STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN AND DOUBLE TROUBLE
Live At Montreux 1982 & 1985
(Epic/Legacy)
It will be a sad day when the well runs dry. More than eleven years after Stevie Ray Vaughan's death, the releases keep coming, and damned if some of them aren't just killer. Case in point: Live At Montreux 1982 & 1985. This is a double-disc set of SRV and Double Trouble's two landmark appearances at the Swiss jazz festival. Eleven of the nineteen songs here were previously unreleased, and some of them were reportedly taken from video of the event. The fidelity is flawless, though the mix is uneven in spots. That's a minor quibble.
The first disc is the real nugget, because it's the show that essentially propelled Vaughan to stardom. David Bowie and Jackson Browne were there, and they were floored by what they heard. Bowie subsequently hired Vaughan to play on his Let's Dance sessions (and for the tour, though that arrangement fell through), and Browne lent the band his studio to cut what would become their first album, Texas Flood. So the treat, in part, is hearing exactly what Bowie, Browne and the Montreux audience heard that night: Vaughan and Double Trouble diving into their swaggering Texas blues. What's also strangely rewarding is hearing the audience boo the band mercilessly; this was the jazz festival's acoustic blues night, and the band's electric assault offended their purist sensibilities.
As it turns out, their snobbishness is their loss, because Vaughan and company tear it up. Opening with Freddie King's "Hideaway," Vaughan nails King's guitar break, the one that separates the men from the boys, before segueing into a frenetic "Rude Mood." It's jaw-dropping. The boo-birds have already roosted, though, by the time the band launches into an extended "Texas Flood"—perhaps the weakest song on the whole set simply because the band steadily slows to a snail's pace. "Give Me Back My Wig" (punchline: "Honey let yo' head go bald"), the Hound Dog Taylor chestnut, is a perfect growling shuffle with ripping slide guitar. The set closes with a slashing charge through Albert Collins' instrumental "Collins Shuffle." Vaughan manages to thank the audience as the boos escalate and the band departs the stage. By all accounts, they were devastated.
The second disc, recorded at their triumphant return in July of '85, finds the crowd much more appreciative of the band's efforts. SRV and Double Trouble have released Texas Flood and Couldn't Stand the Weather to commercial and critical success. Soul to Soul is due the following September, and keyboardist Reese Wynans has joined the band.
The quartet is in fine form, and while they're certainly full of flash and fire, they're also more confident and soulful than during the first Montreux gig, as evidenced on "Ain't Gone 'N' Give Up On Love." The audience remains quiet during the soft parts, taking in Vaughan's stinging Strat bursts and loveman vocals. "Tin Pan Alley," with guest Johnny Copeland, can be excused for being over thirteen minutes long, as it's fun to hear Vaughan and Copeland exchange vocals and slow blues licks. "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)," furious as it is, would have been better served by a less herky-jerky backbeat from drummer Chris Layton. The version on the Live at El Mocambo video is more appropriately thunderous.
"Life Without You," which is apparently the same as appeared on the original LP (though not the CD) Live Alive, does not contain much of the love soliloquy in the middle, and it's far better for it. The song is a gospel-flavored crescendo, and if indeed an edit job was performed, we should all be thankful for the resulting Hendrixian eruption of emotion and feedback. "Couldn't Stand the Weather" closes the set, with its sleek syncopation and hepcat atmospherics. The band leaves the stage without a word, surely soaking in the thunderous applause.
That posthumous releases continue (and remember that the box set SRV came out last year) is remarkable, and Live At Montreux 1982 & 1985 is among the best and most vital. "Sometimes what appear as failures are really successes in disguise," says bassist Tommy Shannon in the liner notes, and sharing the hindsight is invaluable. Brian Briscoe [buy it]
For fans of: Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Albert King
