A real force of nature, Stevie Ray Vaughan was one of the most acclaimed guitarists to break into the mainstream in the 1980s. Besides being heavily influenced by older American Blues musicians, the late guitarist was also inspired by other players who shared the same influences and he once named two British guitarists whom he considered his heroes.
The 2 British guitarists that Stevie Ray Vaughan said were his heroes
Eric Clapton
The first one mentioned by Stevie in an interview in 1990 with John Sebastian from The Lovin’ Spoonful was Eric Clapton, with whom he had the chance to play many times and became good friends. When he was still developing as a guitar player, he used to listen to musicians he admired and reproduce their guitar sounds with his mouth first, so he could then learn how to actually play them. “I kept listening, kept sitting in with people, kept listening to records. If I wanted to learn somebody’s stuff, like with Clapton, when I wanted to learn how he was getting some of his sounds, which were real neat, I learned how to make the sounds with my mouth and then copied that with my guitar.
“I’d get it to where I could sing it and then do it on the guitar at the same time. If it didn’t sound like it should to me, then I’d do it again. It was kind of like scat singing or something,” he said in an interview with Guitar World in 1988. He liked Clapton’s solo career but one album that he really loved was the one he recorded with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers in 1966. It was one of the first albums he ever played along with. Not long after the two met in the ’80s, Eric tried to advise Stevie about his drinking problems while he was in rehab, visiting him at the treatment facility.
Stevie Ray Vaughan recalled:
“Back then he could sense that I wasn’t ready, so he didn’t push it. See, you can try, you can let somebody know what’s going on, but if they’re not ready to quit, you can’t make ’em quit. You just can’t,” he said about Eric’s visit. The British guitarist admired SRV a lot, once stopping his car on the highway after hearing David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” on the radio because he was desperate to find out who the guitarist on the track was. “I was in my car and I remember thinking ‘I have to find out before the day is over who that guitar player is. That doesn’t happen to me very often.”
“About three or four times in my life I felt that way in a car listening to the radio where I’ve stopped the car, pulled over and listened. (I) thought ‘I’ve got to find out before the end of the day’. Not sooner or later, but ‘I have to know now who that is’. I remember being fascinated by the fact that he never ever seemed to be lost in any way,” Clapton said in “A Tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughan” (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage)
To Clapton, no one came close to SRV as a guitarist when he was alive. He once said he felt insecure when he had to perform after the late musician at festivals. A few hours before his death, Stevie was on stage at Alpine Valley with his brother Jimmie, Robert Cray, Buddy Guy, and Eric. When the show was over, they all hugged goodbye and rushed to the many helicopters waiting for them. Some members of Clapton’s crew were on the helicopter carrying Stevie. He died at the age of 35, along with all the other passengers.
Jeff Beck
Jeff Beck is another British guitarist whom Stevie Ray Vaughan was a big fan of. He thought Beck could really play the Blues but take it one step further. “I play it less original than most people I’ve heard. This is one of the things that blows my mind about what Jeff does. He takes the roots of it and is able to make it go way out there. That’s what Buddy Guy did, Hubert Sumlin, Muddy Waters. They all changed it up and did their own thing with it,” he told Guitar Player in 1989.
The two had the chance to tour together in the 80s. They first met each other in Hawaii in 1981, before SRV had even released his first studio album. In 1989, they had the opportunity to do a 29-day co-headlining tour called “The Fire Meets the Fury Tour”. Those shows were conceived by Epic Records and started in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
During those dates, they ended up playing together on stage many times. In an interview promoting the tour, SRV recalled that he had been influenced by Beck since he was quite young. “When I was this big (a kid) I was watching him, listening to him”. Beck also admired Vaughan a lot and even told Classic Rock magazine in 2021, that he was the closest thing the world ever had to Jimi Hendrix.
He said:
“I met him at a CBS convention in Hawaii in 1981. He was a little worse for wear. He was eating KFC out of a box and then ate the box as well. We went on the road together in ’89. He’d got a beautiful new girlfriend and he was as straight as a die. We were on the road for about three months. And then the tragic story was when he went in that helicopter he didn’t want to get on it.”
“The people around him talked him into it by saying: ‘Look Eric (Clapton) has just got on one.’ So off he went and never came back. I think Stevie Ray was the closest thing to Hendrix when it came to playing the blues,” Jeff Beck said. Their joint tour was one of the highest-grossing tours of the year. It also won Pollstar magazine’s award for Most Creative Tour Package.