SRV made his first Guitar World cover appearance with the November '85 issue. In the interview from that issue, he discusses Jimi Hendrix, Albert King and the pitfalls of fame.

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"We're recording the old way and using the best modern equipment we can find, and it's a good combination," Vaughan said. "We go in and cut a song a few times if we need to, or just do a set. At this point, we're pretty fine-tuned, and we're watching it grow as it goes. We're all looking at it, and we have a lot of ideas, things we've wanted to have a chance to work with."

Double Trouble had toured for 18 1/2 months prior to the release of Couldn't Stand The Weather in 1984, and then they took two months off before starting a new project. "We didn’t realize how hard it was to just go cold, without playing in front of people again. I'd never thought about that before. We'd rehearse -- try to play this and that but we didn't play in front of people. You 'd be amazed how hard it is not to play in front of people."

In any case, you don't get the sense that a lot of career planning goes into a Double Trouble album -- no big calculations about how it should sound or how many units it should sell. It mainly charts the natural growth of Vaughan and the band. "We're trying for feeling. We try to accomplish something with the music, which is to feel through things. I've been trying to grow up some myself, in my heart, and it's happening quick and I feel good about it, and I want that to come out in the music."

Meanwhile, Vaughan remains -- like a lot of Texas guitarists -- a die-hard Stratocaster player who uses a minimum of effects. Working on the album, he's stuck mostly with a white Strat-style guitar with Danelectro pickups and custom wiring that was made for him in 1983 by the late Charley Wirz, a Dallas guitar dealer, builder and repairman who was a close friend of Vaughan's for many years. It's the instrument Vaughan's holding on the cover of Couldn't Stand The Weather, and a perfect example of its sound is the light, quickly strummed break in "Tin Pan Alley," which was recorded with only a low Leslie effect.

On the back of the guitar, a simple message is engraved on the metal plate where the neck joins the body: "To Stevie From Charley. More In '84." It's rather characteristic of the generous spirit that Vaughan's early success inspired in many of his old Texas fans -- and, indeed, Soul To Soul is dedicated to Wirz.

"I've been going between that guitar, the beat-up '59 Strat and this other guitar that Charley found for me, a '61 Strat. It's brutal. They all have that neck, and I associate them with Charley -- I didn't get the '59 from him, but he worked on it so many times that it feels like I did, I guess. I like the white ones. It sounds like my old beat-up one, but it's cleaner, not quite as full-sounding. And Charley never told anybody but me what he did when he wired it.

"But that's the sound," he added, "that Leslie and that guitar, if the amp's working clean. You have 'to use the right amp, like a Super, that with the Leslie and a Vibraverb head -- it's really a steel guitar head-if you set 'em all up in a live room, it sounds great. I don't use a chorus -– I like to get that sound with a Leslie, too. It's old-fashioned, but I'm trying to bring it up-to-date."

Vaughan 's pretty vague about his amp set-up, although he admits to keeping two Vibraverbs, two Super Reverbs, a Dumble 150-watt Steel String Singer (which he had stopped using for a while, but brought back into service recently) and the Leslie all hooked together. The actual combination, he explained, was determined over a period of time by which amp worked when, until he accidentally evolved a combination that he liked. Other amps seem to come and go-indeed, in the several weeks between interviews, he'd acquired another Fender.

"They're hooked up pretty straight, I guess," he grinned. "I have a Tube Screamer, a wah and the Leslie on my pedal board, and an on-off switch for everything, so that when I switch it off, between the guitar and amp there ain 't nothin'. When I do a song like 'Third Stone From The Sun,' I can't control the feedback with the effects on. It goes crazy, so I switch 'em all off and then kick it back when I'm done. It's mostly straight, though -- a weird set-up -- but pretty straight."

In addition to that, he continues to play with his guitar tuned a half-step low-"E-flat tuning" he calls it -- and he said that before Wirz died, earlier this year, they had discussed building a custom-scale neck that would allow Vaughan to play the tuning without transposing with concert-pitch instruments.

It sounds like an impossible idea, but who knows? When two stone guitar fools like Stevie and Charley got together, anything was possible.

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