Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble
Live At El Mocambo

THE REVIEW

For ages, musicians have always been aesthetically bizarre types, and the Double Trouble (including SRV) were certainly no exception. Looking at them, you would never have believed they could play like that. They looked ridiculous in their cowboy outfits, as if they had just left their horse and had a whiskey, ready to play a game of pool in the saloon. However, appearance matters little when behind the instruments there is a guitar shaman like SRV, and the moment they step on the stage and start playing, every prejudice falls away gloriously.

Blood, sweat, and tears was SRV's motto regarding his way of playing, as well as a perfect description of the kind of timbre he sought. In fact, Stevie played with very thick-gauge strings to obtain a certain robustness in sound, which at the same time translates into a greater physical and "carnal" effort, if we may say so, towards the instrument, further emphasizing the feeling of the music offered and his relationship with the guitar: an approach that clearly marries with blues, the sentimental genre par excellence.

A guitar raped, mistreated, and simultaneously elevated to queen of the show, this is SRV, this is the blues of the Double Trouble. And although the bassist and drummer also do their job admirably, it's known that in a blues trio where the guitarist is also the singer, the scene can’t help but be dominated by him, the front-man and driving force of 90% of the entire concert (starting with the band's name that features his before the band's).

Rightfully, SRV established himself on the rock-blues scene as the spokesperson for a new movement, which although it dipped heavily into everything that had already been abundantly exploited, he with his way of understanding the guitar and blues, never played the same way more than once, let alone twice.
This documentary captures the freshness of the group in their golden era, at the moment they were emerging on the eighties scene, in a very normal situation where nothing was prepared: El Mocambo, with its atmosphere, and its audience, as drummer Chris Layton himself would recall, it was practically by chance that there were cameras that evening and everything was recorded. Four of the pieces played on that occasion have never been released on any album, while the rest from "Love Struck Baby" to "Pride and Joy" to "Texas Flood" are anthology classics that need no introduction and should be enjoyed as they are, that is, just as that distant night in 1983 Stevie and companions felt like playing them.

An emulator and direct descendant of that more visceral way of playing than technical, very much tied to the figure of Jimi Hendrix, SRV had nothing to fear even compared to other notoriously more technical six-string giants (the MTV unplugged live with Satriani is testimony to this). In summary, an essential document to see an artist at work at his freshest moment, and to have a healthy dose of blues in all its essence live.