Vaughan is a little fellow with big hands and a broken nose and magnetism that makes people watch him even as he moves around helping set up the stage. And when he plays that big red guitar with the heavy strings, they don't just watch him, they are hypnotized by him.
His head disappears under his 1930's-style gray hat as he bends over the guitar, lost in the music, and his intensity and brutally working hands lead the eyes to a word carved into the guitar and two words on the leather guitar strap: "Hurricane" and "Double Trouble."
Vaughan, a blues-jazz guitarist and singer from Austin, and his five piece band, Double Trouble, played to standing-room only crowds recently at Stubb's Barbeque on East Broadway Avenue. They have played there several times and have developed a large following of mostly college students and musicians.
The other band members are bassist Jackie Newhouse, drummer Jack Moore, saxophone player Johnny Reno and singer Lou Ann Barton, who was the original other half of Double Trouble with Vaughan. They played mostly at the Rome Inn and Antone's in Austin and the rest of the time in Lubbock, Dallas or New Orleans. They plan a tour of the East Coast this fall.
Vaughan and his brother Jimmie, who is the eldest by three years, grew up in the Oakcliff area of Dallas and both were known as rock 'n roll guitar prodigies before Jimmie turned to purist blues and Stevie got into blues and jazz.
"What's fun is when you play two or three chords in a row that you never played before and they work and give somebody a thrill." he said in a post- show interview at the home of Lubbock friends David and Kathy Smith. In other words: Vaughan is an innovator who never knows exactly what he is going to do on stage.
Lubbock musician Curtis McBride, a drummer who attends most of Vaughan's shows here, said after one performance that the guitarist is still a diamond in the rough, a raw musician for whom the band has to "lay back" when he goes into an improvisation.
Asked if he knows where he is going musically, Vaughan said, "All I can say is that I'm trying more and more to get to the point where you can hit one note and make people scream instead of having to hit 100 notes to get there." Of a band improvising music on stage, he said, "You have to make sure it doesn't scare you and keep going, and by the time you finish going, it's gone."
Vaughan is as relaxed off stage as he is intense on it. Yawning after playing late and sleeping late, he looks like he has just awakened to go to a boring job-until his attitude on music is brought up and his expression focuses. "It's everything," he said. "When I'm playing, it's my life. I better get intense with it. It's a gift, and I better take it as far as I can go."
He felt the presence of his talent from the time he was a small boy, when he would go into Jimmie's room when his brother was gone and try to play his guitar. Now he has developed to the point that he is not even in the same sphere as people who sit in their living rooms and pick guitars on Sunday afternoons.
His red Rickenbacker has such heavy strings that few people can play it for more than a minute or two, and he declines to pick up an ordinary guitar because regular strings break like thread under his fingers. "You can do things with heavier strings you can't do with light ones." he explains. The index finger on his left hand is crooked from playing so much, and both of his hands are so muscular that they would look more in place on a football linebacker.
Unusual as musicisians, Jimmie and he were even more unusual as high school students a few years ago. "When I was in school, it was berserk, especially high school." he said. "I had to get a note from the principal every day saying I looked all right to go to his school. "Jimmie got chased by the girls and beat up by the football players. "I was playing til 6 in the morning and going to school at 7:15 and it didn't work." Neither finished high school.
Except for a job as a dishwasher and paperboy in his early teens, Stevie has lived exclusively by playing music. He remembers his paper route as especially trying because his street divided the territories of rival street gangs who often used it for a battleground.
In all the instability and flux in his life, he chose musical genres, blues and jazz, that are permanent in American culture and he hopes will help give permanence to his music. He deliberately took a path away from slick popular music. "You take guys like jazz trumpet player Miles Davis," he said. "They made their statement, and it's timeless."
What he is doing up there night after night as he bends over the guitar and plays new things again and again is as easy to name and as hard to define as the human imagination. He is trying to make everyone hear the music he hears. "I know one thing," he said. "I can't come near playing what I hear. I wouldn't know what to do if I was ever able to. I guess just stand there and laugh."