Texas electric guitar heavyweight Jim Suhler may be best known for his starring role in George Thorogood & The Destroyers, but he’s also collected a hat-full of other A-List collaborations and encounters across his prolific career.
Billy Gibbons officiated his wedding, for example, and he tapped Joe Bonamassa for a Hendrix-inspired song on his 2007 solo album. Plus, he also had a rather memorable first meeting with another prestigious blues player: Stevie Ray Vaughan.
“I met him for the first time in 1989,” Suhler says in a new chat with Guitar World. “We had a family jewelry shop in Dallas and Stevie had an old antique watch he brought in to get repaired. I just happened to be there when he came in. In fact I walked right past him when my dad was talking to him.
“My dad called me back and said: ‘Son, there’s somebody here you want to meet.’ And it was Stevie. I was in my late twenties trying to get it together. I hadn’t met George at that point so my dad asked him: ‘Do you have any advice for my son?’”
Strangely, Suhler adds that SRV “didn’t come back to get his watch”, and so the young guitarist hatched a plan to cross paths with the blues great a year later to return the forgotten timepiece.
“The following year [1990, the last time SRV performed in Dallas], I took the watch out to where he was playing, got backstage, and gave it back to him,” Suhler reveals. “He had a light; an aura or energy about him. It was palpable. It was real and he was very powerful. God bless him; he was a great man.”
The guitarist’s life was tragically cut short in August of that year. Suhler, after slinging licks in The Homewreckers and Jim Suhler & the Monkey Beat for nearly a decade, joined Thorogood’s group in 1999.
