REISSUE REVIEW

STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN AND DOUBLE TROUBLE

Couldn’t Stand the Weather (Legacy Edition)

[Sony Legacy]

The first album by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, 1983’s Texas Flood, was recorded on the fly using borrowed studio time. The follow-up was a very different story—the group headed for New York City to record for six weeks at the Power Station, where Vaughan had laid down his stinging guitar solos on David Bowie’s Let’s Dance album the year before. But the relative luxury didn’t dim the grit and fire of Vaughan, bass player Tommy Shannon and drummer Chris “Whipper” Layton—fueled by a year and a half of steady touring, they tore into the songs on Couldn’t Stand the Weather like a thick steak. They built on the strengths of Texas Flood, broadening their horizons into rock and jazz while maintaining a steady grounding in the blues. The first half of this two-disc reissue adds 11 unreleased studio tracks to the original album. Only three are previously unreleased (the remainder were spread across the posthumous The Sky Is Crying album and a previous reissue), but gathering them all in one place nonetheless demonstrates the fruitfulness of the sessions. A second disc sports a previously unreleased show from August 1984 that finds the group in top form, confidently giving more than half the set list over to songs from Weather. Vaughan’s slim catalog has been sliced and diced perhaps more than was necessary in the two decades since his death, but this presentation is a worthy reappraisal of his genius at the moment it reached full flower. –CN