Texas Flood turns the concept of biography on its ear in an innovative, accessible, and wholly captivating way. Writers Paul and Aledort sidestep the traditional narrow and predigested historical narrative in favor of a wide-angle lens that lets the reader become the historian and discover meaningful conclusions based on a veritable flood of artifacts, interviews, photos, and more.
This technique is unsettling at first. The feel is almost skeletal, comprised of narrative snippets interspersed with interview clips. That’s partly for the reader’s practice, because very quickly—and comfortably—the skeleton becomes scaffolding laden with firsthand experiences told by Vaughan himself, his brother Jimmy, his bandmates, family, and a virtual who’s-who of blues and boogie rock, including Eric Clapton, Greg Allman, Albert King, Robert Cray, Dicky Betts, Buddy Guy, Eric Johnson, Bonnie Raitt, Steve Miller, and many more.
It’s a risky strategy from a biographer’s standpoint, but the reader gets the ultimate payoff, examining the bits of firsthand memories and fragments of Vaughan’s life. More traditional biography generalizes and presents a single-thread chronology polished of the jagged edges of real life. This book does the opposite: Paul and Aledort particularize and ask the reader to piece together their own tapestry with the worn, imperfect threads of experience lived on the three hundred patiently, thoroughly detailed pages. For the reader, you’re there, and you make meaning of the visceral experience yourself, and thereby own the truth shared by the many voices that comprise this authentic account.
There’s a “Titanic”-worthy tragic undertow in that truth, because from page one we know the story does not end well. The loss is deepened as the chronology limns a humble, unassuming man from childhood simply exploring the guitar and over time and with much struggle, wringing from it a soulful, masterful intensity rarely seen or heard in a lifetime. Vaughan unfolds through the chronology, existing—couch surfing, mostly broke, schlepping road miles not only for the blues, but living the blues himself. He was what Baudelaire called the “supranatural”: Stevie Ray Vaughan was the music, was the blues.
Texas Flood is a fascinating backstage pass, a front row seat at the epicenter of the Texas music that unfolded in the eighties and nineties in Austin, told in the many authentic voices that shared SRV’s life. The story couldn’t have come from a more elevated Greek peripeteia: Vaughan was at last drug-free, sober, healthy, and leading his band into the best blues he’d ever played, even while offering a helping hand to others who struggled with the demons he’d vanquished himself.
“Stevie showed all of us,” says Tommy Shannon, Double Trouble bassist, “what it was to reach down into one’s heart and soul—into one’s life—and communicate that feeling of love through the guitar on a deep, spiritual level.”
Vaughan’s ability to express the blues was a gift, and this book is more than a history or tribute. Read it, live it, own it: along with the music, it’s the best of what we have left of Stevie Ray Vaughan.
