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Stevie Ray Vaughan: Couldn’t Stand the Weather – Legacy Edition

Epic/Legacy

Like any sophomore album by a new sensation, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s 1984 Couldn’t Stand the Weather asked whether a knockout debut—in his case the previous year’s Texas Flood —was a fluke or truly a harbinger of greatness. Vaughan’s follow up suggested that he was both: a charismatic guitarist of uncommon chops but not necessarily an artist who would shift his chosen genre into the future. No blues-rock axe-wielder since his death 20 years ago has earned the reverence that Vaughan has, but was he really offering anything new or filling a void during an era when classic rock suffered from an image problem at the hands of post-punk? Much of Vaughan’s playing, though possessed of skill and never less than gutsy, was flashy for the sake of flash, his vocals indistinctive and his original material—with the exception of the snazzy “Stang’s Twang”—often flat and derivative. His cover of Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile,” meanwhile, was virtually a duplicate of the original. The studio outtakes that occupy most of disc one, three of them previously unreleased, do little to convince otherwise, and while the ‘84 Montreal live show that fills disc two offers scorching licks and sympathetic, ballsy accompaniment from Double Trouble, it never quite moves beyond crowd-pleasing toward true innovation.