Texas Flood [CD]

OK, I admit first listening was biased by severe abstinence - had this one on LP once upon a time and have yearned for many years to hear it again. But after two weeks I still think this is one SACD that sounds even better than vinyl. Slightly remixed, improving the balance between instruments. There is a fatter sound on some guitar solos that sounded a little tame on LP. Only 2-channel but it does not matter, stereo image is really, really good. Oh, and musically this is first class blues from one of the greatest guitarrists ever.

I can imagine what it must have been like for David Bowie, Jackson Browne, and the Montreux audience to see this virtuoso man play the fastest and most distinctive blues to be heard since Hendrix and Albert King.

I can imagine what it must have been like to have the radio on in the car on a grimy, muddy Monday morning, crammed with a thousand other cars into the clogged dual-carriage way, and hear, from nowhere, the wailing, jamming, flickering fingers of real Texas blues.

Stevie Ray Vaughan seemingly came from nowhere and exploded onto the blues scene with both his Montreux performance and this album, Texas Flood.

It begins with one of the best straight-blues rockers ever recorded, Love Struck Baby, and then on to the slower, Pride And Joy, before the realisation of a true blues magician - Texas Flood. And it doesn't let up from there. Continuously astounding with a million different licks and skids that never tire on the ears, Stevie Ray really does make blues history with his debut album.

Okay, so there are a few drawbacks - the songwriting is constricted to purely within-the-genre blues, and the number of originals on the album is perhaps too sparse. But blues was never about songwriting like Rock was, or like folk became, it was ALWAYS purely about making real feeling through music. No other form of music is as expressive as the blues - classical tires with continual sentiment, and the emotions of jazz stop when it becomes nonsensical and non-musical.

Blues is true music and true feeling, without sugar-coated, soft-focus tears about moping over having a crap life, and instead having real tears, real honesty and a real life, however crap.

And Stevie Ray gave us this like no one had before and like no one will after. But don't give up, you can always play the blues, and if it doesn't have a place today, all the more reason to sing it.

Okay, first of all, that should be five stars. Don't know exactly what happened there, but five stars, okay? Five!
Anyway, there's a review in here somewhere as well. It goes something like this:

Rarely does a year go by without some new artist being proclaimed the greatest thing since music's birth, and when I first heard of Stevie Ray Vaughan, I was a bit wary. With so many people talking about him as if he was the second coming of Jimi Hendrix, something had to be amiss.

Well, it isn't. The late Stevie Ray Vaughan was actually every bit as great as he was made out to be, and his debut album is by far the best collection of blues-rock and contemporary blues of the first half of the 80s, holding up wonderfully more than twenty years later.

This record brought the blues back into the limelight. It spent some seven months on the American charts (an extremely rare feat for what is essentially a blues record), and it includes several of Stevie Ray Vaughan's very best songs:
The blistering rockers "Love Struck Baby" and "I'm Cryin'" are here, as well as the magnificent slow blues "Texas Flood" and "Dirty Pool", an excellent rendition of Buddy Guy's blues-slash-nursery rhyme "Mary Had A Little Lamb", and of course Stevie Ray's most famous song, the sublime "Pride And Joy".

Stevie Ray Vaughan knew not only the form but also the substance of the blues, and his guitar playing is masterful. Vaughan had an incredibly ability to keep his solos sounding fresh and innovative, even when they went on for several minutes at a time, and he was a more than adequate singer as well, switching effortlessly between rock n' roll and slow, soulful blues tunes.
His playing on this album is as good as anything he ever recorded, and it's not hard to see why Eric Clapton once stated that he found himself "in the presence of greatness" upon hearing Vaughan play.

This CD reissue adds five bonus tracks, one of which is a short interview snippet. The other four include a very good live take on "Mary Had A Little Lamb", and the otherwise unreleased instrumental "Wham" (unreleased except on compilations, that is).
And everything here, rockers, blues, instrumentals and bonus cuts, is worth a listen. Many listens. "Texas Flood" is a magnificent blues record, Vaughan's finest original album, and it should appeal to fans of both blues and rock. And, well, music.