SHANNON: By the time we’d gone through all of that, got Richard behind the board and got sounds, we only had time to cut two songs the first day. The second was the only one we used, and it was “Texas Flood.”

  LAYTON: The studio was a big warehouse, about twenty thousand square feet, and we set up in the middle like a gig, in close proximity, facing each other in a little triangle. Stevie and Tommy were only about six or seven feet away from me, and we just played, with bleed [microphone leakage between the instruments] all over the place.

  MULLEN: I wanted the band’s reality to be as close as possible to what they were used to playing live, so I didn’t let them use headphones. I wanted them to play like it was a gig, with the same sense of abandon. If you give a musician the chance to think about what they are doing in the studio, they’ll often mess up. I looked at their set list and said, “Let’s go through the tunes just like a show.”

  LAYTON: Countless people have told me how much they loved Stevie’s guitar tone on Texas Flood. There was literally nothing between the guitar and the amp. It was just his Number One Strat plugged into a Dumble amp called Mother Dumble, which was owned by Jackson Browne. The real tone just came from Stevie, and that whole recording was so pure; the whole experience couldn’t have been more innocent or naïve. If we had known what was going to happen with it all, we might have screwed up. We just played. The magic was there, and it came through on the tape.

  MULLEN: We were using one twenty-four-track machine, but I was really interested in doing it in a sixteen-track, two-inch format. This way, I could play the tape on my sixteen-track back home [at Riverside Sound] to record the vocals, which is what we ended up doing. Stevie’s setup was so simple, so we only used fourteen tracks.

  Moving through the greatest hits from their shows, the band cut “Texas Flood” on day one, “Tell Me” and “I’m Cryin’” on day two, and “Love Struck Baby,” “Pride and Joy,” “Testify,” “Rude Mood,” “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “Dirty Pool,” and “Lenny” on day three, November 24, 1982.

  SHANNON: On our second full day, we knew we had to get it on. During “Testify,” Stevie broke a string halfway through. So we cued up the spot and punched in the whole band; I defy anyone to hear that punch-in.

  LAYTON: It was the anti-record! We didn’t do any of the things that usually happen when you make a record—hit the drums, go listen, play some guitar, go listen—because we didn’t have any time, and this record proves that all of that stuff doesn’t really matter. The only reason it’s a record is because it was recorded. We cared, but it wasn’t that big a deal. Afterwards, we did a few more dates and went home.

  November 1982–January 1, 1983 booking receipts, including the five shows in California before and after cutting Texas Flood, for which the band made $920 total. (Courtesy Joe Priesnitz)

  GLAUB: Right after they finished recording, they played a club called the Blue Lagoon Saloon in Venice, a little divey place where local bands played, and there were about ten people there. No one knew who the fuck he was.

  BENTLEY: Stevie called and asked if I could get him another gig, saying they needed gas money to get back to Texas. I was booking bands at Cathey de Grande, in the basement of a Chinese restaurant. The owner said they had a band that night, but I told him how great Stevie was, and he said, “He can play first for $200.”

  They came into this little club, and he was loud as anything I had ever heard. He was just unleashed after a few days feeling constrained in the studio. It was one of the best times I ever saw him; he was on another planet in front of fifty to seventy-five people, most of them guitar players. He got his $200, and they left. I think they drove nonstop to Texas.

  LAYTON: We drove straight through, twenty hours, stopping only for gas. Stevie and I may even have switched drivers without stopping once or twice, taking the wheel and stepping over each other. Ridiculous. The great opportunity was that we didn’t have a pot to piss in and we got to record for free. We didn’t sense that we had just gotten our big break.

  13

  SERIOUS MOONLIGHT

  While Double Trouble was in Los Angeles, Vaughan received a call on the house phone in the apartment they were renting that would prove to be another momentous occurrence.

  Recalls Layton, “The phone rang at three in the morning, and this quiet English voice said, ‘Is Stevie Vaughan there?’ I said, ‘Damn, who is this?’ ‘This is David Bowie.’ I’m thinking, ‘You mean, the Thin White Duke? Ziggy Stardust? That David Bowie?’ I paused and said, ‘Oh, just one minute.’

  “I ran into Stevie’s room, shook him awake, and yelled, ‘Get up, get up! David Bowie’s on the phone!’ They talked for a while, and then Stevie said that Bowie asked him if he wanted to cut some tracks in New York for his new record and maybe join his band for a world tour. Bowie had expressed interest in hiring Stevie the very first night he met him, but no one took it too seriously.”

  Adds Shannon, “Stevie was really excited about being asked to play on Bowie’s next record. At that point, he also thought we were going to open the shows, because that’s what Bowie told him.”

  Back in Austin, as Stevie made plans to go to New York and record with Bowie, the band and Mullen worked on the Browne tapes at Riverside Sound, where Vaughan recut most of the album’s vocals.

  MULLEN: I gave Stevie two tracks to work with, and he would cut the vocal part for each song twice. We would use either the best of the two tracks or do a quick comp [comping tracks means to edit parts together from different takes]. Overall, there was no finagling of anything on Texas Flood; it was about as live and true to a performance as it could possibly be. When we were done, I did some mixes and ran off a cassette for Stevie.

  Joe Priesnitz’s booking calendar for Stevie, January–May 1983. Note David Bowie sessions and the next week, when Boz Scaggs was booked and canceled. (Courtesy Joe Priesnitz)

  LAYTON: The Texas Flood tapes were in someone’s garage in South Austin. Necessity is the mother of invention, and we needed to get those recordings exposed. Cutter was the one who really made that point to us. Stevie was looking at a heavy commitment to Bowie, and interest in the tapes would have reminded him of where his heart lay and what he always wanted: to have his own band. It was not inconceivable that the tapes could have been forgotten, and we couldn’t allow that.

  Chesley Millikin, manager. (Chris Layton)

  Tommy, Cutter, and I conference-called Chesley to discuss this, and he said gruffly, “Don’t bother me! Stevie’s busy with David Bowie!” We asked him to take the tapes to somebody and see if we could get a deal. He said, “Well, that’s not a bad idea.” Expecting Stevie to get back in a milk truck after that run with Bowie seemed ridiculous, so we thought that we’d better up the ante and try for salvation.

  Vaughan flew to New York in early January to join Bowie and producer Nile Rodgers at the Power Station studio. Most of the recording for what would become Let’s Dance was already complete.

  NILE RODGERS, producer, David Bowie’s Let’s Dance and the Vaughan Brothers’ Family Style: Almost all the musicians and enginee
rs on Let’s Dance were mine. Bowie told me about this amazing new guitarist that he had heard in Montreux that he thought would be great for the album’s solos. The first time I heard Stevie play was when he played my gold-plated hardware Fender Stratocaster, about twenty minutes before he heard “Let’s Dance” in the Power Station Studio C control room.

  CARMINE ROJAS, bassist on Let’s Dance: There was talk about getting Albert King to play on “Let’s Dance,” because David was a genius at putting opposite forces at work and understanding what would work brilliantly. He heard that style of guitar on some of these songs from the start.

  RODGERS: Carmine is getting the story a little mixed up. He’s remembering me saying after hearing Stevie’s first sparsely noted solo, “Why didn’t we just get Albert King?” That was my first thought, but I regretted saying that almost instantly after realizing how carefully Stevie was listening and respecting the space. It didn’t take me long to realize Stevie was something pretty special.

  BOB CLEARMOUNTAIN, Let’s Dance engineer and mixer: We did Stevie’s guitar solos and a lot of David’s final vocals after the band tracks were done. Stevie just had his Strat, a cord, and a Super Reverb amp, which stood out because so many guitar players at the time would bring in multiple racks and huge pedal boards. He made the most incredible sounds and was the sweetest guy.

  ROJAS: I had finished my work and was back in the Power Station for another session, and I saw David and Nile and went in as they were recording Stevie Ray’s guitar parts. I was astounded. He was set up playing crazy loud, but beautifully and with the best tone, and he was fully enveloped inside the music. He was amazing to watch.