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Texas Flood

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SRV
Volume XX | Month Day 20XX
Hello John,
Being from Texas I can never get enough of the Vaughan brothers. Stevie died ion that fateful night 31 years ago last Friday. I think it's still fresh in a lot of Blues lovers memories. He and Jimmie brought the spotlight back on the Blues like it hadn't been in a long while. I saw him play a number of times, the last time in Santa Barbara, of all places. But I could go on and on. Please read the article. It's good. We've got our annual Labor Day Fundraiser coming up on Sunday. It's an afternoon of great music from six acts who have graciously donated a set to help raise funds for Blues Blast '21. Join us, won't you. The Rhythm Room has a whole string of good shows on tap to help us get back in the groove. Get your shot. Maybe you'll save your and your neighbor's lives. See y'all on Sunday!! Sincerely, Jim Crawford - PBS
Blues To Use www.coldshott.com The Sugar Thieves www.sugarthieves.com Gary Zak & The Outbacks www.outbackbluesband.com Hans Olson www.hansolson.net Rocket 88s www.rocket88s.net JC& The Rockers www.thejukerockers.com Carvin Jones www.carvinjones.com Hoodoo Casters www.hoodoocasters.com Rhythm Room ­­­www.rhythmroom.com ­­­­­­­Nina Curri www.ninacurri.com Paris James www.parisjames.com Mother Road Trio www.motherroadtrio.com Blues Review Band Reverbnationbluesmanmike
Big Daddy D & The Dynamites Facebook www.bigdadddyd.com Cadillac Assembly Line Facebook Innocent Joe and the Hostile Witnesses Facebook Chuck Hall Facebook Pop Top Facebook Tommy Grills Band Facebook Sweet Baby Ray SweetBabyRaysBlues.com Thermal Blues Express Thermal Blues Express.com Tuesday, August 31 Gypsy & Hooter’s Blues JAM, 6 p.m., Pho Cao, Scottsdale Wednesday, September 1 Chris Duarte, 8 p.m., Rhythm Room, Phoenix Tool Shed JAM, 7 p.m, Blooze Bar, Phoenix Johnny Miller JAM, 7 p.m., Coop’s, Glendale Thursday, September 2 40 Acre Mule, 8 p.m., Rhythm Room, Phoenix Hans Olson, 6 p.m., Handlebar, Apache Junction Friday, September 3 Sugar Thieves, 9 p.m., Rhythm Room, Phoenix Carvin Jones, 7 p.m., Wicked Brews, Phoenix BluZone Duo, 6 p.m., Voodoo Daddy’s, Tempe Leon J, 11:30 a.m., DA Ranch, Cornville Saturday, September 4 Rhythm Room Re-launch Party (see poster), 7 p.m., Rhythm Room, Phoenix Big Pete Pearson, 8 p.m., Westside Blues & Jazz, Glendale JC & The Rockers, 7:30 p.m., Fibber Magee’s, Chandler Blues Review Band, 6 p.m., Voodoo Daddy’s, Tempe Dry Heat Blues Band, Acme Blues Band & Lila Sherman Blues Band, 2 p.m., Yucca Tap Room, Tempe Leon J, 11:30 a.m., DA Ranch, Cornville Sunday, September 5 Phoenix Blues Society Fundraiser (see poster), NOON, Rhythm Room, Phoenix Carvin Jones, 3 p.m., Catching Flights Bar, Gilbert Carvin Jones, 8 p.m., Rhythm Room, Phoenix Leon J, 11:30 a.m., DA Ranch, Cornville Monday, September 6 Hooter’s Monday Night Blues JAM, 7 p.m., Starlite, Glendale

SRV
By Bill Millikowski It was on August 27 that the news broke. The first flash came over the Associated Press wire that Monday morning in 1990 at about seven o’clock: ‘Copter crash in East Troy, Wisconsin. Five fatalities, including a musician.’ Keen-eyed staffers at the Austin American-Statesman caught that item and began putting the pieces together as AP provided fresh details every half-hour: the mysterious ‘musician’ soon became ‘a member of Eric Clapton’s entourage’, and then ‘a guitarist’. By 9.30am, rumours spread that Stevie Ray Vaughan, Austin’s favourite son, was on board the crashed aircraft. At 11.30am Clapton’s manager confirmed the worst: Vaughan was indeed among the passengers in the five-seater helicopter that slammed into a fog-shrouded hillside near southeastern Wisconsin’s Alpine Valley ski resort. Stevie Ray had boarded the aircraft after a rousing all-star finalé/jam on Robert Johnson’s Sweet Home Chicago along with Clapton, Robert Cray, Stevie’s brother Jimmie Vaughan and Chicago blues legend Buddy Guy, all of whom ripped it up before an ecstatic crowd of 25,000 adoring fans. Four Bell 260B Jet Ranger helicopters awaited the artists and their respective entourages following the show. The caravan of blues stars departed from Alpine Valley at two-minute intervals. The first, second and fourth ’copters landed without incident at Chicago’s Meigs Field. The third, carrying members of Clapton’s entourage and Stevie Ray, never made it. Poor visibility due to dense fog is prominent among factors blamed for the crash. By noon the capital city of Texas was in a state of shock. SRV’s death was the most devastating blow to the Lone Star State’s music community since Buddy Holly, along with Richie Valens and the Big Bopper, went down in an Iowa plane crash 31 years earlier. Soon the entire town of Austin was mourning its homeboy. By 5pm, merchants had posted signs proclaiming ‘We Love You Stevie’ and ‘So Long Stevie’ outside their stores. Even the Holiday Inn replaced the cheery ‘Welcome Conventioneers’ on its marquee with a sombre ‘SRV R.I.P.’ Plumbing stores, Tex-Mex restaurants, musical instrument stores, donut shops – all flew the flag of grief in this central Texas town, where Little Stevie Vaughan, the skinny kid from Oak Cliff, became Stevie Ray Vaughan, home-town hero and Austin’s musical ambassador to the world. In the two decades since his passing, SRV’s impact on the music scene has become more and more pronounced. His influence – his searing guitar style, eloquent songwriting and consummate musicianship – is undeniable on the new generation of blues rockers like Joe Bonamassa, Philip Sayce and John Mayer, while his classic albums such as Texas Flood and Couldn’t Stand The Weather are now justifiable stalwarts of the blues canon. On that fateful day, though, fans began converging on Zilker Park, seated side-by-side in the darkness with candles; 3,000 points of light flickering in a sea of sorrow. His music united everyone, it seemed: tattooed Chicano bikers, besuited lawyers and crystal-carrying New Agers mourned in silence together. Young guitar slingers in the crowd caressed their Strats, Buddhists chanted and old friends wept openly as disc jockey Jody Denberg pumped a steady stream of SRV through a makeshift PA system in the park. The sound of Stevie Ray’s stinging Strat pierced the air and went directly to the hearts of the huddled masses, offering bitter-sweet solace to the bereaved. As mourners gathered at Zilker Park, others instinctively headed to the club Antone’s, a focal point of the Austin blues scene throughout the mid-70s and a favourite hangout of the Vaughan brothers in their formative years. One fan fondly recalled the night in 1978 when Stevie Ray went toe-to-toe on stage at Antone’s with Otis Rush, the great left-handed bluesman who wrote Double Trouble, the tune after which SRV named his band. Another described the night he saw Little Stevie play with Albert King back in 1975. A younger fan related, in still-awed tones, his excitement at witnessing a 1987 jam when Stevie Ray and brother Jimmie were joined on stage by U2’s The Edge and Bono. By 9pm local TV stations began converging on Antone’s, their cameras capturing the testimony of an obviously shaken Clifford Antone, the club’s well-known owner. “I met Stevie when I was 22 and he was 17,” he sobbed to the cameras. “He was Little Stevie back then, just a kid. And he could play as good then as he does now. People are like that… it’s just born in ’em, you know?” The following day, still reeling from the news, the city of Austin tried to carry on. By now every daily newspaper in the US had run some kind of front-page item about the tragic loss. And although the blues world was stunned, the people of Austin were positively crushed. How could this horrible thing happen? Why now, after Stevie Ray had cleaned up and got his life back together? Old friends and colleagues showed up at Antone’s on Tuesday night to hug each other and help brush away the tears. Eddie Munoz, an old friend of Stevie’s and guitarist in the early 80s band The Plimsouls, recalled SRV’s uncanny ability to communicate directly through his instrument: “Stevie was a rarity. There are very few people who have that much soul and that much power, who can command so much attention just by plugging in a guitar. But he didn’t carry any big pretence about it. He used to say to me: ‘I don’t know where it came from. It just happened. My brother Jimmie showed me some stuff, and then it was like the dam broke.’ He was just so shy and unassuming – until you put a guitar in his hands. He lived for playing that guitar. Everybody’s jaw dropped whenever he played. There are those people who are just so blessed – one person out of millions who can touch the instrument and have it sing for him. Stevie Ray always had that.” Stevie Ray’s death hit this writer particularly hard. I had followed his meteoric rise to fame, having first been tipped off to his toe-curling, Strat-slinging abilities back in 1982 by ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons for a story I did on the lineage of Texas guitar. I finally got to interview Stevie Ray when he came to New York on October 4, 1984 for a gala Carnegie Hall gig. Our chat took place in the band bus parked outside the prestigious venue. I remember Stevie being soft-spoken, polite in a charming southern way, somewhat shy and somewhat high – his blurry, red eyes revealing his decadent lifestyle at the time. As we continued chatting, it seemed we had a lot in common. Along with our mutual love of the blues, I also played guitar; but wasn’t foolish enough to go toe-to-toe with this cat. I too had an elder brother who was a huge influence on me musically and gave me my first guitar when he got a better one, just as Jimmie Vaughan had done with Little Stevie when they were kids growing up in Oak Cliff. We talked about sibling rivalries and the little-brother syndrome. I felt a strange bond with this skinny guy from Texas, and knew that we would meet again at some point down the road. My next one-to-one encounter with Stevie Ray didn’t come for another few years, and it was under extraordinary circumstances. He had just got out of a treatment facility in Marietta, Georgia, where he’d spent a month trying to get clean and sober. Speaking to the press was just part of the healing process, and a very cathartic one at that. This time I met him down in Orlando, Florida, where he was to kick off his comeback tour. And instead of the shy, red-eyed insecure kid that I had encountered on the band bus outside Carnegie Hall three-and-a-half years earlier, this Stevie Ray Vaughan was focused and purposeful. He spoke with conviction and gave direct eye contact. And he seemed to possess an inner strength that came from self-awareness. His words from that meeting still ring in my ears today. “There’s just a lot more reasons to live now,” he said. “I can honestly say that I’m really glad to be alive today. Because, left to my own devices, I would’ve slowly killed myself. There were a lot of things I was running from, and one of them was me. I’ve made a commitment now, not for the rest of my life, just for today. Now, each day’s a new victory.” During the course of our lengthy interview, Stevie Ray detailed the ravages of his pre-rehab lifestyle: the endless gigging and recording; the lack of sleep; the abundance of cocaine and alcohol fuelling every waking hour. As he told me: “For a long time we had a schedule that was just completely out of hand. And the only reason we put up with it was because – partly from the situation we were in and partly from doing too much coke – we thought we were super-human. I mean, the whole deal is that when you walk on stage you’re up there bigger than life. People idolise you. And if you let that go to your head you’re in trouble. You have to keep those things in perspective, but that’s hard to do when you’re high on cocaine and drinking all the time.” He took a deep sigh and continued: “During that period when we were touring and making a record, my trick was not to sleep at all. I would stay in the studio all night long, doing mixes of the live stuff and choosing tunes. I’d leave the studio about noon, go to the hotel to grab a shower, go to the sound-check and play the gig. Then I’d come back to the studio, stay there all night doing mixes, come back to the hotel the next noon, grab a shower, go to the sound-check and play the gig. Then I’d come back to the studio. And then the whole thing would start all over again. For two straight weeks I did that. We had spread ourselves way too thin. It was taking its toll, and the only way we could see to deal with that was: ‘Oh, you’re too tired? Well, here, snort some of this.’ (cont'd next week)
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Moved? Changed email addresses? Please let us know of any changes in your address, email, or phone number so we can keep you informed about the Blues community in Arizona. Email us at: info@phoenixblues.org or write to: Phoenix Blues Society P.O. Box 36874 Phoenix, Arizona 85067
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GOT BLUES? If you are a Blues musician, a group, or a club that features Blues music, and would like to be listed, please send your info to info@phoenixblues.org and we'll be happy to list your event in our weekly Out & About section of the newsletter
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