In Step

For those who say Stevie Ray's playing on In Step is the worst he ever did, I don't agree in any way. Sure, his playing is refined and more controlled, but since when did a guitar player have to play lightening-fast skids to be a brilliant player - Especially in the blues? Never! In Step's playing is Stevie probably at his least pyrotechnical, but at his most blue: he takes time with his solos and runs to impart real blue emotion through his playing, instead of astounding everyone with the fastest blues anyone's ever heard. True, Stevie's amazing when he does this, but we saw him do that on Texas Flood and Couldn't Stand The Weather. Since those albums, he'd matured and grown both as a human and an artist, and In Step is the result of someone wanting to just play his blues out on the guitar.

It's a wonderful album and a definite cannot miss for ANYONE even remotely interested in Stevie Ray and the blues.


SRV does pop   February 17, 2005
 4 out of 4 found this review helpful

Stevie Ray Vaughan's fourth album saw him emerging healthy, happy and cleaned up of the worst drug and booze fuelled excesses of his rock 'n' roll adolescence. Of course there are good and bad things, from a rock icon's perspective (and his fans'), about growing up. In Step is the record of a man getting comfortable with himself and his achievements, with all the positive and negative connotations that brings.

At this point the argument "Can white men play the blues?" has been won hands down, Stevie Ray Vaughan sounds like a man who knows it - his guitar tone is by turns rich and beautiful (Riviera Paradise) fulsome and commanding (Travis Walk; Wall of Denial) and cheeky (Cross-Fire) but never genuinely throaty or bitching, as it is for the duration of Texas Flood, Couldn't Stand The Weather and the celebrated early live sets (it is my considered view, for instance, that everyone on this planet should be afforded the opportunity to see Stevie Ray Vaughan Live at the El Mocambo).

Indeed, at times SRV's famous Stratocaster, Number One, sounds positively compressed - odd for a man for whom fingers, strings and tubes were some sort of holy trinity, and digital processing more akin to an angel cast from the firmament.

For its part, Double Trouble is on song, and beautifully recorded - and as a pop record this is certainly Stevie Ray's most accessible entry, but if you're a raw blues tone freak like me, you may find it somewhat uninvolving.

Make no mistake: this is a great record, and worthy of sitting in any collection, but for my money Stevie Ray Vaughan's first two albums mentioned above and the outstanding, posthumously released, The Sky Is Crying are better ways of remembering the man who famously said:

"Tune low, play hard, and floor it. That's technical talk."

Olly Buxton