Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble

Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble

There's the sophomore slump (U2's October) and the sophomore slam (Led Zeppelin II). Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble's second LP for Epic, 1984's Couldn't Stand the Weather, amounted to following up Jimi Hendrix with, well, Stevie Ray Vaughan (1954-1990). Where the local, Dallas-born guitarist's debut, Texas Flood, a year earlier chiseled its name immediately into the all-time blues registry, Couldn't Stand the Weather went directly from his forebear's Are You Experienced to Electric Ladyland without ever stopping at Axis: Bold as Love (another second-outing slump). A double-disc reboot of Vaughan's commercial breakthrough – 500,000 sold and double that eventually – inspires flashbacks to a rain-lashed MTV video for "Couldn't Stand the Weather" that will still soak your socks. Even now Texas elements best describe the disc, opening like the skies on a follow-up of sorts to Texas Flood instrumental and Grammy-nominee "Rude Mood." At one minute and 52 seconds, "Scuttle Buttin'" busts open Couldn't Stand the Weather like loose shudders in a typhoon. The title track then showers meteors on Vaughan's trademark bolero. Its composer's spatial flurry of riffs, where rhythmic pause equals 1,000 years of solitude, peels back pure kiss-the-sky Strat varnish. And that's before "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" powers forth, a standard that Double Trouble bassist Tommy Shannon pressed his best friend to cover (see "In a Blink of an Eye," Chronicle Music blog Earache!, July 28). After a dizzying cluster of vertiginous string bends toward the five-minute mark comes the song's portentous greeting, "I won't see you again in this world," after which Vaughan almost swallows the next line, "See you in the next," before hollering the punch line: "Don't be late!" Two full decades after the guitar hero's death, and in the face of posthumous galaxies of catalog comportment, the studio version sounds somewhat tame. Setting off the album's second half is the same weather system powering both the title cut and another video era favorite, a cover of Austinites Mike Kindred and W.C. Clark's "Cold Shot." Its chill 'tude melts into all nine late-night minutes/rivulets of "Tin Pan Alley (aka Roughest Place in Town)." Two final SRV originals on the eight-track, 38-minute LP, "Honey Bee" and speakeasy closer "Stang's Swang," call bar time. If not better than Texas Flood, then Couldn't Stand the Weather manages that which the best sophomore efforts (Cream's Disraeli Gears) ultimately accomplish – refining an act's key ingredients/influences into an evolutionary advance. Session overflow, 11 tracks, reshuffles portions of posthumous peak The Sky Is Crying and Sony's initial Couldn't Stand the Weather expansion in the form of 10 covers and Vaughan original "Empty Arms," which would prove an initial step toward Vaughan & Double Trouble's first relative slump – the still fiery Soul to Soul. A previously unreleased stab at Sky Is Crying opener "Boot Hill" proves pleasingly raw, but nothing notable justifies the filler. Same goes for the second CD here, a live sampling of Couldn't Stand the Weather in Montreal two weeks after the album's release, unremarkable save for its penultimate track, 11-minute Mars rover "Lenny."

The reissue, not the album: