Stevie Ray Vaughan's 1982 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival is simultaneously perhaps the most influential and most unusual blues event of the last forty years. Today the concert is considered to have been the launching point of his career, but he was thoroughly booed by the audience. If the concert is generally regarded as a success in hindsight, why was it received so poorly in real time? The answer lies in perceptions of authenticity.
Stevie Ray Vaughan and his band Double Trouble had been making a name for themselves on the competitive Austin, TX music scene, but they had not yet signed an album deal. While in Austin, a friend of Claude Nobs, the manager of the Montreux Jazz Festival, saw Vaughan play and was very impressed with his guitar playing. He told Nobs about Vaughan, and Nobs was interested. He decided that, based on Vaughan's talent, it was worth a gamble to invite and unsigned, unrecorded act to appear at the festival. His gamble paid off, but not on the night of the performance.
The problem of Vaughan's perceived lack of authenticity was exacerbated by poor scheduling. To Nobs, Vaughan's talent was probably enough, but he did meet the authenticity requirements of the 1982 audience. Vaughan was, of course, scheduled on blues night. However, at the time, the most popular blues acts on the European tour circuit featured black musicians playing traditional acoustic blues, and that was the type of performance the audience had paid to see. After an evening of acoustic blues, a young, white Stevie Ray Vaughan walked on stage and began playing very loud, very electric blues with a strong rock element. It was an excellent performance, but it was not what the audience had paid to see, so they soon began booing. The opinion was not unanimous. It is entertaining to watch the video of the performance and see small groups of fans dancing along to the music amidst a chorus of boos, and if you listen closely after the final song, you can hear a sizeable minority briefly attempting to clap for an encore. But Vaughan was not about to come back out for an encore after such a demoralizing show.
Fortunately for Vaughan, and for all his subsequent fans, there were two very important people there who appreciated his performance. One was Jackson Browne, and the other was David Bowie. Bowie wrote in the liner notes for the CD release of the performance, "I probably hadn't been so gung-ho about a guitar player since seeing Jeff Beck in the early '60s....He was so complete, so vital and inventive with the form." Jackson Browne offered Vaughan and his band the free use of his Los Angeles studio to record the tapes that would eventually become Vaughan's debut album Texas Flood, and Bowie invited Vaughan to play guitar on his new album Let's Dance and on the supporting tour for the album.
In 1985, Vaughan returned to Montreux for another concert, and this time he was what the audience had paid to see. He had established a reputation by then, so fans knew what they were going to hear when he stepped on stage, and they got it. They even insisted on and received a second encore at the end of the performance.
Vaughan's experience at Montreux demonstrates that an audience's perception of authenticty can be strongly influenced by what they expect to hear. The 1982 audience came to hear the blues, but not that kind of blues, but fortunately there were some in the audience who recognized his talent in spite of their expectations.
Stevie Ray Vaughan's 1982 Montreux performance (with booing)
Stevie Ray Vaughan's 1985 Montreux performance (with double encore)
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