Cowboys & Indians / March 2011 / Jimmie Vaughan

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Jimmie Vaughan

A Texas Guitar Legend

Many of Jimmie Vaughan’s dreams were born in a dumpster. When the Grammy-Award winning Texas blues guitar hero was a kid growing up in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, he used to dig through a record store trash bin in search of discarded vinyls.

“Donk-daing. Donk-daing.” Vaughan belts out a few staccato notes, hoping to zero in on the title of one of the prime finds salvaged from that treasure chest of rubbish. Then he goes into the famous riff. “Doaw-doaw-doaw-dow. Dow-dow-dow-dow.” He trails off in thought. “What is that song? ... ‘Purple Haze.’ ‘Purple Haze,’ of course!”

Of course. Of course Vaughan would be thinking about “Purple Haze.” It’s the song that turned him (as well as millions of others) on to Jimi Hendrix. When he found a 45 of it in the trash behind a shopping mall, he hopped out of the dumpster and ran back home to his record player. Needle hit groove, and he was in love. It was powerful. It was inspiring. But really, to him, it didn’t sound all that much different from his other hero, Muddy Waters. Vaughan realized Hendrix had the same sound as Waters, only louder. In fact, when he first heard Waters, he didn’t think it was much different from the Western swing he’d grown up listening to. It was all starting to sound similar.

“I didn’t know the difference when I first started listening to music,” Vaughan says. “Everyone was playing the same kind of licks on the guitar. The Western swing guys were playing blues licks. Bob Wills did these instrumentals on the steel guitar that sounded like they were blues changes, with a shuffle kind of beat. And so did [Louisiana blues musician] Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown. And my father listened to [big band leader and jazz musician] Glenn Miller all the time and his band did the same beat and did a lot of the same changes. It was all over America.”

Which, as any ethnomusicologist will tell you, is because the blues, like its country music cousin, is America. As deeply ingrained in America’s roots as blues music is, the genre does have some favorite habitats. Vaughan is quick to point out that his native Texas has an especially strong bond. “The blues is just as Texas as cowboy boots,” he says. “I mean, you got T-Bone Walker, Albert Collins, Lightnin’ Hopkins. Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, Freddy King. You could go on and on for a week with just the people that came from Texas. Plus you’ve got all the country and Western and Western swing, which was strongly influenced by blues and jazz. The blues is as Texas as the dirt.”

And Vaughan is Texas blues. He is a Stratocaster-riffing, hot-rodding, silk rayon-shirt wearing Lone Star legend. He is one cool-faced, slicked back steaming slice of Americana. Yes, it was his brother Stevie Ray who brought national attention to Texas blues-rock, but it was Jimmie who was Stevie’s strongest inspiration. “I play probably 80 percent of what I can play. Jimmie plays 10 percent of what he knows. He can play anything,” Stevie Ray once said of the brother he idolized and competed with. And while it was Stevie who went platinum and global after he was tragically killed in a helicopter crash in 1990, it was Jimmie who humbled virtually every living guitar god when he first appeared on the scene. It was Jimmie who first led the blues revival with the Fabulous Thunderbirds. And it’s Jimmie who’s still playing those 12-bar gems and helping teach future generations to appreciate the blues.

Vaughan was recently nominated for what could be his fifth Grammy. If he wins, he will be the fourth artist to accept the award for Best Traditional Blues Album more than once — a distinction shared only by John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, and Eric Clapton. It would be a fitting placement in history for the man who Guitar Player magazine called a “deity — a living legend,” who Chicago-blues legend Buddy Guy referred to as “unbeatable when it comes to the blues.” But it’s not just the Recording Academy and guitar gods who dig the guy’s playing. Even those who don’t understand the appeal of one of America’s greatest contributions to Western civilization still get chill bumps when they watch Jimmie Vaughan play. Why? He transforms that battered heap of wood, knobs, and strings into a spiritual vessel. When you watch Vaughan coax it out of his Fender Strat you just might have a religious experience — you just might gain a better understanding of why the blues and gospel have always gone hand in hand. But then again, when you watch Jimmie Vaughan play the guitar, you might see why in the early days of the blues, some folks thought certain guitar players must have sold their souls to the devil to play the way they did.

It’s easy to wax biblical when you’re talking about a genre of music that is seeping with lore, but Vaughan’s blues prowess is not the work of a devil’s deal. His skills are the result of both a God-given talent and the determination of a Texas boy hellbent on fulfilling his dream. From a young age, Vaughan was determined to be a guitar player and he was determined that music was going to be his ticket out of Oak Cliff.

In guitar parlance, that was going to take a lot of woodshedding.

 

Vaughan was 13 when he got his first guitar. A family friend gave it to him to occupy his time after he was sidelined with a football injury. His devotion to the fretboard was immediate. By 15 Vaughan had his first band, The Swinging Pendulums, and by 16, he was playing Dallas clubs with a new band called The Chessmen. It was only a couple of years after Vaughan first found that Hendrix 45 in the dumpster that The Chessmen were opening for The Jimi Hendrix Experience. At one of these shows in 1969, Hendrix even borrowed Vaughan’s Vox Wah pedal when he broke his own. The stuff of guitar-player dreams. 

By then Vaughan had been having six-string dreams for a while. “When I was a kid I was just dreaming about stuff that was impossible to do. Because that’s what dreams are,” Vaughan says. “Sometimes when you’re in it you just don’t know you can’t do it so you do it. That’s really what it all represented to me and [playing guitar] was also kind of a way out. I felt as if I could do it if I really tried. Also I thought, Well if I get really good I’ll make a record and I’ll get some money and buy a car and drive away.” 

He ended up driving away before that first record came along, but he only had to go about three hours south to make his dreams come true. By the early ’70s Vaughan realized that Dallas was only holding him back. So he left his hometown and headed to Austin. “It was my dream to move to Austin because it seemed like you could move here and play any kind of music you wanted,” Vaughan says. “There were a lot of clubs that had weird bands. So I thought, Well I can go there and have a blues band.”

In Austin, Vaughan first played with Texas Storm, the blues-soul band that had moved down with him from Dallas (little brother Stevie on bass). Then came the band that would take Vaughan to the top: the Fabulous Thunderbirds. With Kim Wilson on vocals and harmonica and Jimmie on guitar, the group would go platinum-certified with the song “Tuff Enuff” and put blues back on the charts with a string of hits. But before the Thunderbirds ever came to national attention, they had made a name for themselves in Austin as the house band of the legendary club Antone’s. There, Vaughan picked and kicked around with some of the biggest names in blues. At one of those shows, the Thunderbirds were opening for the Father of Blues himself, Muddy Waters. Hoping to impress one of his heroes, Vaughan performed using a Waters-inspired slide on his guitar. After the show, Waters grabbed Vaughan around the neck and said, “When I’m gone, I want you to do that and show everybody that’s what I did. I want you to do it for me.”

Another dream come true. As was the recording in 1989 of Family Style, when Jimmie and Stevie finally got to make a record together. Released in September 1990, Family Style earned the Vaughan brothers a Grammy and the praise of music critics and blues aficionados alike. Sadly, Stevie wasn’t able to enjoy the success. He died a month before the release. In the wake of the tragedy, Jimmie quit touring and recording until 1993 when Eric Clapton convinced Vaughan to open a series of concerts for him in London. By then, Family Style had earned Vaughan international acclaim and he was welcomed back to the music world with open arms. After the tour, he immediately started working on his first solo album, launching the final leg of a career that would transform him from a musician to a legend.

Since those dumpster-diving days he’s done what he set out to do all those years ago in Oak Cliff. He’s gotten really good (two of his four Grammys are for rock instrumental performance), made some records (seven with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, four on his own, and one with Stevie Ray), and bought plenty of cars. In fact, Vaughan is one of the foremost collectors and designers of classic custom cars. His creations have been featured in magazines and museums throughout the country.

The classic cars, the stripped-down old-school blues, the sharp retro personal style — it’s more than nostalgia to Vaughan. It’s his own American dream. “I grew up in a beautiful time in the ’50s, so I got to see all those wild cars that were brand-new and hear all that music that was coming out, and I just never got over it,” he says. “I just wanted to be like that. I’ve been accused of living in the past. Whatever you want to call it, that’s okay. But that’s what I love — American stuff. Music, cars, whatever it is. You know, happy type stuff.”

Happy type stuff? Odd phrasing  — especially coming from an icon of a genre associated with melancholy. But consider two things. First, it actually sounds cool when Jimmie Vaughan says it because he’s Jimmie Vaughan — he’s the epitome of cool. Second, you can’t help but feel happy when you listen to his music. Take his latest album, Plays Blues, Ballads & Favorites, his first solo record in nine years. Crank up the dial and crack a smile. Because Vaughan’s kind of blues is feel-good, get-it-out-of-your-system blues. The kind that instantly transports you to a smoke-filled juke house or honky-tonk where you’re bouncing your baby on a Friday night, grooving — and happy. Much of that music magic is owed to the master engineer work. “I like the way things sound when they remind me of a jukebox. You know, a real jukebox — the way they used to record with the echo and everything,” says Vaughan. “So I, along with Jared Tuten, my engineer, figured out a way to record the album so that it sounds like that.” A tip of the fedora to the production, but the true beauty of this new album is the song selection and the Jimmie Vaughan spin. “I’ve been writing most of the stuff on the other albums and a friend of mine down in Austin said, ‘If I were your manager I’d have you go and record every blues song that you can think of and just put it in the can.’ First I thought, Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. But then I started thinking about it and realized that it was a good idea. So I just went and started recording songs that I liked. They’re songs that I enjoy, that I’ve always listened to — 40, 50 years I’ve been listening to some of this stuff. I just like it because it’s cool and it’s just fun.”

That’s what Vaughan strives for because that’s who Vaughn is — he’s cool and he’s fun. And after playing the ax for 47 years he’s still living his dream. “I’m enjoying playing music more than ever,” he says. “You get a little bit older and you can appreciate things better. It’s just been so good playing guitar. I’ve been able to meet my heroes and go all over the world. Dreams can come true if you pursue them.”

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