Stevie Ray Vaughan: Texas Flood : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The good news: Stevie Ray Vaughan plays true Texas-style blues guitar all over this debut album with his Austin-based band, Double Trouble. No synthesizers, no Beatleisms, no overt attempts to Make You Dance. Double Trouble's basic trio format allows Vaughan (the brother of Fabulous Thunderbird Jimmy Vaughan and lead guitarist on David Bowie's Let's Dance LP) to do what he obviously loves best, which is to whip it out. He plays stinging Stratocaster leads on "Pride and Joy," gut-wrenching runs throughout the title tune and a roiling combination of Berry, boogie and ensemble horn lines on "Love Struck Baby." The few modernisms that do obtrude are strictly six-string oriented: the delicately detailed Hendrix-like landscape of "Lenny" and the rampant riffery of "Rude Mood," which finds Vaughan obviously gunning for Jeff Beck. All of this is most refreshing, and I don't even mind the singing, which at least is genuinely generic.

The Bad News: Stevie Ray can't write–and we all know how boring white blues can become without some semblance of a tune upon which to hang all the pyrotechnics. So what if "Testify" sounds a lot like Jimi without the wah-wah pedal; Hendrix may have been a blues player par excellence, but above all else, he was Hendrix–an original. Stevie Ray does his thing well, but essentially, it's somebody else's thing.

The Verdict: Texas Flood is well worth hearing, even if you have heard it all before. After all, it's been a long time, right?