Goldmine #500
September 24, 1999
The Family Style: Jimmie Vaughan sings the blues to a larger audience, by
Richard Skelly

It's taken time for Jimmie Vaughan to get out of the funk caused by the tragic, senseless death of his younger brother Stevie Ray. The younger Vaughan was killed in a helicopter accident in East Troy, Wisc., on Aug. 27, 1990. But the Jimmie Vaughan that has emerged from the tragedy in the mid- and late 1990s-with his soulful vocals, superb guitar tone and economical playing style-has the potential to introduce as many new fans to the blues as his younger brother did in his eight years as an international touring artist. While it's impossible to discuss the career of Jimmie Vaughan at length without mention of his younger brother Stevie Ray, Jimmie's solo career through the 1990s has been full of pleasant surprises.

For starters, after nearly 30 years of playing guitar with a succession of bands, most prominently The Fabulous Thunderbirds, the elder Vaughan brother began singing at the request of producer Nile Rodgers. Rodgers worked with the Vaughan brothers on Family Style (1990) and worked on Jimmie's two solo albums, Strange Pleasure (1994) and Out There (1998), both for Epic Records.

Through the 1990s, Vaughan has blossomed into a good vocalist, a creative songwriter and, as usual, he plays superb guitar without even having to think about it. Vaughan's live shows with The Tilt-A-Whirl Band, which includes three back-up vocalists, longtime Austin drummer George Rains and Hammond B-3 organist Bill Willis from Los Angeles, are well-paced affairs that draw audiences in through the rhythms, the just-right back-up vocalizing and the great guitar tones that emanate from Vaughan's two Matchless amplifiers on stage. Watching Vaughan sing and play, you can tell he's putting most of his effort into his vocals, because his guitar playing is second-nature and (seems to be) effortless.

Vaughan was born on March 20, 1951. He and his younger brother Stevie were primarily raised in Dallas, though Vaughan attended first grade in Jackson, Miss. Guitar-playing uncles showed Vaughan his first few chords on guitar, and it wasn't long before younger brother Stevie also became obsessed with playing guitar. Both brothers would entertain visiting relatives as youngsters. After working in a procession of bands that had few places to play in the Dallas/Fort worth area, Jimmie moved to Austin in 1970, at age 19, with drummer and songwriter Doyle Bramhall. He and Bramhall formed The Storm in 1972, and that band accompanied visiting blues acts at places such as Soap Creek and The Rome Inn.

In 1974, Vaughan met Kim Wilson, a California-raised harmonica player who was then living in Minneapolis. Wilson was encouraged to move to Austin, and after he did, he and Vaughan founded The Fabulous Thunderbirds, which included Keith Ferguson on bass and Mike Buck on drums.

In July 1975, local blues aficionado Clifford Antone opened Antone's blues nightclub on East 6th Street. Though the club has been through a succession of moves since then, it still operates today from a location on West Fifth Street. The Fabulous thunderbirds quickly became a house band of sorts at Antone's, playing lengthy "residency" styled shows there and backing up the likes of Muddy Waters, Albert Collins, Albert King, Jimmy Roders and others. After several years of playing regionally around Texas, the group was signed to record for Tacoma Records, and they released their self-titled debut album in 1979.

The band would record four more albums with Chrysalis and then Epic Records before Tuff Enuff broke the nationally in 1986. The title track became a Top 10 single. Vaughan continued to tour around the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia with the Thunderbirds at their breakneck pace until June 16, 1990, when he played his last gig with the band in Fort hood, Texas. He then joined his brother on the road for a series of select dates at outdoor arenas, one of which, the Garden State Arts Center in Holmdel, N.J., this author attended. According to Keri Leigh's book, Stevie Ray: Soul To Soul (Taylor Books, 1993), the younger Vaughan's #1 guitar was smashed by a falling sound baffle which barely missed a roadie.

Shortly thereafter, the blues and classic rock community was in shock for weeks after the tragic death of Vaughan in the helicopter accident in East Troy, Wisc. (The accident also took the lives of Eric Caption's agent Bobby Brooks, his bodyguard Nigel Browne, tour manager Colin Smythe, and pilot Jeffrey Brown.) Just a few weeks later, Family Style would be released on Epic Records, the first-ever publicly issued collaboration between the Vaughan brothers.

After taking some time off from the road to get himself together spiritually and mentally, Jimmie returned to performing publicly with Clapton at a series of shows in 1992 at London's Royal Albert Hall. Vaughan said of this dark period in his life that he would practice and play guitar every day but simply refused to go out in public very much to perform, since everyone would tell him how sorry they were at the loss of his younger brother. "It would break me up, so I just stayed home," he recalled.

Fortunately, executives at Epic Records decided to sign Vaughan as a solo artist, and his album Strange Pleasure, released in 1994, was critically praised and widely hailed as one of the best contemporary blues albums of the year, though it may not have sold in stellar numbers. Four years later, Out there was released in June 1998.

Vaughan and The Tilt-A-Whirl band have been touring around the US and Europe since the release of those two albums, and the patrons at his shows tend to be a mix of people: those old enough to recall Vaughan during the glory days of the Fabulous Thunderbirds in the mid-1980s, those too young to have ever seen Stevie Ray or Jimmie Vaughan perform, those who were avid Stevie Ray Vaughan fans, and the classic rock 'n' roll radio fans who don't know much about blues. It is this last group of fans on whom Vaughan works the real magic. When they hear him perform contemporary blues songs such as " Feel Like A King," "Astral Projection Blues" of Johnny Guitar Watson's classic, "Motor Head Baby," they're prompted to search out the recordings of people whom Vaughan credits as influences: Watson, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Kenny Burrell, Collins and Lightnin' Hopkins.

Vaughan's two solo recordings and his live shows draw elements of soul, urban blues and regional Texas blues styles together. It's fair to call his unique synthesis of stylings Texas soul blues.

Vaughan, now 48, took time out from his hectic summer touring schedule to speak with Goldmine before a show at Trump Marina in Atlantic City. (If you ever get a chance to see a show there, do it. The focus, surprisingly, is not on gambling, but on presenting good concerts, and patrons aren't forced to walk through the midst of a huge casino to get to the ballroom.)

Goldmine: Tell us a bit about the making of the Family Style, Out there and Strange Pleasure, albums for Epic Records. They were produced by Nile Rodgers, who's more or less known for his work in the pop field. What does he bring to blues and roots production that other producers don't?

Jimmie Vaughan: I trust Nile, musically. He knows what he's talking about, and he's a musician. A lot of producers aren't musicians...maybe they're engineers. They don't play at all, or they play a little bit here and there. I don't know. But Nile is definitely the best producer I've worked with who's a no-shit producer. He can sit down and write a chart or transpose music or play lead guitar or rhythm guitar and all those kinds of things. I like his musical abilities, and I respect him. I have to be able to respect a guy musically before I can let him produce me, because I already know what I want. Nile can help me stay out of my own way a lot of times. I really enjoy working with him and engineer John Hampton.

He's my friend, and I can sit here and talk to him and say, "You know what, I really don't like that. I hate that part," and he'll say, "Yeah, you're right," or "No, you're full of shit." And I can argue with him and he'll argue back, and it's okay, because there's a level of respect.

You've been thanking Nile publicly for getting your your singing career going, and right from the get-go, I thought your vocals were great.

The first time I sang in the recording studio was on family Style (Epic Records, 1990 with brother Stevie Ray.) Secretly, I always wanted to sing, and I just never did, 'cause I didn't like the way my voice sounded. I'd been listening to Muddy Waters and Bobby "Blue" Bland and all these great blues singers, and I just couldn't sing like that. So I decided, "I'm not going to sing, I'm just going to play." When I turned 40 years old and we asked Nile Rodgers to produce Family Style, Stevie and I showed up at the studio with a lot of instrumentals. The plan was to see if we couldn't get Etta James to sing a few songs.

Nile said, "Stevie's gonna sing and you're gonna sing, too." And I said, "Well , I don't sing." And he said, "Well, you have to!" So, at that point, I was backed into a corner. To a great extent, I'm still learning to sing. It's not like guitar playing, where I don't think about it much. I'm working my way towards getting that way with singing, and it's a pretty lofty goal for me. Any musical instrument, to start a new instrument, is difficult, and I think of the voice as an instrument. That's the way I approached singing - that may be my downfall as much as it is my asset!

One of the things I've loved about your playing from the beginning is your economy of style. You don't need to play a lot of notes to say a lot. You just get these great tones out of your guitars. You're like a white Albert King. How did your style develop this way?

Thank you, that's a fine compliment. When I first started playing, I thought that I wanted to play really fast. So I learned how to play fast. I can still pay pretty fast. I thought that was an important thing, and it was at the time. Then, I realized that it was like practicing in public. It just didn't mean anything to me after I saw what it was. It was just an exercise. What I really wanted to do was say something when I played, like B.B. King does, like Buddy Guy does, like Kenny Burrell does, like Albert Collins does, like Albert King does, Like Gene Ammons, the great tenor saxophonist. I wanted to be able to make a statement and at the same time express myself.

What I do is, when I go to play, I wait and listen to my inner self to tell me what to play, instead of just playing a bunch of stuff. And sometimes I'm just standing there, waiting, and everybody's looking at me like, "What's wrong with you?!" It's almost like telling a lie. I'd rather tell the truth, regardless of what it is.