Exploring why The Rolling Stones loved Stevie Ray Vaughan
When Stevie Ray Vaughan came around in the late 1970s, he drew the acclaim of many of his contemporaries for his incredible talent in playing the blues guitar. When David Bowie witnessed Vaughan play at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1982, he booked him in to play on his 1983 album, Let’s Dance. Yet Bowie wasn’t the only star to be amazed by Vaughan’s talents.
In the biography Caught in the Crossfire by Joe Nick Patosky and Bill Crawford, we read the story before Vaughan became famous, playing bars in Texas and trying to get a record deal. One day, he was hanging out at a racetrack in Austin when Mick Jagger rolled up and commented about the lack of competent blues musicians, so Vaughan’s manager gave him a tape of Vaughan playing a festival.
Jagger and Charlie Watts end up watching the tape. The book reads: “Watts was floored by what he saw; garbed in a white kimono, decorated with bamboo leaves, a silver concho belt, and a black belt with a silver band, Stevie Ray Vaughan navigated the realms of the dirty and the low down like no one Watts had heard in 20 years. The way the Vaughan kid was not imitative or slavish in the least, but rather fresh and authentic. He sounded like he’d written the songs himself, wielding such flash and might that his guitar sounded like it was on fire”.
“The Vaughan face in a full contorted grimace as he bent the strings on a newly founded Strat whose wiring hung out like guts,” the passage continues. “Slinging the guitar behind his head, hopping backwards and sashaying his hips, the way he tore through Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Tell Me’ was like he was Hubert Sumlin’s lost brother. He had the audacity to top it off with ‘Manic Depression’. As Watts watched the tape of Stevie unstrapping his guitar and banging it against his Marshall amp, bringing the feedback up to a violent crescendo, he made a move for the telephone to call Chelsea, [Vaughan’s manager]”.
The videotape of Vaughan had blown Watts away; he called Vaughan’s manager and arranged to have him play for the Stones in New York just four weeks later, as they were thinking about signing him to their label. The audition was to take place at the Danceteria club in Manhattan.
The book continues: “At first, the gig had all the trappings of a rough ill-fated voyage. Amps blew up, guitar strings broke like there was some kind of hex on the band, but when the stage manager tried to cut them off after their allotted 35 minutes – a typical New York set, but hardly time to wind up by Texas standards – Ron Wood pulled the curtain open while Mick Jagger yelled, ‘Let them fucking play!’ Stevie and the band gladly accommodated him; if someone was going to stick up for them in a viper pit like the Danceteria, it might as well be the Rolling Stones”.
“It was the first time I met him,” said Vaughan of Jagger. “I attacked it and kept seeing somebody I thought I recognised from Texas. This guy jumping up and down, acting like he was playing with us. Come to find out about an hour later that it was Jagger I’d been staring at. Every time we’d stop, Jagger would scream, ‘Keep playing! Hell with it, I’ll buy this place!”
