A Worthy Survey of a Guitar Hero’s Legacy

The death of Texas blues rocker Stevie Ray Vaughan at age 35 in a 1990 helicoptercrash was doubly sad. Not only did it cut short the life of a supremely talented guitarist, singer and songwriter, but it also happened a few years after Vaughan had perhaps saved his own life by giving up drugs and alcohol.

“SRV,” a new four-disc box set that surveys Vaughan’s career, includes an extraordinary number of testimonials from stellar musicians whose lives Vaughan touched through his music and his example.

It also contains a wrinkle certain to become more common in future CD retrospectives. Along with three CDs of music, there’s a 30-minute DVD with five of his “Austin City Limits” performances from 1989 that give fans a look at one of rock’s most esteemed instrumentalists.

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*** 1/2 Stevie Ray Vaughan, “SRV,” Epic Legacy. In the early ‘80s, the epitaph for the guitar hero could have been expressed in a single word: MIDI.

That was the acronym for an increasingly dominant computer synthesizer technology that seemed on the verge of rendering the rock guitarist obsolete.

Michael Jackson, Culture Club, Men at Work, Duran Duran and others provided pop music with records that had little or no room for anything so antiquated as a guitar solo.

That’s why the signing of a hotshot guitar-slinger out of Texas by revered talent scout John Hammond--the man who discovered artists from Benny Goodman and Billie Holiday to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen--struck many at the time as more of a look back to rock’s glory days than a gaze into its future.

Besides appearing to be a musical throwback, Vaughan had a pugnacious look that was definitely not the kind favored by the powerhouse new music forum of the day, MTV.

But with his 1983 debut, “Texas Flood,” an album as steeped in the blistering electric blues of Albert King as in the revolutionary rock-guitar histrionics of Jimi Hendrix, Vaughan introduced himself to the world as a savior of the guitar-hero tradition.

He and his band, Double Trouble--originally a trio with bassist Tommy Shannon and drummer Chris Layton, later a quartet with keyboardist Reese Wynans--churned up a thick, ominously powerful sound like that of an approaching hurricane.

Vaughan’s rip-saw voice was neither a thing of beauty nor great subtlety, but was a magnificent conduit of tortured emotion and the ideal complement to his damn-the-shrapnel, full-speed-ahead guitar work.

Of the 55 tracks here, 36 are previously unreleased, and the lion’s share are live performances, in which his spontaneity was allowed to soar. They follow him from 1977 when he played briefly in Austin blues group Paul Ray & the Cobras, when he was a gifted if not yet thoroughly distinctive guitarist, to his final concert in East Troy, Wis., where he shared the stage with Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Robert Cray and his older brother, Fabulous Thunderbirds guitar great Jimmie Vaughan, just hours before the helicopter crash.

Producer Bob Irwin has done an admirable job culling material from Vaughan’s own live and studio recordings as well as from albums by Johnny Copeland, Albert King, Lonnie Mack and A.C. Reed on which Vaughan appeared. It’s a shame there wasn’t room for his Grammy-nominated 1987 duet on “Pipeline” with surf-guitar king Dick Dale.

The set also might have gained a bit more poignancy had it included “Six Strings Down,” a tribute to Vaughan written after his death by the Neville Brothers and Jimmie Vaughan and recorded on the latter’s “Strange Pleasure” album in 1994.

On the other hand, it’s probably fitting that “Life Without You” was omitted, even though the song was a concert centerpiece during which Vaughan would stop between searing solos to deliver a heartfelt speech about embracing life to its fullest.

“What’s confusing about ‘Life Without You,’ ” Vaughan told The Times in 1988, “is I wrote that song when I was very loaded. Things like that don’t make sense to me.”

To many, it made no sense that a musician with as much talent and opportunity as Vaughan had would head down the path of self-destruction. But for years, Vaughan considered drugs and alcohol as much a part of the blues as picks and guitar strings.

Eventually it dawned on him that “getting loaded wasn’t fun anymore,” he recalled two years after emerging clean from rehab.

His example didn’t go unnoticed. In one of the numerous touching notes from fellow musicians in the CD booklet, Bonnie Raitt says, “The way he played and grew after his sobriety took away the last excuse for us blues hounds to stop living that deal with the devil just to be real.”

The DVD is a real bonus that adds to the appreciation of the seeming effortlessness of his playing, as well as being a video record of a great band in great form. The “SRV” booklet also scores well above the norm with insightful and entertaining essays about different facets of his career.

If he wasn’t the musical innovator some of his heroes such as Hendrix and B.B. King were, there’s no question he was a champion of the electric guitar in particular, and of raw, impassioned music in general.

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** 1/2 Badfinger, “Head First,” Artisan. Badfinger is another of rock’s many sad stories. According to liner notes by Badfinger biographer Dan Matovina, “Head First” was shelved because of a financial dispute between the British group and its publishing company. That, apparently, was the final straw in a series of career woes that led lead singer and chief songwriter Pete Ham to commit suicide in 1975, a few months after these tracks were recorded. His death disturbed bandmate Tom Evans so much that he also took his own life eight years later.

This two-CD set includes the rough mixes of what would have been the “Head First” album, catchy post-Beatles pop-rock in the mold of Badfinger’s early-’70s hits “No Matter What,” “Day After Day” and the Paul McCartney-composed “Come and Get It.” Several of the songs have charm, but none are lost masterpieces. The album will be of most interest to Badfinger die-hards or collectors of everything Beatles-related.

The second disc contains several of Ham’s cassette demos, much of the music filled with gloomy foreshadowing, It’s a heartbreaking soundtrack to a particularly sad rock ‘n’ roll saga. Consumer note: The total running time of the two CDs is just an hour, so the music easily could have fit on a single disc.