The PBS channel here in the seattle area is showing an SRV tribute.
I had the pleasure of seeing him live twice.
He has been gone 17 years now…wow
I’m getting old…This is my first post, I hope i am in the proper venue.
IMHO Stevie Ray left us way too early
I saw him a bunch of times at the Rome Inn, in Austin, before he became well know. Every time I saw him, Lou Ann Barton did a set with him. That was the best part of the show. His guitar and her pipes were a great combination.
I really wish mainstream radio would occasionally play R&B that’s not Stevie Ray. This is Houston, Texas, for gods’ sake.
I was home on leave when a music-savvy relative said, “Hey, Stevie Ray Vaughn is playing at the St. Paul Blues Festival* this weekend; wanna come?”
Me, the music-loving-but-unsavvy-in-the-cool-way cousin said, “Sure!” I mean, I knew the name and his music, but didn’t realize he was, like, y’know, a LEGEND or anything.
My younger sis said, “Who?” but came along for the ride anyhow and later became one of his Biggest Fans, the poseur
We had an AMAZING time and he and DT put on a great concert. He was dead a couple of weeks later.
*Not sure of the name of the thing but it was on/near the Wabasha Bridge.
Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
Yeah, he was just starting to get his own sound. His covers of Jimi Hendrix songs were great. Little Wing is as good or better than the original. It’s hard to change a tune and make it your own but he did it. And Riviera Paradise must be deceptively hard to play. I can’t get any local musicians to try it.
Oh yes. Yes it is. 
SRV was a truly great musician. Working within the context of the most boring and hackneyed blues scales, he communicated. He used those limited tools in ways that sounded new and fresh and uniquely him. Sure, he covered a ton of folks, but when he played, you heard him throughout.
He was the retro-EVH, all the way down to the three-initial abbreviation! His playing changed *everything * in guitar-land - Strats became ascendant - but they had to have a Tube Screamer stomp box in front of them, be beat to shit and have the heaviest strings you could possibly play (up till then, it was all about fancy, pointy guitars, locking tremolos and very light-gauge strings).
It is too bad, that like EVH, there are SO many players who want to be him that his style has become a stereotype that can turn an audience off when a “Stevie Ray Vaughnabee” shows up to jam with a Strat and wants to sit in on Pride & Joy. It is both a sign of how truly influential he is, and a need to find something new - the way he would have.
But his take on a Texas Shuffle - e.g., Pride & Joy and Cold Shot - is signature - no one can throw a raking upstroke in the middle of a standard 1-and-a-2 shuffle beat and give the whole riff groove and balls the way SRV could…
Wordman, I wish I had your vocabulary (or even understood half of it). I’m a SRV fan and I need to acquire more of his music. I did not know his music or have a taste for it when I first moved to the DFW area. He was still playing small venue shows around here then. I feel like I missed an opportunity.
I’ll pick up another SRV CD or two to make up for it.
Stevie Ray was by far my favorite guitarist.
Here’s a YouTube video of him in action. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, just scroll to about 6:30 and watch to the end to see what he could do. He could play better behind his back than most guitarists could with the guitar in front of them.
First of all - thanks! Second of all, if there are specific things you are curious about, let me know - as a guitarist, I focus on some stuff that may not be clear to a non-player, but are explainable…
One small measure of his greatness is to compare how two different bands covered two different songs from the same Stevie Wonder album (Innervisions). Stevie Ray’s “Superstition” is great – he made is his – while the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Higher Ground” is crap (I have nothing against the Peppers, BTW).
Damn. Just damn.
Wow - I really disagree regarding the RHCP’s version. I love it.
As for SRV’s version, yep - great stuff. But check out any number of Jeff Beck’s versions - that’s who Stevie Wonder originally wrote the song for…
His death was indeed a sickening loss. 
Stevie Ray Vaughan will always be one of my favorite performers. I still remember hearing the news when he died. He was a home-town hero who’d been through hell (drug and alcohol addiction) and had come out on the other side. So tragic and what a horrible way to die. I had lived in Dallas all of my life (I finally left Big D in 1999) and I regret that I never got the chance to hear him perform live.
(When I signed up for this board, I couldn’t think of anything clever or witty for a user name. I was listening to one of his CDs at the time so I just grabbed one of the song titles off of it. Not terribly original or descriptive but it’s nice to think of him.)
Had the same experience with Michael Hedges. I was making a mix of his while talking to someone on the phone when my buddy said “yah, too bad he died”. What??? DAMMIT !!!
One of my hugest regrets is not seeing him live when I had the chance. He was playing at the Greek in LA and I didn’t go for some incredibly lame reason, lost to time and alcahol abuse. Then I moved and he never came near me again, then he took that damn helicoper.
Man, I do enjoy Stevie Ray playing.
I remember when my roomate brought home a new release called Texas Flood. Wow!
He fell pretty low for a while, but I was eager to hear what he could do once he seemed to be cleaning up his act.
Then hearing he died, at a crap venue like Alpine. had to be a bad joke. Guys, this is Wisconsin. Its not exactly difficult to miss those bumps that pass for ski-hills in those parts!
SRV was an amazing player. I don’t remember where I read it, but I remember an interview with Steve Vai about that cheesy Ralph Maccio guitar movie “Crossroads”. Steve Vai plays the “devil guitar player” that Ralph eventually outplays to get his soul back (or something). In the interview, Steve mentions they thought about getting SRV to play the “devil player”, but they’d have had to change the ending because there was no way anyone could outplay SRV in blues. Period. Steve Vai admits that SRV could play him under the table in a blues jam.