Stevie Ray Vaughan - Legendary lost first album

A lot of people know that Stevie Ray Vaughan got his first big break from David Bowie when Bowie hired him to play on his Let's Dance album that was released in 1983. That is true. I'm not sure where Bowie had first heard of SRV, it might have been somewhere in Texas, but it might also have been at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1982. Stevie Ray appeared there as a result of Jerry Wexler watching his show at a club in Austin, Tx and Wexler pulled some strings to get him and his band in.

Stevie Ray and Double Trouble were nearly booed off the stage that night because they were booked to play on an acoustic night of music, but soon had the crowd cheering. Jackson Browne was impressed and offered his studio to them. They managed to record an entire album there in a few days, and the rest, as they say, is history. The public loved their first album called Texas Flood and it quickly went double platinum.

Except for the fact that Stevie Ray and Double Trouble had already recorded their first album in Nashville five years prior, in 1978. That album had Lou Ann Barton on vocals. Lou Ann was asked to leave the band because of her history of getting drunk and screaming at waitresses and throwing glasses. Now, it might be because the band wanted to disassociate themselves from her or maybe they really didn't like the way the album turned out, but they ended up paying some cash to have its release halted.

The story goes that the album was discovered in a cupboard in Austin by somebody. Whatever really happened, it was bootlegged quickly and now you can listen to it. Here's those studio sessions from 1978: