Twenty years ago yesterday, the world lost the most remarkable guitar player of my lifetime, the great Stevie Ray Vaughan,, died. Listening to that man play is one of the most fundamentally beautiful things you'll ever hear. If you don't love him, I damn near believe that you're committing a sin.
If you know anything about he guitar, you know just how hard Stevie made it for himself to play as magically as he did. the action - or the height between the strings and the fretboard - of his Stratocasters was remarkably high, and he used the heaviest gauge strings known to man. His guitars were set up in way that no ordinary human could play like that. Most rock guitarists play with very light strings - .009's mostly (Vaughan used .012's) - and incredibly low action.
Most guitarists sacrifice tone for playability, because your fingers are only so strong. In rock n' roll music, speed is generally accepted as being more important than tone and perfect pitch, which isn't true of most genres of music, where guitar is an accompanying - a mostly rhythmic -instrument.
Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar was set up more like a stand up bass, but he played with the speed and melody far surpassing most players who took the convential, easy way of doing things,. But he was better - and better sounding - than anyone other than Eric Clapton. If anything is better than sex, it's listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan play the guitar. Hearing him play is like hearing Ray Charles sing, and that brought tears to my eyes. And to think that he did all of it spaced out on cocaine and whiskey fot 90% career. He was only clean for the last wo years of his life.
On the night he died twenty years ago in a helicopter crash; he played with Clapton, Robert Cray, B.B King and Buddy Guy. I'd seen everybody on that bill at least once - and Buddy Guy's case, five times - but I had never seen Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Throughout the eighties, Vaughan played in Toronto nearly three times a year. And I always had an excuse not to go out and see him for tickect prices that were, compared to today, almost impossibly cheap. The clip posted above is from his first show at Toronto's El Mocambo Club, which I would've gone to, were I not thirteen years old.
I missed seeing magic when I could. You shouldn't. You might never see it again.
If you're curious about why I hate music, look at the videos below, consider what we lost twenty years ago, and haven't come anywhere close to replacing.
Stevie Ray Vaughan was a genius. I don't think we'll see his like again.
One more from the ElMo in TO. If you don't have this video, you should buy it immediately.
There isn't a wasted note in the entire show.
Thanks to, of all people, John Mayer, who plays amazingly like Stevie Ray when he wants to plays at all.
0 comments:
Post a Comment