![]() Two of the songs, “Tightrope” and “Wall of Denial,” were cautionary tales about addiction and substance abuse, a topic Stevie discussed openly during public appearances and in the middle of concert performances. The album title pronounced his continued sobriety, having walked a 12-step recovery program. It was like a second career taking off, leading to the release of his most successful LP, In Step, in June of 1989. He was admitted to rehab and, against all odds, emerged sober and more focused on his music than ever. Stevie Ray Vaughan was on his way, almost.ĭrugs and alcohol brought the party to an end when Stevie suffered a physical and emotional breakdown while on tour in Europe in 1986. Stevie got his first big break at the Montreux Jazz festival in 1982, where his ferocious Jimi Hendrix style wrapped in Muddy Waters soul left some of the audience in rapturous tears and others booing in anger at the radical departure from the jazz they had come to hear.Ī record deal followed that led to commercial success, lots of touring, and the nonstop partying that such a lifestyle seems to demand. By any measure, Stevie was the better guitarist of the Vaughan brothers, but he insisted on playing the blues, a style that had limited appeal during the heavy metal ’70s and techno pop ’80s. ![]() They both later moved to Austin, where Jimmie’s career took off with his band, The Fabulous Thunderbirds. He and his older brother Jimmie were guitar phenoms in the Dallas music scene when they were teenagers. Stevie Ray Vaughan was a rising Texas legend. ![]() Maybe that’s where the money was, but it wasn’t what made the case important to me. He got a percentage of everything that Clapton made, and it doesn’t take much of a percentage of Clapton to make you a very wealthy individual.” He was Eric Clapton’s manager and one of the four passengers on the helicopter. There’s some big money at stake on this one. “This is the Stevie Ray Vaughan case,” I said, my curiosity piqued. My boss lingered at my door for a moment as I flipped through the file. I had over 1,000 hours of helicopter flight time under my belt, most of it in the same model helicopter that flew into a ski slope on that fateful night in 1990, killing Vaughan and everyone else on board. The file landed on my desk because of my flying experience. Although still a “baby lawyer” at the blue-blood, Dallas law firm where I worked, I was older than most of the firm’s junior lawyers as a result of flying helicopters in the Army for five years before law school. I was only a few years younger than that when my boss, a seasoned aviation lawyer, dropped a new litigation file on my desk. Stevie Ray Vaughan, perhaps the best rock/blues guitarist of my generation, was 35 when he died in a helicopter crash near Elkhorn, Wisconsin, shortly after midnight on August 27, 1990. Stevie Ray Vaughan never saw it coming at all. We’d done it! We’d re-created the Stevie Ray Vaughan helicopter crash. We roared past the crash site, just feet from impact. The pilot yanked back on the cyclic stick, inducing sickening Gs as the helicopter clawed toward the sky. I opened my eyes to the sight of the ground rushing toward me.
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