{"id":3116,"date":"2011-08-05T16:55:04","date_gmt":"2011-08-05T23:55:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=3116"},"modified":"2011-08-05T16:55:36","modified_gmt":"2011-08-05T23:55:36","slug":"jimmie-vaughan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2011\/08\/jimmie-vaughan\/","title":{"rendered":"JIMMIE VAUGHAN"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/h1>\n

JIMMIE VAUGHAN<\/h1>\n

The Texas guitar master still considers himself a student of the blues <\/strong><\/h2>\n

By Eric R. Danton<\/strong><\/p>\n

Texas-born guitar slinger Jimmie Vaughan grew up listening to songs by the likes of Jimmy Reed, Johnny Ace and Lonnie Brooks\u2014the kind of old rock \u2019n\u2019 roll, vintage blues and country that once filled up jukeboxes and crackled from transistor radios. Stations at the time regularly played songs that blurred genre lines, and young Jimmie didn\u2019t mind it one bit. \u201cI was just listening to the guitar players,\u201d he recalls. \u201cNot because I was smart, I just didn\u2019t know any better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those were the tunes Vaughan could never quite get out of his system, from his days gutting it out on the Dallas and Austin blues scenes as a teenager alongside fellow hopefuls like former ZZ Top frontman Billy Gibbons, through his star-making turn in the 1980s as a member of the Fabulous Thunderbirds and in platinum-selling duo the Vaughan Brothers with sibling Stevie Ray. Now the club circuit is a distant memory, Vaughan left the T-Birds in 1989, and of\u00a0course his much-missed younger brother passed away in 1990. But even today, the songs of Jimmie Vaughan\u2019s youth continue to inspire and sustain him\u2014so much so that he worked up his own versions of a dozen of them (along with one original instrumental) for his first new solo album since 2001, the aptly titled Jimmie Vaughan Plays Blues, Ballads & Favorites<\/em>. \u201cIt\u2019s a combination of songs I always liked and songs I was a little afraid to do,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd then some obscure little weirdo stuff that was fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

The album was a long time coming, not the least because taking on the songbooks of your heroes is a tall order. \u201cIf you start recording songs from other people you hold in high esteem, it gets really scary,\u201d says Vaughan, now 59. \u201cSometimes, you can do things you think you can\u2019t, and sometimes you just can\u2019t. You just have to go try.\u201d Vaughan spoke with us about those songs, his famous brother and his lifelong process of learning to play the blues.<\/p>\n

Did any of these songs intimidate you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

[Billy \u201cThe Kid\u201d Emerson\u2019s] \u201cThe Pleasure is All Mine.\u201d I love that song and I\u2019ve been listening to it a long time. A lot of songs are scary because I can play them, but I don\u2019t know if I can sing them. Even though I\u2019d listened to them for a long time, I\u2019d never tried to play most of the songs\u2014with the exception of Lonnie Mack\u2019s \u201cRoll, Roll, Roll,\u201d which I\u2019d recorded with the T-Birds in the \u201970s. Any song, when it\u2019s new, it\u2019s unfamiliar and scary. But that\u2019s the good part about\u00a0it, too. By the time you learn it, you want\u00a0to go do something else. If you get real familiar with something, it\u2019s not all brand new and exciting.<\/p>\n

How long did the album take?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It took maybe a year, but we weren\u2019t in the studio very often. It was an on and off thing. I pretended to be making 45 singles with\u00a0this record. I\u2019d go in with two or three songs, and then the next time my band came to town for a gig, we\u2019d go in again. There were a lot of different sessions. Most of us live in Austin, but not everybody\u2014[saxophonist] Greg Piccolo lives in Connecticut; Billy Pitman, the guitar player, lives in California; Bill Willis lived in Oklahoma\u2014so to get my band together, I have to come up with a block of gigs, or a good reason to fly \u2019em all out. [Organist Willis died earlier this year<\/em>.]<\/p>\n

Why pretend to be making singles?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s more fun and it feels better. You don\u2019t have to come up with a book, you only have to come up with a chapter. You just go in and pretend you\u2019re making a new single for the jukebox down the street, right? In the old days, you\u2019d have a recording budget, book a studio for two or three weeks and try to spend that budget and do the album. I\u2019m not going to do any more albums like that. When I record now, I\u2019m not going to say, \u201cYou know what, we need to make a new album.\u201d<\/p>\n

Do you still recognize the kid who first fell in love with this music?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I feel<\/em> like that kid. He\u2019s actually having more fun and is just as excited as when he was a kid. I\u2019m still doing my dream, which was to be a blues guitar player. When I told my uncles I wanted to be a blues guitar player, they said, \u201cWhat for?\u201d They thought I should be a country guy. It was a very odd thing for me to announce that I was going to be a blues guitar player when I was 15. And I don\u2019t mean from a racial standpoint: In the early \u201960s in Dallas, every kind of band played Jimmy Reed songs. I always listened to the black station and wanted to play Little Tommy Tucker and \u201cHigh Heel Sneakers.\u201d<\/p>\n

But your uncles preferred country? <\/strong><\/p>\n

They liked Webb Pierce. So did I, but when I was a teenager, I didn\u2019t know the difference between blues and country. That was the confusing part. On Saturdays in Dallas, it was all country and western shows on the television, like the Wilburn Brothers, Porter Wagoner and Cow Town Jamboree<\/em>. A lot of the country and western guys would come out and play jazz songs or Jimmy Reed songs too. Back then, music was more together than it was separate.<\/p>\n

Did you always want to play guitar?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wanted to be a drummer at first, but I couldn\u2019t do it as well as the guitar, which seemed easier and more fun.<\/p>\n

Coming up with guys like Billy Gibbons, did you feel a sense of destiny?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When you\u2019re young like that, you\u2019re having so much fun, you\u2019re not thinking too far ahead. You\u2019re thinking, \u201cMan, what if I could play this song and do this gig?\u201d and, \u201cHave you heard that new song by Eric Clapton?\u201d (laughs<\/em>) I wasn\u2019t thinking about my career or anything except, \u201cI can\u2019t believe I have a gig tonight.\u201d I did meet Billy Gibbons when I was about 15, and we played together in Houston at the Catacombs. I was in a band called the Chessmen. The ad on the radio for the Catacombs was, \u201cDallas\u2019 Jimmie Vaughan meets Houston\u2019s Billy Gibbons from the Moving Sidewalks. On the same stage, battling it out!\u201d<\/p>\n

What was the idea behind the Vaughan Brothers album [Family Style<\/em>, 1990]?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was 12, I bought an electric guitar and got in a band at school and started playing. I\u2019m four years older than Stevie, so he was 8 and had a little toy guitar. Somebody would come over to the house and my dad would say, \u201cJim, get your guitar and play \u2018In the Mood\u2019 by Glenn Miller,\u201d because my dad liked that song. When Stevie got a guitar, Dad would say, \u201cYou boys get your guitars and play a song.\u201d And the person would almost always say, \u201cYou boys are pretty good. Maybe someday you can make a record together.\u201d We grew up and became musicians and finally it happened. I named it Family Style<\/em>, because it was like sitting at a table family-style. Also, Family Style<\/em> was a deliberate attempt to have a\u00a0hit and do something different than what\u00a0we were both doing with our own bands\u00a0and careers. We definitely pushed it and tried to do all the stuff we weren\u2019t doing with our own bands.<\/p>\n

Think you\u2019d have done another one?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know. We just didn\u2019t ever get there, you know? We recorded the album,\u00a0and then the tragedy happened before the record came out. It came out immediately after Stevie got killed. It was already scheduled, so we didn\u2019t know what to do. Do we release it? Do we cancel it?\u00a0We didn\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

Do you still practice?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I play a couple hours every day. Sometimes more. I just took the ferry from England to Hamburg, and I played guitar for four hours sitting in the bus. It\u2019s fun. I\u2019m not hanging out in the bar anymore. I\u2019m over all that\u00a0young-man stuff about drinking. I don\u2019t\u00a0do any of that anymore, so I play guitar. When you\u2019re young and out on tour, you don\u2019t\u00a0want to go home. But you go through life,\u00a0get a little older and start appreciating\u00a0what you\u2019ve got. At least that\u2019s what happened to me.<\/p>\n

Is playing guitar an ongoing learning <\/strong>experience for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I took music lessons last year. I got a\u00a0guitar teacher who\u2019s unbelievable. I\u2019m\u00a0not going to tell you his name because I\u00a0don\u2019t want everyone to call him. He\u2019s mine! (laughs<\/em>) But he\u2019s a fabulous guitar player who went to the Guitar Institute of Technology and learned from [GIT founder] Howard Roberts. I\u2019m always trying to learn how to play new things. Not necessarily change my style so I sound different, but theory and chords. I still enjoy all that.\u00a0I\u2019ve never really learned anything that I haven\u2019t used sooner or later. I may not use it for 20 years, but someday it might come up, and you go, \u201cOh yeah, I know what\u00a0to do about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why are you still drawn to the blues?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I just play the music that I love, because that\u2019s what I like to hear. I made it my business to find other musicians who like what I like, and I\u2019m still just trying to learn how to play what I want to hear. I love that stuff. The first time I heard that music, it made me feel great, and I went, \u201cMan, that is it. When I grow up, that\u2019s what I\u2019m going to be.\u201d I\u2019m still trying\u00a0to do that. That\u2019s what I enjoy doing, so it\u2019s living for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JIMMIE VAUGHAN The Texas guitar master still considers himself a student of the blues By Eric R. Danton Texas-born guitar slinger Jimmie Vaughan grew up listening to songs by the likes of Jimmy Reed, Johnny Ace and Lonnie Brooks\u2014the kind of old rock \u2019n\u2019 roll, vintage blues and country that once filled up jukeboxes and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[2297,623,970],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3116"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3116"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3119,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3116\/revisions\/3119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}