Published on Apr 3, 2000
Any time you deal with posthumous collections and releases, you
walk a fine line between respect for the artist’s memory and pure
commercialization. This is a lesson that people learned the hard
way with Jimi Hendrix’s music, releasing any type of dreck that he
had recorded, even if the songs never progressed past the demo
stages.
Stevie Ray Vaughan is starting to inch dangerously towards that
spotlight now, as the sixth release since his death in a 1990
helicopter crash,
Blues At Sunrise, takes center stage. A collection of
Vaughan’s slower blues work isn’t a bad idea, but the two
unreleased cuts and one featuring Vaughan and Albert King
performing together do nothing to help Vaughan’s musical
legacy.
Now, I’m of the school that there should be a balance on an
album of up-tempo and slower songs. While I can appreciate the
significance of grouping together Vaughan’s slow, soul-spilling
numbers (kind of like the classic blues artists who came and went
before him), after a while, you can’t help but wish that the pace
would be picked up even a little bit.
That being said, many of the previously-released tracks on
Blues At Sunrise are given a chance to shine when they
otherwise might not have. Songs like “Dirty Pool,” “Ain’t Gone ‘N’
Give Up On Love” and “The Things I Used To Do” all allow Vaughan
the room to let his Stratocaster wail in a mixture of pleasure and
pain. Numbers like these gave Vaughan the opportunity to stretch
his legs musically and show what he could do on the guitar without
necessarily relying on flashy chops. The one track that stood out
for me on the disc was “Chitlins Con Carne,” which absolutely
reflects Vaughan’s mastery of the genre and of the six-string.
Unfortunately, there are signs that the bottom of Vaughan’s
musical barrel might have been scraped at times. The live version
of “Tin Pan Alley (aka Roughest Place In Town)” does not add to the
studio version at all, and seems to be just a showcase for Vaughan
to perform with fellow blues legend Johnny “Clyde” Copeland.
Likewise, the title track, performed live with King, is, in a word,
boring. Even a song like “Texas Flood” is stretched to its limits;
this particular version comes from the home video
Live At The El Macambo. I guess you had to be there.
The alternate take on “The Sky Is Crying,” admittedly not one of
my favorite Vaughan songs, doesn’t have the magic that you can hear
in the version featured on the album of the same name. This is
probably why this particular version never made it onto a CD until
now.
I don’t have anything against Vaughan’s fans wanting to hear
damn near every note that he ever played, and I can appreciate why
discs like
Blues At Sunrise come out. But there comes a time when one
has to take a step back and ask themselves, “Why was this track
left in the archives?” It might be time for those in charge of
Vaughan’s master tapes to take a close look and ask themselves if
they want to make Vaughan’s posthumous work the next Jimi
Hendrix.
If you like slow blues that gives the emotional rawness time to
come to the surface,
Blues At Sunrise will undoubtedly please you. But if this is
a sign of things to come, I seriously hope that this will be the
last album from Vaughan we see for some time.