Stevie Ray Vaughan: Our 1989 Interview About Jimi Hendrix

On the Enduring Appeal of a Musical Hero

Like his hero Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan was part bluesman, part rock and roller.  And Stevie, bless his heart, was always quick to credit the musicians who influenced him. These ranged from lesser-known figures like Larry Davis, who recorded the original “Texas Flood,” to movers and shakers like Chuck Berry, Albert King, Buddy Guy, and Albert Collins. But no influence loomed larger in his repertoire than Jimi Hendrix, many of whose songs he mastered note-for-note. He recorded live and studio versions of “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” “Little Wing,” and “Third Stone from the Sun,” and often played Hendrix songs in concert.

While working at Guitar Player magazine in 1989, I was asked to write a cover story to accompany a Soundpage of an unreleased version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House.” To flesh-out the article, I interviewed Jimi’s former bandmates Noel Redding and Billy Cox, as well as Joe Satriani and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Quotes from these conversations appeared as part of my May 1989 cover story. Here is a transcript of the complete February 9, 1989, interview with Stevie Ray Vaughan. It covers not only Jimi Hendrix, but some of what Stevie was going through as he recorded In Step.

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When did you first become aware of Jimi Hendrix?

The first time I ever heard his name was when my brother brought a record of his home in the mid ’60s. I guess it was around ’67, ’68. And Jimmie had found it in a trash bin! Behind it. He was playing a gig at this show in Dallas called Sumpin Else, and he found this record. He recognized it because he’d seen a little blurb in a magazine, just a short paragraph about Jimi Hendrix. He knew he was supposed to be something really happening, and he just happened to see this record that had gotten thrown out with a bunch of other stuff, because it didn’t fit in with the show perfectly or something, you know. And he brought it home and put it on the record player, and we just about – what can you do? [Laughs.] What can you do but say, “Yeah!” It really knocked my socks off.

I’m not sure exactly the year, and I’m not sure which song it was. It’s kind of a blur, because around the same time my brother Jimmie, he had this knack of figuring out who was really happening. And why! [Laughs.] And he would bring home these records. It seemed to me that Jimmie would all of a sudden bring home stuff, and it would be months before you would hear it anywhere else. He would bring home so much of it. He would get into a certain style of music, and he would bring a lot of that stuff home about the same time. It just seemed as if for some reason he could just come up with a style and all of a sudden he had all the ifs, ands, and buts around it. All of the things of different people who were in the same school – that went to school together, you know, instead of a different school. He would bring home all these things at the same time, so a lot of the different influences that were on Jimi Hendrix, I heard those things at the same time.