Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unbelievable debut!, July 8, 2000
What an amazing album. "Love Struck Baby" starts it off and is one of their most famous songs. "Testify" is one of the greatest songs Stevie ever did. It shows you his rough, lightning-quick style and why so many became imitators of his playing. "Rude Mood" and "Lenny" are great, but are even better on the Carnegie Hall album for arrangement. "Texas Flood" is a great example of classic blues writing and another favorite of the masses. Plus, the five bonus tracks are great. Some live stuff and even part of an interview Stevie did in 1989, which continues on the other re-issued albums. Since this is the debut album, this is a great place to start a collection. And you will start one if you buy this, believe me.P.S. Try to watch live recordings of the band, where you get to see the energy they play with. Check reruns of Austin City Limits, or buy one of the many videos released.
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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
SRV's Stunning Debut, June 28, 2005
Way back in 1983 my brother pulled me aside. His voice was nearly trembling with excitement. "You've GOT to hear this", he said, then he put on "Pride and Joy".
Oh. My. Goodness.
That first album was vinyl and we played the spots off of it. When I enlisted in the Navy later that year I had to get my own copy to carry with me, on cassette. Later, we both had to get the CD versions.
Stevie Ray Vaughan is a musician of immeasurable talent and influence. When "Texas Flood" was released, there hadn't been anything like it heard since Hendrix. His tone on that old beat-up stratocaster was hot and brown. (A brief digression on the "brown" sound - Eddie Van Halen said it was the difference between hitting a block of wood with a hammer and hitting an anvil. If you don't get that - don't bother.)
Texas Flood was a stunning collection of upbeat tunes and instrumentals mixed evenly with hair-raising slow blues. SRV wired that stratocaster with cables, (seriously, his guitar gauges were ridiculously thick), then he bent those strings into tortured notes that hit your eardrum the way a bite of your momma's apple pie hits your tongue or the way Catherine Zeta Jones hits the eye.
The title tune is a slow blues jam with Stevie's great vocals mixed in with his guitar solos scorching sound waves - at times he bends strings up TWO half-frets, choking the life out of that strat. The previously mentioned "Pride and Joy" is more uptempo and everything good about guitar-based Blues can be heard on that track. "Mary Had A Little Lamb" takes several children's nursery rhymes and puts them to the 3-chord miracle that was Double Trouble.
I won't bother going over every track - they're all good, and if you're serious about the blues this album MUST be in your collection.
As an aside - I see several outraged reviewers trying to rebut some idiot who wrote "let's face it, this guitar player is awful". I'm very curious if "Bonnie" was serious - because saying SRV was awful would be to say the same about Mozart, or Shakespeare or Johnny Unitas. They're greatness is so obvious that we're not worthy to even attempt to measure it.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
From Austin they came, January 30, 2008
Back in 1983, some friends & I headed to Asbury Park, N.J., to the Convention Center to see Marshall Crenshaw & Dave Edmunds on a double bill. Much to our disturbance, we discovered we would have to wait for Crenshaw to come on because there was an unannounced third act opening the show-a band from Texas called Double Trouble ( being unsophisticated Jersey boys, we had no idea what had been going on in Austin.) The group's set commenced with some in the crowd grumbling that they wanted to see Marshall Crenshaw straightaway. Forty minutes later, Stevie Ray Vaughan & his band had finished and the crowd, stirred to utter amazement, would not let them leave. That night I saw a man do things with a guitar with such lightning like bravado, I could not believe what I was seeing or hearing; Bruce Springsteen learned to make a guitar talk, but Stevie Ray had learned to give the six-string swagger. "Texas Flood" is a testament to what rock&blues swagger should sound like, and to what an enormous talent Stevie Ray Vaughan was and still is in the mind's of guitar afficianados everywhere.
From the opening twangs of "Love Struck Baby" & "Pride & Joy," on through to last bonus cut, a live version of "Wham!" you'll be captivated by the sound & the walk-the-walk style of perhaps the greatest guitar talent ever to come out of Texas. If everything is bigger in the Lonestar State, then that includes the sound of blistering blues guitar, which Stevie Ray proves without a doubt on "Texas Flood." This one is a keeper par excellence and one of my favorite guitar albums ever, right next to Jeff Beck's "Blow by Blow." No valid rock&blues cd collection can be without this record. It is certainly one of the greatest of its time & its kind.
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