Stevie Ray Vaughan: Soul To Soul : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Three albums on, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble stand at the crossroads. There's enough evidence on Soul to Soul to suggest that there's some life left in their blues-rock pastiche; it's also possible that they've run out of gas.

Like George Thorogood, Vaughan has achieved considerable success by presenting some of America's richest music in diluted form. This album's cover versions (with nothing as obvious or gratuitous as Couldn't Stand the Weather's reworking of Jimi Hendrix' "Voodoo Chile") will bring songs by Hank Ballard and Willie Dixon to the larger audience they deserve. Vaughan's original compositions are as superfluous as Thorogood's, but his singing has greatly improved, and the addition of keyboard player Reese Wynans to the power-trio format fills out the sound without adding much clutter to it.

These gains are genuine, but they're also limited. Vaughan's downfall is his refusal to marry his roots commitment with any kind of pop sense: song structure is continually abandoned in favor of open-ended jams. Maybe next time an outside producer, such as Don Gehman (John Mellencamp, the Blasters) or Joe Boyd (Richard Thompson, R.E.M.), could impose some structure and tighten Vaughan and Double Trouble's sound, bringing it into 1985 without draining it of its integrity.