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Talent is never enough in the big time record business. Just like the hit tunes you have to have a hook, something that will sell itself, to compensate for the sloth- like sales and marketing people who are normally bereft of ideas. If something turns up that is bursting with energy and excitement but comes in outside the normal channels of high powered lawyers or agents, most record guys run for the hills in horror, particularly the sales and marketing guys. Such was the case when an unsolicited cassette turned up in the Hammond Music Enterprises office. It was a thirty-minute recording taken from a radio broadcast in April 1980. The tape had been sent to Chuck Gregory by a musical horseman, Chesley Millikin. Chuck didn’t want to bother it and tossed it in my direction suggesting I have a listen. He said he’d never heard of the artist and I knew even less. At least he’d heard of the manager who’d sent the tape. A day or so later I was driving across 9th Street on my way out of town and I popped the cassette into my tape deck. An announcer said something “Live from Steamboat 1874 it’s Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble.” It took about fifteen seconds to recognize that this was real deal, maybe even better than that. The next morning I returned to the office and told anyone who’d listen that we should bet the ranch on a young kid from Texas named Vaughan. No one listened very hard; John Hammond who I thought would back me wasn’t very enthusiastic. I was shocked. This was the most remarkable young (he was 26) guitarist I’d ever heard and I was met with yawns. There are a bunch of versions of what happened next, mostly true but some a bit distorted. I kept nagging anyone at Hammond Music Enterprises who’d listen that the ranch was still available, but the company was struggling and without the resources to go after an unknown guitar player. Then Stevie played the Montreux Jazz Festival in the summer of 1982. The crowd didn’t like him much but David Bowie and Jackson Browne did. Stevie recorded with Bowie and almost toured with him and later in the year got some studio time through the good efforts of Jackson Browne. These tapes became the basis for what was released in 1983 as Texas Flood, but Stevie still didn’t have a record deal and HME was as broke as ever. In late 1982 I had a chat with Chesley Millikin, who told me they had some new material they’d like to play for Hammond. I said I’d set it up but the presentation had to play on John’s ego, that if they were sufficiently humble, asked John to take charge, ask his advice, give him the respect he should have, they might have a chance. The meeting was held in John’s little office in Media Sound and it worked. I took photographs of three smiling guys who look ready to move on to the next stage, which they did. HME didn’t get the record; John took it to Epic and a minute later took himself along as well. HME wasn’t doing well, John was itchy and Stevie was just the ticket to get back into a nice office at CBS in a consulting capacity, which he continued for the next few years. I don’t know when the deal went down, but I have photographs of John with Stevie and the band, plus Jimmy Vaughan, at the Power Station and they’re dated January 12, 1983. Strangely enough, Chesley Millikin wasn’t at this session. Some months later the record was released and it did very well. Someone at CBS told me they were spending $1.00 a record in terms of promotion, at least for the first 250,000. It ultimately went gold and was the beginning of a career that burned very brightly until the helicopter crash in August 1990. Others referred to Stevie as John’s last great discovery. Of course, this wasn’t the case. I never heard John say he’d “discovered” but Stevie was the last artist he backed who had great commercial success after a long run that had begun in the mid-1930s. The people he’d championed at HME, while talented, were not big-ticket artists and had modest careers. It was nice that he was able to go out with a winner. Long after John had died and two years after Stevie’s death, the master tapes from which the demo I’d heard in 1981 were remastered and a CD entitled In The Beginning was released because Epic had run out of unissued material and Stevie was still a very viable artist. In my mind, this early recording is still the best, raw, exciting and without any rock pretense. Ten years after that, in the early 2000s, Rolling Stone Magazine voted Stevie the seventh greatest guitarist of all time. He sure sounded that way in 1981 when I first heard the demo tape. I never bought the In The Beginning CD; I didn’t have to, I still had the demo tape which I was pretty sure had a better sound, a more gritty feel, that did the cleaned up and remastered CD. |
Stevie Ray Vaughan and John Hammond, New York City, 1982 |
