Joe Nick Patoski

Month of April 2022: Celebrity Profiles

Now, if you are an avid blues listener, like my husband is, you will undoubtedly rate this book much higher. My husband absolutely has always, and still loves Stevie’s music. He gave this book a 3.5 stars. I never had even heard of him until we met in September 1987. Now, the blues is “almost” right up there with my ‘70’s music.

But, you won’t get the feel of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s real personality from this book. It is pretty dry reading. The authors dropped SOOOOO many blues artist’s names and every joint they ever played in from Dallas, Austin, Houston to San Antonio. I probably only heard about an eighth of the blues singers mentioned.

Stevie Ray Vaughan was a generation between me and my mother. She was born in 1945; I was born October 15, 1964. Stevie was the 2nd and youngest of two boys, born on October 3, 1954…almost exactly 10 years older than me. He was a native of small town, Terrell, Rockwall County, Texas, 33 miles east of Dallas.

Like my parents, Stevie’s parents didn’t decide on a name for him until they signed the birth certificate. They chose his name because it “sounded” good. His older brother, Jimmie Lawrence Vaughan was named after his father, Jimmie Lee Vaughan. My oldest and youngest sisters were both named after my parents. I’m the middle child. They didn’t know what to name me. A black nurse kept calling me Missy and the name has stuck all my life. But, on my birth certificate is a French name that “sounds” really nice: Yvette Renee.

Stevie’s family moved around a LOT for his dad’s job, but they finally settled in a house on Glenfield Street in Oak Cliff, known as “the Brooklyn of the South” (p. 27), and, today, is one of the oldest districts in Dallas, Texas.

By age 11, he was OBSESSED with playing the electric guitar and never looked back. He dreamed about it and, at times, slept with his guitar. If he didn’t have a guitar in hand, he would be fingering notes. He drove other people crazy because that’s all he would ever talk about. He really looked up to his big brother, Jimmie, and wanted to be just like him. Unfortunately, that included drinking and drugs.

When Stevie and Albert King played together at Antone’s, on 6th Street, in Austin for the first time, he sang “Texas Flood” and a few other songs, and because he wasn’t used to singing, Stevie actually apologized for his voice. (p.98) Crazy! He has a beautiful vibrato and quite a sexy voice. King was surprisingly impressed with Stevie’s performance and ability to keep up, where Eric Clapton and a few others had failed and disappointed the King.

At age 22, Stevie decided it was time to finally put his own band together, Triple Threat Revue. But even then, band members came and went frequently due to Stevie’s drug use and disorganization in getting consistent gigs. Eventually, a new group was put together, called Double Trouble. Still, they stayed broke, looking for their next gig, drugs and alcohol. Stevie was 25 years old when he married Lenny (Lenora Darlene Bailey). They were so broke that they made wedding rings out of wire found on the ground.

I thought it was interesting that Stevie wasn’t a big fan of David Bowie (I’m not either. He’s just not my taste). He hated the “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” album most. Stevie didn’t just not like it, it made him mad. (p. 151) Haha! That’s exactly how Stevie’s wild solo guitar jams make me feel…mad and literally pissed off because it sounds like so much chaos with that electric guitar. It sure didn’t help that my husband had to blast it every chance he got for the past 34 years. So sorry Stevie! Otherwise, I do love your music. But, I’m really more of an acoustic guitar person.

In May 1983, radio stations all across the US were gearing up to play a few of Stevie’s music from his album Texas Flood: “Love Struck Baby” and “Pride and Joy”. While I was graduating high school, Stevie was becoming a big name in the blues industry. “Texas Flood” went gold. Double Trouble was travelling and playing at arenas making thousands now, but somehow losing even more than they brought in. He demanded a fifth of crown royal backstage before every concert, and snorted at least 7 grams of coke throughout the concert, and kept (and spent) $5,000 in his boots at all times.

Stevie had done so much coke that he had to have his cartilage in his nose removed. He used to entertain ( or showoff) at the after parties by pulling a hankie through his nose.

April 10, 1985, Stevie sang the “Star Spangled Banner”” at the Houston Astrodome at National League. It was horrible. The crowd boo’d him. They didn’t like it. My husband even said it was horrible. Stevie was so messed up on coke and crown he didn’t even notice. All he could think about at the time was getting Mickey Mantles autograph on his guitar.

In 3 years, by 1986, Stevie was nearly all washed up due to his daily dose of coke and Crown Royal.

On August 27, 1986, his father, who suffered from Parkinson’s, was taken off life support and died. The next day Stevie had to leave Dallas for a tour in London. A month later, on September 29, he began vomiting up blood due to ulcers and holes in his stomach. He collapsed and was taken to the London Clinic for a four-week rest and cared for by the same doctor who treated Eric Clapton through his heroin addiction. Clapton even gave Stevie a visit and encouragement, and sent wagon loads of flowers.

On October 16, 1986 (one day after my 22nd birthday) Stevie entered into the 28-day Charter treatment in Georgia (in the U.S.) on his own. It was life or death. Alcoholics Anonymous’s 12-Step Program was instrumental in helping Stevie come clean. In fact, attending the meetings had become just as much an obsession as snorting coke had previously been. He became a healthaholic, gave up red meat and shopped at Whole Foods Market natural grocery. He turned to God and often gave words of encouragement during his concerts. He was now giving “hugs, not drugs”.

Stevie wanted his next album to be meaningful, and not all about girls, cars and alcohol. When he sat to record “Riviera Paradise” onto Stevie’s last album with Double Trouble, “In Step”, (which was released in July 1989, and went gold, then platinum) lights were turned out in the studio and Stevie turned his back to everyone sitting behind the glass and he lost himself in his music. He finished the song with exactly 8 seconds left on the tape. It was the first take, and it was perfect. He is quoted, “To me the song was a much needed chance to turn the lights off in the studio and basically - I don’t know how to put it any other way - pray through my guitar.” (p. 240)

Listen to his live version here on YouTube (9:54 minutes long):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3c_8VUL5jks&feature=youtu.be

“Tick Tock” carried the message of making amends before its too late, and was sung and played by Stevie and his brother, Jimmie. Stevie told his brother, “Let’s make it clean.” So, Jimmie went into rehab, and this song was made just after Jimmie came out of rehab. It is part of their album, “Family Style”, Stevie’s last recorded album before his death. This song made Billboard’s Top 10 just a few days after he was laid to rest.

Listen to “Tick Tock” here on YouTube. That’s Jimmie starting off the song with talking, then Stevie singing:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N8uUTW9zPbM&feature=youtu.be

On August 27, 1990, on the exact same day his father died, but four years earlier, Stevie, age 35, was killed in a helicopter crash, after finishing a huge concert in Chicago that included a lot of the big blues players…Jimmie Vaughan, Albert King, Eric Clapton, John Lee Hooker. Incidentally, this was also one day after my husband’s 26th birthday. We were stationed in South Carolina with the U.S. Coast Guard. He remembers it like it was yesterday.

The fog had begun to roll in. There was only one seat left in the helicopter that was about to take off. Jimmie, his wife and Connie were supposed to all ride back together. Stevie asked his brother if it was alright if he took this one back. It was filled with a few of Eric Clapton’s entourage. Eric Clapton was in the helicopter right behind them when he saw the helicopter simply disappear. He didn’t think anything of it because it was so foggy out, they couldn’t really see much anyways. It wasn’t until early the next morning when they discovered the crash. Jimmie Vaughan and Eric Clapton were asked to go to the sight to identify the bodies. Jimmie saw Stevie’s hat and picked it up. As he headed back to the vehicle, he was wishing he had some momentum from Stevie, when someone came running up and handed him Stevie’s cross from his neck.

Stevie’s cause of death was from a cut aorta, and he was tested negative for drugs in his system.

Stevie is buried in Veteran’s Section 15, next to his father, at Laurel Land Memorial Park in south Oak Cliff.

Stevie Ray Vaughan’s official YouTube Channel:

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCxPlXqVP-0GvvGG-WrE_6Iw


Genealogy: Need to research

Stevie Ray Vaughan’s grandparents, James Robert and Sarah Catherine Vaughan, were originally from Fulton County, Arkansas. (p. 5) I have Vaughan ancestors on my dad’s paternal side that I have never researched before. My grandfather Julius Leslie Roberts mother was a Vaughan: Mary Roseanna Vaughan (b. 1841, Vermilion Parish, LA - d. 1929 Elton, LA). I haven’t even researched who her parents are. It might mean I will have to research a little of Stevie’s family as well to see if we connect anywhere along the line. FUN!… (altro)

Quite where the boundary is between love for your hometown and simple narcissism is I don't know, but while the majority of the market for this book is probably limited to hardcore Austin navel-gazers like myself, since it does not attempt to provide a Grand Unified Theory of why Austin made the transition from small/poor/weird to big/rich/cool while other cities did not, it's certainly the best general cultural history of Austin that I've read. Patoski has really done his homework, digging deep into the archives for informed historical context and then leavening that research with revealing interviews of luminaries like Lance Armstrong, Richard Linklater, Liz Lambert, and a bunch more. Austin has always seemed to me like a large small town where everyone was only a few degrees away from everyone else, so I got a lot of pleasure out of learning more about the incredible web of connections between the people who turned Austin into a hotspot in food, music, film, tech, and so on. If you live here, even if you only showed up yesterday, you're participating in one of the fastest demographic and economic transitions in modern American history, and while I freely admit that there's almost no Austin-themed book that's too self-indulgent for my tastes, I think even a non-Austinite could enjoy this, if only for Patoski's real affection for the city. That, and the fact that you could construct quite a few great playlists out of the musicians he discusses.

Each chapter is immensely absorbing and offers a lot to ponder, but several recurring themes finally converged in my mind during the antepenultimate chapter "Keeping Austin Weird (The Looky-Loos)", which discusses how tourism has become an essential part of Austin's economy, and the complex reactions that that shift has engendered among us locals in an era when it seems like the city has been changing faster than ever. Everywhere that draws large numbers of tourists, or "looky-loos", has a basic dilemma: visitors bring in a great deal of revenue for businesses, often far more than locals do, and so selling Austin-ness to willing non-Austinites is not only a perfectly valid economic strategy for many entrepreneurs, tourism might as well be synonymous with being a "real city". The more people have a good time in Austin, the better off Austin is for it. This also cements Austin's place as a tastemaker, and one of the best places in the country to be a fan, broadly defined (Alamo is a movie fan's theater, bands of the world flock to our music festivals, Whole Foods redefines grocery stores, etc). However, even if the concentrated benefits to businesses handily outweigh the cumulative congestion and infrastructure costs to the city at large as our enterprises rake in hundreds of million of dollars, the distribution can be sufficiently out of whack to breed resentment and anger among the natives.

These concerns about growth and equity are also tied into the diversity paradox, which Patoski doesn't explicitly identify but which I think longtime residents feel implicitly, and which is also probably inevitable in any city that makes the parochial-cosmopolitan transition. Put simply, cultural exchange with other cities makes Austin more diverse yet less special at the same time. As Austin gets more diverse by exchanging stuff with other cities, we also start to resemble those places ever more closely, until the things that made us distinct are now universal because diversity increases on a local level at the same time as it decreases on a local level. We import NYC pizza, Hawaiian poke joints, and San Diego burritos, and export breakfast tacos, barbecue, and outlaw country artists right back. We're just not quite as special anymore, to the extent that we ever were, and yet people continue to arrive, because as an economist will point out, specialization increases with the extent of the market, and so size and variety combine in a virtuous cycle even as there are seemingly ever fewer "authentic" local experiences, however you ant to define that. It also goes without saying that much of this bounty hasn't trickled down to the less fortunate sectors of the city either, who find their influence shrinking as the rest of the city seemingly leaves them behind.

Austin is hardly the first city to experience these dynamics, and one can only imagine a resident of Venice, New Orleans, or Paris rolling their eyes at our quaint complaints that there's an inherent difficulty in keeping yourself unique while the world wanders slowly up the sidewalk in front of you trying to take too many selfies. But even if the irritation someone feels at a tourist treating their city like a big Instagram backdrop is only natural (the chapter opens with a discussion of the infamous "I love you so much" graffiti wall at Jo's, which frequently causes traffic backups that I have personally had to endure), that peeving is ultimately self-defeating. A steady stream of people is enlarging Austin from a small pond to a big pond, and what kind of awful fish tries to build a dam upstream just to monopolize a particular riparium? Who would be helped if someone had discouraged you, or your parents, from moving here? If, as Patoski so copiously documents, the "good old days" of Austin consistently seem to have been just about 20 years ago, then right now is as good as time as any to live here. "Weird" might not be glamorous to everyone, particularly in bumper sticker form, but evidently the spirit that the word represents continues to charm.

Lame marketing slogans aside, the city we live in was built by a parade of self-described misfits coming to Austin, finding that they were home, and then doing something cool that even people outside of Austin liked. Creativity is the only thing that has a permanent place here. To the extent that Austin continues to enable that same ability to flourish and grow it will have preserved its spirit, and likewise it will have failed to the extent that the modern slacker finds that here is no place to dream. Seen in that light, while Austin has in no way been perfect in its past, the explosive growth that surrounds us is just a continuation of the trend that began with our founding, and while we might not be heaven on earth, we're pretty damn great, and the the more like-minded people who fall in love with the hills, the springs, and the river that provide our habitat, the better the future will be for us all. Austin is the kind of city that inspires this kind of passionate prolixity that strikes outsiders as so tedious yet so bewitching, and while far be it from me to tell anyone else the "right way" to be an Austinite, a failure to welcome the future is one of the surest ways to be wrong.… (altro)

So I thought I’d read about the Dallas Cowboys upon the occasion of their 60th anniversary, hoping to celebrate a good season to come.

The team at this moment is 1-3 and we’re heading for another mediocre year … again.

But it weren’t always this way, as this book shows.

This book follows the team from its creation until the glory years of the ’70s, the slide of the ’80s, the return to glory of the ’90s, and the fair-to-middlin’ years since. The book, published around the 50th anniversary, ends with the coming of Bill Parcells and Tony Romo, and was filled with hope.

Sounds an awful lot like today, with Mike McCarthy and Dak Prescott. I hope it ends better.

This book presents warts and all, which is a fair way to present the team. Along with the highs of Staubach and Lilly and Dorsett and Smith and Aikman, there are the lows of Bob Hayes’ drug arrests, Michael Irvin and Pete Gent and Lance Rentzel and Rafael Septien … read up if you don’t know.

It’s a good look at a legendary team with millions of fans and millions more of haters. A good read.

Read more of my reviews at Ralphsbooks. Also, follow me on Instagram at @ralphandmainlybooks.… (altro)

Very good historical information about the growth of Austin TX from a sleepy little town to a over crowded high-tech center. Jjoe Nick Patowski has been covering music stories in Austin for years, and I am glad to see that TAMU press supported his work. I moved to Austin in 1975, and know many of the people mentioned in the book. Unfortunately a great many of them are dead now, but their spirit lives on. The culture has changed from a focus on creativity and non-conformance, but there are different types of innovation still keeping Austin on the map.… (altro)