How to you tell when someone's on cocaine?
How to you tell when someone's on cocaine?
If you're asking how do we know SRV was on cocaine, it's because after he sobered up he admitted it. I remember reading in, I think Guitar World where he said he had gotten to where he'd dissolve a gram of Peruvian marching powder in his drinks. What he eventually found out was that the stuff would crystallize in his stomach and in turn started to cut up the inside of his stomach like razorblades. That's apparently why he got to the point where he was vomiting blood.Originally Posted by davis
If they snorted it, sniffing and wiping the nostrils. If they smoked it or shot it (or snorted for that matter), more talkative than normal, if a cig smoker smoking more than normal, licking lips repeatedly, jittery, eyes darting around and finally exhibiting an attitude of "I'm so f*****g slick that I'm just switching to glide" (if that last one makes any sense).
"My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician, and to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference"
President Harry S. Truman
Fire Meets Fury isn't bad. SRV is sober and a sober SRV was a force to be reckoned with. The only trouble is it's not a complete show. There is that monster version of Life Without You that GuitarGeek talked about, but it's the same version that was on the remastered In Step. This catalog could certainly be managed better than it is.
Some on PE complain that he was only capable of recycling from his large encyclopedia of blues licks but without the coke, he was a true monster. Plus he was a better songwriter than many of his contemporaries and peers, so when he turned his lyrics towards rebuilding his life we got some songs that were indeed personal blues.
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
He was a monster even when he wasted. The Live In Tokyo and the Rockpalast show both show him playing his ass off, and those were both during the time he was still using (I don't think he actually cleaned himself up until after the live album, Live Alive came out...speaking of which, has anyone ever heard the version of Life Without You that was on that? I know it was left off the CD release so they could squeeze it onto a single disc, so I've never actually heard that particular version).
What I loved about SRV was that he was playing a style of electric guitar that was long out of fashion in the 80s. He played a worn out, stock Stratocastor with single-coil pickups, and he had that deep, round, neck pickup sound. No one else sounded like that in the 80s. He was the antithesis of Eddie Van Halen.
His whole thing was very out of step with what was in vogue circa 1983. The only people who were playing blues music at that time were either people who'd been playing it for decades or were flying under the radar with no expectation of or interest in breaking big on MTV or whatever. SRV was the guy who kinda made the blues/rock thing hip again.
Then a decade later we got the likes of Kenny Wayne Shepherd, who proved you could be a Stevie Ray clone and a pinup poster boy at the same time.
Sorry, but, IMO, the difference between SRV and the multitude of his contemporaries who were playing the blues was that he had a big record label promoting the shit out of him.
I don't know if I agree with this.
But maybe I'm just a fanboy and can't be objective.
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
I just think the radio airplay made all the difference, because what he was doing was being done by many others out there.I don't know if I agree with this.
But maybe I'm just a fanboy and can't be objective.
Probably. But you can say that about just about any successful artist out there.
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
Well, yeah, but the context here is about blues players in the 80s, few of whom had airplay on mainstream radio.
What contemporaries are you're talking about? Who else in the early 80's was doing that kind of blues rock music? I know there were bands like Roomful Of Blues and other similar groups, but they were all more a pure blues kind of thing that appealed to people who scoffed at the idea of Jimi Hendrix being called a "blues musician".
And yeah, SRV did have a big label behind him and airplay that didn't, but then I think I made that point in my initial point. Everyone else (and as I said "everyone else", as far as I know, weren't really doing what SRV was doing) were flying under the radar, which is usually a side effect of not being on a big label or playing on a big hit single (as per China Girl and Let's Dance), and I get the impression that a lot of those guys actually prefer it that way.
Which is why I said, SRV made blues music hip again. You wouldn't have the likes of Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Johnny Lang, John Mayer, etc without SRV.
Yeah, he avoided Blues and blues-rock from disappearing from the mainstream radar, until guys like Robert Cray appeared
I mean: only ZZ Top, Thorougood and SRV were representing blues-rock in MTV (well ZZT was not very bluesy anymore by then)
and to think we owe it to Bowie's worst album Let's Dance... (where SRV played un-SRV-style)
my music collection increased tenfolds when I switched from drug-addicts to complete nutcases.
I like Let's Dance (the song). I like the guitar and congas.
Seriously? You make it seem like he invented the genre. Ever hear of Alligator Records? Many were playing the very same thing. The aforementioned Johnny Winter is a prime example of someone who put out albums throughout that decade that were not only blues rock, they were better.
Without taking anything away from SRV , he was a great guitarist, I am also of the belief that he was really the only guy playing blues, blues/rock in the 80s who received any serious commercial attention.
He just came along at the right time and became the darling of music critics and writers, and as a result of the hype, the fans. I used to laugh when I would hear people talking about him being the "best" , he was good but not the best. There were guys like Johnny Winter, already mentioned in this thread ,Buddy Guy, Rory Gallagher,Albert Collins, Gary Moore,Coco Montoya & Walter Trout, etc, and being from Chicago as I am I could think of a lot of great local blues guitar players I have seen in clubs around the city,Rico McFarland comes to mind first , who were at least as as good as SRV.
But really, isn't that how it works with most commercially successful musical artists anyway? There are always excellent bands that "fly under the radar".
You make some interesting points, but there's a lot of reasons why some of the guys you're talking about weren't getting the same attention that SRV got during the 80's. For instance, Rory Gallagher only released a couple albums during the 80's, and his unwillingness to tour Stateside (I believe he said he had a "Buddy Holly complex") probably kept his visibility to a minimum, at least in the US. It is a shame that he didn't break big in the 70's, because he was certainly doing something similar to SRV, but had a record deal more a decade earlier, and toured his ass off too. Who knows, maybe being Irish hurt his chances to breaking here. You can just imagine some record company executive saying "Who's ever heard of an Irish bluesman?!", when it came time to decide which artists they were gonna "push".
And you mention Gary Moore, who during the 80's was still doing the mainstream hard rock "guitar god" thing, which he later claimed went further into that direction that he actually intended to. I don't think he really started doing the blues thing until the early 90's, when he got sick of having to spend six months writing and recording each album, when it wasn't gonna get next to no airplay (at least not in the US, anyway).
The other guys you name, I consider to be straight ahead blues players. Certainly Buddy Guy and Albert Collins weren't gonna have the crossover appeal that someone doing like SRV had. And they may have been considered by industry types at the time to be "past their prime". I'm not saying they were, I'm just saying that this was before the big record companies figured out how to promote older artists without sacrificing their dignity in the name of being "modern" or whatever.
I've apparently never heard the "blues/rock" stuff from Johnny Winter, because most of the stuff I've heard him do is more of a straight blues thing.
Yeah, the line between blues guitarists and blues/rock guitarists can get kind of blurry.I mean the difference between blues and a blues/rock guitarist isn't really that much when you get right down to it. And as I said at the start of my post I think SRV was great, saw him 3 times. But I really think it just came down to him being someone that they decided to hype, not that he didn't deserve the plaudits that came his way. but I think that he was kind of the "chosen one".
There were many others who could play anything he could play. I just threw a few out there for the sake of argument.
I dunno, I think Stevie Ray had a tone that was very similar to Jimi Hendrix and maybe that might've had something to do with his popularity in the 80s. The only other name I can think of that had, more or less the same popularity at the same time, playing blues, blues/rock was George Thorogood. But George sounded nothing like SRV (guitar wise or in vocals). That's another thing too, SRV was a hell of a singer. I'm only going by some vague memories of that scene in the 80s. I wasn't into until after SRV's death. I remember when "Crossfire" was a huge hit in 1989-90. I really loved that track. I was thinking about getting into SRV when I heard he died. I was really shocked.
Thorogood can't even approach SRV's skill on the guitar.
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
Thorogood thoughly sucks, IMO.
Johnny Winter playing kick-ass blues rock:
Thorogood is what he is - good bar blues/rock.
He's good at what he does. You can determine if what he does has any value.
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
George Thorogood is laughing all the way to the bank with "Bad To The Bone." It's probably the most cliched bit of guitar/blues you've ever heard, and it's been overplayed and sampled to death. When I think of George Thorogood I think of The Terminator/Arnold. That's George's legacy in the mainstream. But hey, the guy's made some scratch. I never cared for his singing or his guitar tone. In fact, does George play any lead guitar or is he just a rhythm/slide guy? I just can't really stand his style. Granted, I'm judging him based on 3 or 4 of his radio hits over the last 30-35 years.
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