With four decades of hindsight, it occurs that Stevie Ray Vaughan’s popularity might well have continued to ascend if he were not battling his demons so furiously when making his third studio album. It’s not quite fair to term Soul to Soul the nadir of his discography–that designation goes to the much-overdubbed Live Alive out the very next year–but, at this point in his history, there’s no question the late Texas musician’s career arc was planned in proportion to his level of artistry.
The resounding one-two punch of his first two LPs–1983’s Texas Flood and Couldn’t Stand the Weather from just a year later–posited him as the modern standard bearer of the blues. But, hearing the successor to that pair, there’s a palpable sense of inspiration fading away; hypotheses about Vaughan’s personal issues as the source of the relative decline may be no more constructive than conjecture on the creative stasis that often afflicts artists early in their career.
Nevertheless, revisiting the 1985 long-player Soul to Soul (released 9/30/85) is enlightening, if for no other reason than the Double Trouble band had been expanded to include keyboardist Reese Wynans. Purportedly recruited to counteract SRV’s growing limitations as an instrumentalist and vocalist in the trio format–with bassist Tommy Shannon (ex-Johnny Winter) and drummer Chris ‘Whipper’ Layton–the man who preceded Gregg Allman at the Hammond B3 organ in the Allman Brothers Band is prominent from the very start, on the instrumental shuffle that opens Soul to Soul, “Say What.”
Unfortunately, so is Vaughan’s continued reliance on effects-laden guitar. Always too reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix based on the inclusion of the late guitar icon’s “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” on the sophomore SRV longplayer, the negative first impression arising here solidifies with a cover of “Come On Part III,” itself an inclusion on the late guitar icon’s 1968 magnum opus Electric Ladyland.
Fortunately, notions of Stevie Ray’s ennui otherwise fade with this rowdy take on Hank Ballard’s “Look At Little Sister.” Perfectly rowdy and abandoned, as if the band is freed from self-conscious expectations based on original material, the cumulative momentum of the album fully ignites through its juxtaposition with “Ain’t Gone ‘N’ Give Up On Love,” a twelve-bar blues square in the ensemble’s wheelhouse.
The latter also stands as a statement of perseverance, an undercurrent of which sentiment runs throughout this entire project and comes fully into focus on “Change It.” That track features the bandleader’s most nimble guitar playing on the record, that is, if it were not for the cathartic abandon suffusing his solos on the final cut of ten “Life Without You.” Intensity of that level was/is Stevie Ray Vaughan’s stock-in-trade.
However, hindsight reveals how that power was waning on Soul to Soul, an inescapable notion that correlates with its expanded reissue of 1999. In comparison to its hefty companion pieces, an eleven minute-plus instrumental meld of the West Coast Seattle Boy’s “Little Wing” with “Third Stone From The Sun” is the only extra track besides an original homage to roots, “Slip Slidin’ Slim” (plus an excerpt from a radio interview conducted by Timothy White, author of the reissue’s liner notes).
Still, even if just as a means to an end, a posthumous retrospective on Soul to Soul becomes enriching. Prior to his tragic death, the vaunted guitar hero had conquered his demons to the point that the next long player’s title, In Step, stands as an accurate depiction of his state of mind and body well in advance of his tragic death in August 1990.
Eight months prior, armed with just a single 12-string acoustic guitar–plus that force of personality that permeates his best work–SRV won over an MTV Unplugged audience in such a way his passing now seems all the more tragic.
