More Stevie Ray Vaughan
More Electric Blues
- This pressing of Jimmie and Stevie Ray’s 1990 release has superb Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on both sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
- Space, clarity, transparency, and in-the-room immediacy were off the charts on this pressing – it beat every copy we had hands down
- “Jimmie makes his vocal debut on ‘White Boots’ and ‘Good Texan,’ and the brothers blur the lines between their expected guitar styles — Stevie sometimes going for a less sustainy twang, Jimmie moving into Albert King territory.”
This vintage CBS pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.
What Amazing Sides Such as These Have to Offer Is Not Hard to Hear
- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes even as late as 1990
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
What We’re Listening For on Family Style
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
- Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Vinyl Condition
Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)
Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don’t have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.
If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that’s certainly your prerogative, but we can’t imagine losing what’s good about this music — the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight — just to hear it with less background noise.
TRACK LISTING
Side One
- Hard To Be
- White Boots
- D / FW
- Good Texan
- Hillbillies From Outerspace
Side Two
- Long Way From Home
- Tick Tock
- Telephone Song
- Baboom / Mama Said
- Brothers
AMG Review
With slick production from Nile Rodgers and employing neither guitarist’s band (Double Trouble nor the Fabulous Thunderbirds), this is bluesy, but far from purist. Jimmie makes his vocal debut on “White Boots” and “Good Texan,” and the brothers blur the lines between their expected guitar styles — Stevie sometimes going for a less sustainy twang, Jimmie moving into Albert King territory. When standard blues is the order of the day (the slow intro “Brothers”), the key word is “standard” — bordering on run-of-the-mill. Instrumentals “D/FW” and “Hillbillies from Outer Space” fare better — offering ZZ Top crunch and Santo & Johnny steel, respectively.
musiconvinyl.com
Family Style is a fantastic Blues Rock album by the Vaughan Brothers, released in 1990. The album features the brethren guitarists and vocalists, Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan, in their only studio collaboration.
In his early years, Stevie Ray Vaughan often remarked that he would like to do an album with his brother. He fulfilled that wish in his very last studio performance, which was released nearly a month after his death. The liner notes end with “Thanks Mama V. for letting us play.”