Stevie Ray Vaughan

Spiritinthesky

Spiritinthesky

Filing Flight Plan
Joined
Apr 14, 2014
Messages
11
Display Name
Display name:
Spiritinthesky
27th Aug 1990, Stevie Ray Vaughan was killed when the helicopter he was flying in, hit a man-made ski slope while trying to navigate through dense fog. Vaughan had played a show at Alpine Valley Music Theatre, East Troy, Wisconsin with Robert Cray & His Memphis Horns, and Eric Clapton. Vaughan was informed by a member of Clapton's crew that three seats were open on a helicopter returning to Chicago with Clapton's crew, it turned out there was only one seat left; Vaughan requested it from his brother, who obliged. Three members of Eric Clapton's entourage were also killed.

Full story here: http://www.thisdayinmusic.com/pages/stevie_ray_vaughan
 
...and then about 5 years later, I "discover" SRV and then realize all we have is all we're ever gonna have.

Amazing talent.
 
his grave is immediately next to my grandparents at Laurelland cemetery in Dallas.. always covered with guitar picks pretty cool .
​
 
^^^ wow - that's cool!

Definitely one of the greats. My parents took me to one of his last concerts. I was 11 or so - I remember it well, although at the time I was too young to realize just how talented he was.
 
Whenever a Stevie Ray song hits my Sirius or Pandora blues stations, the volume goes to Max A/B!:yes:

Cheers
 
I visit his memorial in Austin regularly.
 
Yup, definitely one of the greatest. He and Clapton together would have been a concert for the ages.
 
Mary and I were there, 7th row, center. Stevie Ray, Eric Clapton, Robert Cray, all on the same stage.

SRV smoked them all. Clapton saw it, and introduced SRV as the "greatest guitar player in the world". I believed it. He was incredible.

Standing in line at the concession stand before the show, I had a choice: Did I want a Stevie Ray shirt, or a Clapton shirt? I figured, stupidly, that I would see SRV the rest of my life, but I might never get the chance to see Clapton again -- so I bought the Clapton shirt.

Wrong choice. The Clapton shirt is nice (I still have it), but the SRV shirt would have been priceless. I should have bought both shirts, but our first child had just been born 14 days earlier, and we were as broke as it gets...

It was so foggy that night that we could not find our car in the parking lot. I have rarely seem fog so dense, and everyone was talking about it as we moved like a herd of buffalo, blindly, toward the parking lots. No one heard or saw a thing, and I was incredulous to learn (the next day) that SRV's helicopter had crashed. I simply could not imagine anyone flying in those conditions.

I worked for the local newspaper at the time. My buddy was one of the photographers, and he took pictures of the crash site the next day. They hit hard, and suffice it to say that no one suffered. The pilot just flew headlong into the ski hill...

What a loss. Imagine the music he would have made in the intervening decades!
 
Jay Honeck said:
SRV smoked them all. Clapton saw it, and introduced SRV as the "greatest guitar player in the world". I believed it. He was incredible.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this is what Clapton had to say about it later:

“We played on the same bill on his last two gigs. On the first night, I watched his set for about half an hour and then I had to leave because I couldn’t handle it,” Clapton admitted years later. “I knew enough to know that his playing was just going to get better and better. His set had started, he was like two or three songs in, and I suddenly got this flash that I’d experienced before so many times whenever I’d seen him play, which was that he was like a channel. One of the purest channels I’ve ever seen, where everything he sang and played flowed straight down from heaven. Almost like one of those mystic Sufi guys with one finger pointing up and one finger down. That’s what it was like to listen to. And I had to leave just to preserve some kind of sanity or confidence in myself.”
 
Just talked about the accident on the local station. His helicopter crashed right after taking off, but it was a few hours before they looked and found it.

With fog and the wee hours of morning they should of dropped to plan B.
 
He had his demons under control, a lot of music was left to come.

YouTube has a bunch of SRV and BB King playing together.
 
sourdough44 said:
Just talked about the accident on the local station. His helicopter crashed right after taking off, but it was a few hours before they looked and found it.

With fog and the wee hours of morning they should of dropped to plan B.
Click to expand...

Anyone know if the pilot was instrument rated?

Really scary how many EMS 'copter pilots are not instrument rated.
 
despite having a commercial helicopter rating, and being certified to instruct in helicopters, his instrument rating was only valid for flying in airplanes - not helicopters - a skill requisite to his intended flight.

Brown was guided off the landing zone, flying at a high speed about a half-mile from take-off. It then, however, veered off to one side, disappeared into the darkness.

At the airport in Kankakee, Illinois, the electronic signal sent by an emergency locator transmitter (ELT) was received shortly afterward, and local authorities were quickly notified, Walworth County Sheriff Dean R. McKenzie said.

Authorities traced the signal to Walworth County by about 4:45 in the morning – around the same time that Omni Flights concluded that one of their Jet Rangers was missing – and then contacted sheriff's deputies about 5.45 a.m. that the signal originated near the resort. At 6:45 that morning, sheriff's deputies began searching the hill with help from the Civil Air Patrol.

At 7:02 a.m., the bodies of all 5, and wreckage from the helicopter, were found near a ski hill at Alpine Valley, scattered along a gravel service road near the top of the hill. All were killed on impact, their bodies were thrown across a 200-foot slope. Initial observations were that the helicopter had slammed into the hill at such a high rate of speed and it happened so quickly that all 5 never knew what hit them.

http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/SRVaughan-N16933.htm
 
I still remember where I was when I learned of his death....Baumholder Germany O'Club and drinking a Grölsch Beer during an officer call.


Sent from my iPhone
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top