"Jimmie knows there are people who want every bleep and blip Stevie made in the studio," Irwin says. "I liked some of the fun ditties, like 'Slip Slidin' Slim.' Jimmie will say, 'Oh, that's just Stevie trying to find an amp sound,' and I'll say, 'Yeah, but they're fun.' It's not at all disparaging toward his talent to show a fun little ditty. That to me is interesting. But the point where they're having a tough time in the studio and exhibiting directionless material, you don't want to show that side."
Of course, hardcore fans would insist that's the most interesting material of all--the missteps, the searching in vain for a sound that never comes. Those songs will likely not end up on the boxed set or anywhere else, remaining the property of Jimmie Vaughan and the bootleggers who covet such material, despite sound quality that all but erases the subtleties that made Vaughan not only a great guitarist, but a smart--and, ultimately, important--musician.
But that hasn't stopped some early material from surfacing. Late last year, Home Cookin' Records--the label owned by Houstonian Roy Ames, who has been accused of stealing music made by the likes of Freddie King and Roky Erickson--released Sugar Coated Baby by Austin blues singer Lou Ann Barton. The disc is also available under the name Blues with the Boy, and both are made up of 16 tracks, more than half of which--including "Natural Born Lover" and "Scratch My Back"--were recorded in 1977 with Barton on vocals and Stevie Ray Vaughan on guitar. An Epic executive who deals with Vaughan's catalog says he had no idea the Barton albums existed and will look into the matter, taking the appropriate action if they discover Ames has improperly released the material.
Jimmie Vaughan couldn't be reached, and Irwin will only say Stevie's material is considered "sacred" at the label where such matters are concerned. If nothing else, Irwin says, unauthorized releases such as this are "problematic." Lou Ann Barton--among the Vaughans' very closest friends and an original member of Triple Threat and Double Trouble--says that she did indeed know Ames in the early 1970s, but that he never recorded anything she ever did with Stevie. And as much as she'd like to stop Ames from releasing albums such as Sugar Coated Baby, she simply can't afford it.
"What can I do?" she says. "I don't know how he's getting by doing the Stevie stuff. I can see how he'd try to pass this stuff on me, but I was always told by the Vaughans nothing could be out with Stevie without their permission. I mean, this isn't a bootleg. It's a release."
If Vaughan wasn't much appreciated in life--when he died, he was bumped from the cover of Rolling Stone and replaced by the girls from Twin Peaks--his sound has become a commodity in 1999. Such young bucks as Jonny Lang and Kenny Wayne Shepherd and so many other would-be gee-tar studs have turned SRV echoes into gold and platinum records, selling far more in their teens than Vaughan managed in his 30s. If nothing else, Epic's reissue series will perhaps remind their audience that a decade ago, someone else made arena-sized blues.
"I was listening to a CD this morning by the Keller Brothers from the Dakotas," says Layton, who is in the middle of writing a Double Trouble album to feature Tommy Shannon and several as-yet-unnamed special guests. "They're blond, good-lookin' guys and great players, and they do their own thing. But then I listened to one of our records, and then I realized that when I hear Stevie, my hair still stands up all over my body...I talked to an old farmer guy in a feed store once, and someone was talking about Stevie. This guy said, 'I didn't know him, but I heard his music, and when he died I cried.' There was an intangible thing about Stevie and the way he played that was different.
"There was sorrow and melancholy, and yet it was also so uplifting. My skin crawls, and it makes me cry from time to time. I know what it does to me. I don't know what it is. And players listen to it and go, 'Goddamn, I wanna know what that is.'
