Few artists have shaped Texas blues more than Jimmie Vaughan and Jimmy Reed, so it’s appropriate that Vaughan would help pay homage to the great Reed with the first complete tribute album dedicated to his work, On the Jimmy Reed Highway released last week on Ruf Records. As a founding member, along with Kim Wilson, of the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Vaughan was integral in developing Austin’s blues scene in the Seventies and Eighties, the T-Birds becoming a mainstay at Antone’s from the club’s beginning. Our resident blues guru Roger Gatchet spoke with Vaughan about how he found the blues, Austin in the early days of Antone’s, and the tribute album to Jimmy Reed.
Austin Sound: I want to congratulate you on all the positive press and buzz about the new On the Jimmy Reed Highway record on the Ruf label. I think this is one of the best Texas blues records to come out in a long, long time.
Jimmie Vaughan: Wow, well thanks. It’s been a lot of fun, we’ve really been enjoying it. It’s all coming fast, it’s been good.
AS: I wanted to first ask you, before we talk about this latest project, could you tell us a little bit about how you first got into playing music and the blues and guitar, growing up in Dallas, Texas?
JV: Well, I was a terrible athlete. And I was playing football, in the seventh grade, and I got tackled and I broke my collar bone. So they sent me home from school. Anyway, the next day this friend of mine, I had been fooling around with his guitar, and he gave me his guitar. So I was off to the races. And I was happy about being home and everything, even though my arm was hurting. [laughs] So I thought well, if I practice on this guitar maybe I can get a car, and then I can leave. Or something, whatever kids think. And so I started playing and I learned that day, not very well, but I learned how to play the beginning riff to “Honky Tonk,” which was actually [by] Jimmy Reed. And I soon found out that that was a Jimmy Reed lick, or an Eddie Taylor lick let’s say. And so that was how it really started for me, and I’ve been playing ever since.
AS: So you first started out with Jimmy Reed. Who were some of your early influences on guitar?
JV: Well, there’s Freddie King. This was in the mid-sixties, so you know Freddie King was big. There’s one [record] where he’s standing with his foot on a park bench, I had that one. And there was a band in Dallas when I was a kid called the Nightcaps, and they actually had 45 records and they had hit records in Dallas. They had “Wine, Wine, Wine,” and they had a song called “Thunderbird,” a bunch of songs like that. I really learned how to play off of their album [Wine, Wine, Wine, released on Vandan in 1962]. And there was radio. There was a show called Cat’s Caravan and they played Lightnin’ Hopkins and Jimmy Reed.
AS: Do you know where that show was being broadcast out of, was it in Dallas?
JV: Dallas. And then after that, I had a little transistor radio in bed you know, and you could get Wolfman Jack, and you could get WLAC in Nashville, Tennessee with John R. and all those guys [“John R.” Richbourg was a long-time blues DJ at WLAC, from the 1940s through the seventies].
AS: What kind of music was coming out of Nashville, was that mostly country?
JV: No, WLAC was straight blues. I mean it wasn’t straight blues, it was blues, with whatever the new records were. And there was a place called Ernie’s Record Mart, where you could get a 12-pack blues special. [Blues] was all over the radio in the mid-sixties.
AS: Sure, much more so than it is today. What was the club scene like in Dallas, before you moved to Austin? When did you leave Dallas for Austin?
JV: It was ‘69.
AS: Do you have any memories of the club scene in Dallas in the 1960s, what it was like down there?
JV: Well yeah, I have a small memory of it. We played in the clubs seven nights, six nights a week, and our dads had to take us because we were too little to get in. So that’s the kind of memories I have of the club scene in Dallas. I don’t know, we played everywhere. I mean there was a lot of clubs back then.
AS: What brought you to Austin?
JV: Well, when I was in another band I started coming down here when I was like fourteen. I got a gig with this band called the Chessmen. And they were a cover band and they played for fraternities. Made pretty good money, and so we’d come down here to play. I always liked Austin, and I said to myself “I want to move there someday.” I had a good feeling when I was here, so I came down in 1970 for good.
AS: I think if there’s anything I could do, it would be to ask my mom to have conceived me about fifteen years earlier so I could have come to Austin and lived here during that time that you were here, you know, when Antone’s first opened up, and there was that amazing blues scene in Texas. You’ve been such an integral part of the Austin blues scene for so many decades now. Can you share some special memories you have of Clifford’s club, Antone’s? You and the Fabulous Thunderbirds held the band spotlight down there for a long time.
JV: Well yeah, we started that band, and we had been playing at the Rome Inn, and we played a little bit at the One Night. I played at the One Night before the T-birds for five years, on Monday nights. So there was a lot of clubs going on. There was a couple of clubs on Sixth Street, and there was quite a few places around town to play and we pretty much played every night. And so we met Clifford, and we’d go by his store. He had a store that sold stuff from India, stuff like that - imports. And we’d go back there and he always wanted us to go in the back and play. He had some amps back there. And he said, “Well I’m gonna own a club, and I want you guys to go down there.” So he opened the Sixth Street place, and we pretty much stayed down there six, seven nights a week. Then he started bringing in Jimmy Rogers and Eddie Taylor, all those different guys, and he had Buddy Guy and he had Junior Wells, anybody he could get from Louisiana or California, or Chicago. It was pretty cool. And there wasn’t a lot of people comin’ to the thing. On weekends it would kinda fill up sometimes depending on who it was, but a lot of the times down there there’d just be three, four, five tables full of people. People standing at the bar, ya know. And so you could just go in there and play, just go in there and play for hours. It wasn’t like now where there’s always somebody filming everything, and everything is being recorded, and everybody’s, ya know, talking about this and that. It was just, it was pretty neat.
AS: Just a down home blues bar.
JV: It was a nice place though. They had food and everything.
AS: I did an interview with Sarah Brown, long-time bassist out there. And she told me that one of the favorite memories she has of the old original location was pistachios and hard boiled eggs.
JV: Yeah yeah, there you go. [laughs]
AS: Are you remembering those?
JV: Well I remember grape leaves. [laughs] Grape leaves.
AS: How much fun man. I wanted to ask you if the East Austin Chitlin’ Circuit scene was still happening when you moved to Austin in the seventies.
JV: Well, before I moved here we used to go and we used to play, we played a handful of times with different guys at the I & L Club.
AS: I & L Club?
JV: Yeah, the I-L Club. We used to play over there. And that’s where I met Otis Lewis and some other guys. We played over there quite a bit. And we used to play at a place called La Cucaracha. We used to see people play at Ernie’s Chicken Shack. I was like seventeen, eighteen.
AS: Were there many white blues fans hanging out there on the East Side at that time?
JV: No, the only guy I knew that liked blues down here at all was Bill Campbell. Bill Campbell was all over it, and he knew everybody and played with a lot of the guys on the East Side, and knew Albert Collins and Freddie King, stuff like that. And he was the guy you’d go to to know when somebody was comin’, or what was going on, you know. But I don’t remember, there wasn’t a great blues scene going on. I don’t remember anything except, it was all Willie, Waylon and the Boys.
AS: Willie, Waylon and the Boys, yes.
JV: You know Jerry Jeff Walker and all that. We played at the Vulcan a couple of times.
AS: I did want to talk about the new record that you just put out with Omar Kent Dykes and an all-star ensemble cast of Austin’s finest blues artists. Can you tell us a little bit about your connection with Jimmy Reed, and what makes this artist so special. It just seems like everyone covers his songs, and everything that he did was just magical, you know? I don’t know how to describe it, when I put on a Jimmy Reed record it’s like something really special.
JV: Yeah, well now after growing up and thinking about it, I think of Jimmy Reed as like Hank Williams, you know? In a sense, because his records were pretty much, you know in the fifties, early sixties, they all had that same sound. It never got a chance to get modernized, and anybody likes Jimmy Reed songs. People know Jimmy Reed songs even if they don’t know who he is. Everybody’s heard of “Big Boss Man,” or “You Got Me Running,” that kind of stuff. And I think that’s what it is. Omar gave me a book about Jimmy Reed, and I was reading in that. And you know the engineers, the people behind the scenes like the booking agents and the record companies, those people, they didn’t like Jimmy Reed. [laughs] Because apparently he was hard to handle, for whatever reason. But the people loved Jimmy Reed and demanded him. He was really popular with just the folks. And I think that’s just because he sounds so relaxed and so cool, naturally. It’s just you can’t deny it, it’s unbelievable, it’s Jimmy Reed. Plus you had the fantastic guitar of Eddie Taylor on there, and Jimmy Reed, and then the harmonica, I mean it’s great music. He’s the biggest selling blues artist of all time.
AS: That’s what I’ve read. And he was one of those artists who was able to crossover from the black R&B charts over to the pop charts, and was really popular with young white college students.
JV: It was more than that, I can tell you that when I was a kid, I didn’t know all this about who played what, and what was this, and this is that kind of music, and this is that kind, it was just music. I mean the country guys used to play Jimmy Reed songs, my parents used to go dancing and they told me they went to a Jimmy Reed gig to dance. It was dance music, and they had slow songs, and people danced together then. It was romantic, it had everything! It had a really smooth, cool beat, which was reminiscent of big band stuff, you know beat-wise. I don’t know, it’s one hundred-and-ten-percent American.
AS: Yeah, something special
JV: Yeah, that’s how I would describe it. It was big in Dallas. When I was a kid, there was a show, like one of these dumb after-school record sock hop shows on TV, and they’d have the latest records from whoever was out, and they would have Jimmy Reed on there too, you know, the records. And he was on Top 40 radio, things like that.
AS: It’s impressive. When you went into the studio to record the tracks for this new album On the Jimmy Reed Highway, did you find it difficult to recreate his sound, his signature sound? Were you trying to recreate his signature sound?
JV: Well, we were just trying to do it in the spirit of, really. We didn’t analyze the songs. Like on “Big Boss Man” there’s a definite head intro that makes you recognize what song it is. If it had something like that we’d do it, we’d do the intro, but mainly we just tried to do it in the spirit of. Everybody on the record really loves Jimmy Reed. So this was just really fun for everyone. And we did the record like in one day, two days or something. It went real fast.
AS: I think you guys nailed it. One listen to this album and you can tell there’s some real special musical and artistic expression going on.
JV: The drummer and the bass player and Derek [O'Brien], let’s not forget Derek. Derek produced this record, and he’s the one that called all the different people. He produced it for Omar, so he’s the one that kept it, if you want to say, authentic. There’s no fuzz tones or reggae bands on it, you know what I mean. So Derek did a great job, and he played the background guitar. You know the “do-da-do-da-do-da-do,” that deal. I just love playing that, so it was a pleasure. A lot of times you hear [bands] try to put a lot of electric bass on it when they cut Jimmy Reed songs these days. That kinda plugs it up, ya know? It’s gotta be open like that.
You know Jimmy Reed albums, like those first albums Carnegie Hall, I’m Jimmy Reed, and all that stuff, it’s like if you were on an island and you only had one album, you’d never get tired of Jimmy Reed records. You could play them over and over and over. I’ve been playing them for thirty years or longer. [laughs]
Websites:
www.jimmievaughan.com
Myspace
