Stevie Ray Vaughan: The Best Blues Electric Guitarist, Ever, Forever
That’s right, it’s not Jimi Hendrix. As great as Hendrix was, he took his R&B roots and went far out into Psychedelia; that was his specialty, although his Red House is first rate blues.
If you have any doubts about SRV being the greatest blues electric guitarist ever, spend some cash (as Muddy you-know-who would say) and get Vaughan’s Live at Carnegie Hall work, recorded on his 30th birthday in 1983.
Listen to the best start you are ever going to hear from a musician (and I have been fortunate to catch performances by such blues greats as, in order of witnessing them: Lightnin’ Sam Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Albert King, John Lee Hooker [blues from a different, foot thumping, angle] and BB King, and such jazz greats as George Benson [when I saw him at San Francisco’s Keystone Korner, great guitar work was his specialty and he sang only one song], Charles Mingus and Stanley Turrentine).
On the Carnegie Hall work, you hear the man who “discovered” Bob Dylan, John Hammond, introduce Vaughan as one of the greatest guitarists of all times, before SRV started a blistering-paced tune that will blow you away.
Play track eight, “Dirty Pool” and you will hear the tune that was the genesis for my choosing Vaughan as the greatest.
In a posthumous television tribute to Vaughan, BB King, Eric Clapton, and Buddy Guy all spoke about SRV’s greatness.
I had planned to make a list of the second, third, etc., best blues electric guitarists of all time, but that is really too close to call. In alphabetical order, I choose, as of this writing: Duane Allman, Michael Bloomfield, Roy Buchanan (in my novel CHASING FREEDOM, available at www.amazon.com, etc., I called Buchanan one of the great musical artists of all time), Eric Clapton, Albert Collins, Ry Cooder, Robert Cray, Billy Gibbons, Buddy Guy, Elmore James (creator of great classic blues guitar riffs), Albert King, BB King, Albert Lee, Bob Margolin (Muddy Waters’ longtime guitarist), Keith Richards, Muddy Waters and Johnny Winter. And with folks' continued interest in the blues, and new up and comers up and coming all the time, that list can continually change, with the addition of such guitarists as Doyle Bramhall II and Derek Trucks, for example.
(Allman's and Clapton's work on Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs is some of the best electric guitar music you will every hear. Some of those great riffs, such as on tracks 4, 7 and 10 that you thought were Clapton's weren't his -- they were Allman's (that is some slide guitar: "GET DOWN, BROWN").
For acoustic blues guitarists, the aforementioned Lightnin’ Hopkins, Son House, and the great Blues Man Robert Johnson have got to be on the list.
Last Spring, I made a “blues pilgrimage” to the Blues Capitol of the World, the Mississippi Delta, and its heart, Clarksdale, where highways 61 and 49 intersect. After an exhaustive search, I found the monument to Johnson I had been searching for.
Texas has the distinction as being the location of the only recordings made by Johnson, probably the most legendary Blues Man of all times.
Johnson recorded those tunes in San Antonio in 1936 and Dallas in 1937.
One of them, about the legendary intersection of highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, is, of course, Cross Road Blues.
And, to Eric and others, it is never too late to correct yourselves. It is Cross Road Blues, not Crossroads.
Ending on a Texas note, and with another recommendation, get Al Kooper /Mike Bloomfield The Lost Concert Tapes 12/13/68.
In his excellent liner notes, Kooper explained how, after this precious music was found decades after it was recorded, the tapes had to be literally cooked in the oven as part of the restorative process.
Native Texan Johnny Winter showed up to the gig as an unknown, who had played with Bloomfield years earlier in “twist joints in Chicago,” Bloomfield said in introduction.
Winter’s amazing vocals and guitar work had this effect: he began that Friday night gig as a “complete unknown.” By Monday, he had signed a lucrative recording deal.
To see how Winter is still very much alive and well, check out his great rendition of Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited at Clapton’s 2007 Crossroads (not Cross Road) Guitar Festival in Chicago.
So, we are in the Texas Music Now on this blog, but, Stevie, here’s to you in the past, the present and the future.
For you surely prove one of my lines from about 1977: There Is No Time In Art And Love.
Note 1: To see some of my photos and videos (some of the smaller MP ones that were uploadable at the time of uploading) from last Spring’s Mississippi blues journey, visit www.myspace.com/paulheidelberg.There you will find photos and videos of such places as The Cross Road of highways 61 and 49 and that monument to Robert Johnson that took me far out into the Mississippi Delta countryside. When you see parcels of cotton-growing land that are measured by the thousands of acres, not hundreds, you appreciate the tortuous work that slaves and their descendants endured. That work was a vital part of the birth of The Blues. The Blues began as work chants in those fields –- those fields of blood, sweat and tears.
Note 2: I had planned for Note 2 to be suggestions for three Dylan digitally re-mastered CDs you need to get. That now becomes Note 3. This Note 2 will be something else, and it is something else. I just used the www to search for some info, just as I used the computer system at the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Fort Lauderdale, to search for things, more than 20 years ago, when I worked for seven years there as a reporter, columnist and editor; the Internet puts the information that used to be available only at such places as a big newspaper’s library into everyone’s hands. That is only one of the amazing things about the www. Also, in the pre-Internet days, I could use my computers at work to search the AP sportswire, or lifestyle wire for stories and information, much as I now use such things as Google.
So I had wanted to mention Dylan’s Under The Red Sky and SRV’s association with it. I bought the work as a cassette tape soon after it was released. I found the lyrics sort of simplistically strange, but I enjoyed the musicianship. When I heard these great guitar licks, I checked the liner notes, or someplace, and found guitar credits for Stevie Ray Vaughan. No wonder that sounded so good, I thought. I remember reading a New Yorker magazine review panning the Dylan work, saying it was the worst thing he had ever done.
Well, if you don’t know it by now, Dylan is a prophet, or at least prophetic. Back to my novel CHASING FREEDOM, which I wrote in Spain, while living there from 2004-2006: I put a line in the book I saw on a bathroom wall at the best art college in the USA, hands down, the San Francisco Art Institute, where I studied Painting, Photography and Creative Writing (I also graduated, no easy feat). This was at a huge art exhibition opening; it may have been the time I met Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a legendary San Francisco poet who goes all the way back to the Beat era and is featured reading a poem in the great concert film, The Band’s The Last Waltz.
Those words were:
Bob Dylan is making mistakes you won’t make for 10 years.
That was about 1973 and it was right on.
So, minutes ago I am searching the www to find out the date of SRV’s tragic death in a helicopter accident after a concert where he had performed with, among others, Clapton and Guy, and I also searched for the release date of Under The Red Sky. If I can believe what I just found at www.amazon.com and at some site I found by using Google, Stevie Ray Vaughan died August, 27, 1990; Under the Red Sky was released on September 11, 1990.
Wow.
I had wanted to say that SRV’s work on Under The Red Sky was some of his last recorded work. Maybe it was The Last. The Last with a fellow great, anyway, I would guess.
Another entry for this note: The release date for Dylan’s critically-acclaimed, as they say sometimes, but not always, such as in the case of Under The Red Sky, Love and Theft , was September 11, 2001.
Another Wow for Dylan.
A friend reminded me of the release date while commenting on some of the lyrics from Love And Theft, such as the “Siamese twins are coming to town.” My friend saw definite connections between that line and the Twin Towers.
Now onto Note 3 and music you must get. I have thought many times, I am glad a lot of these musicians who cut records 40 years ago are still around to hear how great they sound digitally re-mastered, and that includes Van The Man Morrison being able to hear his great, and I mean great, Veedon Fleece and Common One, after digitally re-mastering “brings them up to speed.”
I read two days ago in Rolling Stone magazine that yesterday and today, another Wow, Van is doing concerts at the Hollywood Bowl for a live album of tunes from his great album Astral Weeks, released in 1968.
Speaking earlier of my novel CHASING FREEDOM –- in that book I call Astral Weeks one of the top album’s of “The Sixties,” or maybe The Top Album, right up there with the Beatle’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band.
I can’t wait to get this Hollywood Bowl performance.
Note 3: For great listening, in Texas, or anywhere, do what I did recently: order digitally re-mastered CDs (or via www download, or whatever) of Dylan’s Another Side of Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited and John Wesley Harding.
All are something else, including Bloomfield’s and Kooper’s work on Highway 61 Revisited.
On these albums, don’t miss:
From Another Side of Bob Dylan: Black Crow Blues, Spanish Harlem Incident, Chimes of Freedom, To Ramona, Ballad in Plain D, My Back Pages and It Ain’t Me Babe.
From Highway 61 Revisited: Like A Rolling Stone, Tombstone Blues, It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry, Ballad Of A Thin Man, Queen Jane Approximately, Highway 61 Revisited (I don’t think the police car “instrument” holds up, however) and Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.
From John Wesley Harding: John Wesley Harding,(the truly haunting) I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, All Along The Watchtower, Drifter's Escape, Dear Landlord, I Pity The Poor Immigrant and I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight (one of Dylan’s first forays into that C&W sound he would later astound the world with on Nashville Skyline). Also, check out the WILD drumming on the title track by veteran Nashville drummer Kenny Buttrey, and be sure to "Google" "Kenny Buttrey" to read about the late musician's work with Dylan, Neil Young and others. Another Add on 11/13/08: Don't miss Charlie McCoy's fine bass work on the title track and other tunes on the album. Also, "Google" "Charlie McCoy" to get to his site and find amazing credits, including sessions with everyone from Perry Como and Elvis Presley to Joan Baez and, of course, Dylan.
Another add to this blog on November 14, 2008: Re: Blonde On Blonde, which Dylan has said had "The Sound" he was always striving for; this was his favorite work in that respect (maybe that opinion has changed now, with the release of Love and Theft and Modern Times). Listening to Blonde On Blonde, and listening for the drumming work of Buttrey, his prowess just leaps out at you on about every track. Listening to Sad-eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, I wrote in my notes that what Buttrey was doing was hard work -- to go on and on like this. It wasn't unlike the hard work required with operatic singers performing sections of Mozartian or Wagnerian operas.
So it was interesting to read at Wikipedia a few minutes ago quotes from Buttrey that explained all the musicians working with Dylan thought this was a two or three minute tune -- so they hadn't expected to go on and on. That even makes Buttrey's laying down that drumming all the more amazing -- that had to be hard physically and mentally.
I ended the notes I made while listening to Blonde on Blonde (this might be Dylan's masterpiece) by writing again that listening to digitally re-mastered music is something else; for one thing, you can better appreciate such work as Buttrey's drumming, and McCoy's bass work on such albums as Blonde On Blonde and John Wesley Harding.
Re: Blonde On Blonde: Years ago I was reading a copy of the New York Observer, after I had been given a subscription by my then-New York City literary agent (that was about the time "Sex And The City" was being serialized in the paper, long before it was a television program or feature film). A writer who had written extensively about Dylan made this remark about lyrics from Sad-eyed Lady Of The Lowlands: "What does, 'my warehouse eyes, my Arabian drum, should I leave them at your gate, or sad-eyed lady, should I wait' mean?"
I thought, are you kidding?
I sent him the following, but never heard from him: It means: these wide eyes I have because I am so in love with you and so enthralled by you, and this Arabian drum ( it might have been any other instrument, a flute, a magical one, in fact, although I heard only lately other references to drums by Dylan in another song that might add more significance to drums, specifically), should I leave them at your gate, meaning, I may soon be down the road, baby, catch you in the next life, or should I wait, meaning I am staying here with you, I am here waiting for you if you want me to."
That's what it means, right, Bob? That's what fellow poet (to you and to me) Ginsberg probably thought, right?
A final note: I had forgotten about the humor in some of Dylan’s early work, in tunes like Motorpsycho Nitemare, from Another Side Of Bob Dylan.
Via the wonders of the www,
Best from
Paul Heidelberg
11/8/08
