Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [115]
We took the album out on the road in 1990, first in the UK and Europe, then later across the USA. It was during the second half of this tour, at the end of August, that I lost a good friend and a musical hero. Stevie Ray Vaughan was a Texas guitarist and blues player, the younger brother of Jimmie Vaughan, whom I knew pretty well from his group, the Fabulous Thunderbirds. In mid-1986, I had had a call to my office from Jimmie saying that Stevie Ray was in a drying-out clinic in London, and he asked if I would go and see him. I visited Stevie and told him that as someone who had been through all this before, I was there for him if he needed me. We became good friends, and during the following years I saw him play a few times and we occasionally jammed together. At that time I would say he was one of the greatest electric blues guitarists in the world, with a style very reminiscent of Albert King, who was his hero.
On August 26 we were playing at a ski resort in Wisconsin, in a venue called the Alpine Valley Music Theatre, between Milwaukee and Chicago. Stevie Ray opened the show with his band Double Trouble, and watching him on the monitor in my dressing room, I remember thinking, “Man, I’ve got to top the bill after this.” His playing was so fluid. It didn’t seem like he was playing to emulate anybody, it just all came straight from him, seemingly without any effort. It was very inventive, and his singing was great, too.
He really did have it all.
I went on and did my thing, thinking that in the light of someone like Stevie Ray, I was a very eclectic musician, in that I didn’t just play blues, I played ballads, reggae, and all kinds of different styles. “The blues” was in all of the music I performed and in the way I interpreted it. Also on the bill that night were Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, and Stevie Ray’s brother, Jimmie, and at the end of the show we all jammed together, Stevie Ray included, in a fifteen-minute version of the song “Sweet Home Chicago.”
When the show was over, we all hugged good-bye and were rushed off to a series of helicopters that were waiting for us. They were the kind of choppers with big Perspex domes, and as soon as we got in I noticed the pilot using a merchandising T-shirt to clean the windscreen, which was covered in condensation. Outside, a thick wall of fog seemed to hover about ten feet above the ground, and I recall thinking to myself, “This doesn’t look right,” but I didn’t want to say anything in case it promoted fear. After all, the last thing you want on a plane is a crazy person saying, “We’re all going to die,” so I just kept my mouth shut. At that moment, unbeknownst to me, Stevie Ray, who had been due to drive back to Chicago, had found a spare seat on one of the other choppers, along with two of my crew, Nigel Browne and Colin Smythe, and my agent, Bobby Brooks.
All four helicopters took off, flying up into a wall of fog. I remember thinking, “I hate this sort of thing,” and then suddenly we were above the fog and the sky was clear and we could see the stars. It was a short trip back to the hotel, and I went to bed and had a pretty good night’s sleep. About seven in the morning I got a call from Roger to say that Stevie Ray’s helicopter hadn’t come back, and no one yet knew what had happened to it. I went up to his room, where eventually