Best Blues Concert-Tribute Album For Guitar Wizard Stevie Ray Vaughan Affirms His Preeminence As Blues Innovator

It took nearly five years for Stevie Ray Vaughan’s family to find the right vehicle to honor his memory, and another 15 months for a record company to release the all-star concert that ensued.

Had Vaughan been merely a famous musician when he died in a helicopter crash near East Troy, Wis., on Aug. 27, 1990, the passage of that much time could have made the project stale, a tribute to a faded memory.

If anything, the past six years have brought into even sharper focus Vaughan’s prodigious talents.

“You tell me, who has come along since then that is blowing everybody out of the bucket?” said Joe Nick Patoski, whose biography of Vaughan, “Caught in the Crossfire,” was written with another Austin, Texas-based writer, Bill Crawford. “I’d love to have someone knock my socks out, but they are not out there. We pegged him as the last of the great blues-guitar heroes and I think that still stands.”

“A Tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughan” is being released simultaneously this month on compact disc, cassette tape, video and laserdisc. The concert was recorded on the Austin City Limits sound stage on May 11, 1995, and it features performances by B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Robert Cray, Buddy Guy, Bonnie Raitt and Dr. John.

The concert video also will be available to public television stations this month.

Stevie Ray’s brother Jimmie, founder of the Fabulous Thunderbirds, served as the musical director and guiding force behind the show. Prior to that, he was the Vaughan family’s arbiter of good taste when people proposed ways to pay tribute to his brother.

“None of it sounded like the right thing to do and some of the stuff was crazy, frankly,” he said. “I turned down everything and said, ‘No, I’m not going to do any of it.’ I knew when the right thing and the right time came along, it would happen. And this just fell into our laps.”

Vaughan said he made out a list of the musicians he wanted to play and of the Stevie Ray-related songs he wanted them to perform.

“They all said ‘yes’ and I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I don’t think anyone even had to change around their schedules.”

In a way, the tribute concert was an encore of Stevie Ray’s last show. Clapton, Cray, Guy and Jimmie Vaughan were all on the bill that night. Jimmie himself gave up the seat on the doomed helicopter to his brother.

“What I know about is music, and there were a lot of things communicated and healed and grieving and tribute that you can’t say in words,” Jimmie Vaughan said. “I can’t talk about it, but I can play about it.”

Stevie Ray’s admirers seem of two minds about the nature of his greatness. One camp dwells on the ideas that seemed to flow so effortlessly from his guitar. The other marvels at the physical abilities that made it possible for him to say all he had to say.

To Clapton he was some kind of “open channel” through which the music supernaturally poured, especially the guitar solos.

“It never seemed to dry up,” Clapton said.

But producer Jim Gaines said Vaughan’s sound was so authoritative because his hands were out of proportion to his smallish body.

“He had huge hands, some of the strongest hands I ever saw for a small man,” Gaines said. “You’d shake his hands and it was like the grip of an ironworker or something, and it wasn’t like he was trying to squeeze your hand.”

Cray said Vaughan equipped his Stratocaster guitars with the thickest strings he could find, making it sound like no one else’s before him, except perhaps Jimi Hendrix.

Cray first met Vaughan in San Francisco in the late 1970s. He recalls ringing the door at his apartment and there was Vaughan, dressed in a kimono with an Afro wig on his head. Vaughan was imitating Hendrix.

“We went to a party that afternoon and I remember Stevie kept it up all day,” Cray said.

Vaughan was in love with Hendrix’s playing. But unlike other guitarists, who almost universally adore Hendrix, Vaughan was so gifted that he took the master’s works and make them his own.

Vaughan’s version of “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” was the highlight of his 1984 breakthrough album, “Can’t Stand the Weather,” and his instrumental of Hendrix’s “Little Wing,” recorded in 1984 and released on 1991’s posthumous “The Sky Is Crying,” may have been the best guitar work of Vaughan’s entire career.

When he died, Vaughan was 35 and free at last from the drugs and alcohol that had troubled him during the latter half of the 1980s. The helicopter he was on also carried Clapton’s agent, assistant tour manager and bodyguard and a pilot when it slammed into a hillside on a foggy night ride from the Alpine Valley concert site to Chicago. Everyone aboard died.

The Vaughan family reached an undisclosed settlement with the operators of the helicopter charter line.

Each day that passes - and no one emerges to take up Vaughan’s mantle - affirms his genius, Gaines said.

“I get a lot of phone calls from wanna-bes,” he said. “There are a lot of people out there that can copy some of the things he did. But no one will ever be able to touch him… . All those guys who are trying to copy him are great copyists, but that’s all. He was a real artist and artists are one of a kind.”