There is no real blues without torture. And what Stevie Ray Vaughan went through in order to produce his stunning range of guitar sounds and expressions was a severe punishment in itself.
To optimise the tone, he would use incredibly heavy and thick strings, which were actually painful to play in a blues style – sometimes slicing into the tips of his fingers as he pushed them into wide bends. The pain was clearly visible on his face, and the guitar fingerboard literally convulsed with the power of his vibrato. This was a man for whom no agony was too great in the name of musical expression.
On Texas Flood, SRV’s first album, you hear that tortured brilliance. Guitar playing in which every single note has its own personality, and the tonal flavours can rapidly shoot across an entire musical rainbow.
The whole album is blues-based, and solidly backed by Double Trouble – alias drummer Chris Layton and bassist Tommy Shannon – Vaughan provides lead vocals as well as the spectacular lead and rhythm guitar.
SRV was heavily inspired by Jimi Hendrix, but unlike so many of the guitarists who cited Hendrix as an influence, Vaughan could convincingly mimic the ‘sixties innovator’s technique. That’s another element which really comes across in the performances on Texas Flood. It’s almost like a form of channelling at times.
My two picks of the playlist are Testify and Lenny. Both instrumentals, but very different in pace and delivery. The relaxed Testify is truly, truly beautiful, with the 5-way Stratocaster switch set (mostly) to position 2, an eminently sensitive touch, the crispest attack and articulation, highly intuitive use of the guitar’s vibrato arm, and some of the most attractive note combinations you can imagine. With quality production and some gorgeous reverb it is very, very spiritual.
In contrast, Lenny is a burning, uptempo showcase of Vaughan’s technical mastery. To play like that on any guitar would be a spectacle. To play like that on a guitar with the kind of strings SRV used was heading into miracle territory. Although it appears last on the Texas Flood album, Lenny was often an opener in SRV’s live sets around the time of release.
Tragically, after beating a serious drug problem, Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash in August 1990. By then, his influence was deeply ingrained into the guitar playing community, to the point where the world’s premier guitar manufacturer – Fender – created a posthumous SRV signature model Stratocaster for the commercial market. They also modelled a set of Stratocaster pickups, called the Texas Specials, to help recreate the Stevie Ray Vaughan tone. If only it had been that simple to recreate his actual playing.
The cassette is a 1983 release, on the Epic label, and manufactured in the fading-from fashion off-white plastic. It has Dolby, but the tape media looks like a pretty cheap ferric composition, and there’s nothing in the fidelity of the reproduction to contradict that.
But you wouldn’t really want a massively hi-fi “chromey” sound for an album like this. It works well with a ferric warmth and a bit of frequency clipping at the top end of the spectrum.
Tape Tardis 