Hard to Be

You are locked on The Zoo, the station that still treats a guitar solo like a civic duty, and the record spinning under this rap is the one that opened the only album Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimmie Vaughan ever made together. "Hard to Be" is the first cut on Family Style, the Vaughan Brothers project that hit the street on Epic on September 25, 1990, produced by Nile Rodgers and clocking in at four minutes and forty-three seconds of Texas soul dressed up in a New York horn chart. Stevie and Doyle Bramhall wrote it. Both brothers sing it. If you came in expecting the raw Strat fire of Texas Flood, hang on. This one walks in wearing a suit and still leaves boot prints on the floor.

The Vaughan boys grew up in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, sons of Jimmie Lee Vaughan and Martha Vaughan, the woman the album liner notes thank in one plain line: "Thanks Mama V. for letting us play." Jimmie, the older brother, born in 1951, was the first one out of the house with a guitar and a reputation. He soaked up Freddie King, Jimmy Reed, and the Dallas-Fort Worth club circuit, then helped put the Fabulous Thunderbirds on the map with Kim Wilson, a band that cut a sharper, leaner blues than the radio of that era usually allowed. Stevie Ray, born October 3, 1954, followed his brother into the same rooms, the same records, the same argument about who got the better lick. He built Double Trouble with Tommy Shannon and Chris Layton, blew the doors off Montreux in 1982, cut Texas Flood, Couldn't Stand the Weather, and Soul to Soul, and landed the gig that introduced him to a much wider crowd when Nile Rodgers put him on David Bowie's Let's Dance. By In Step in 1989, Stevie was sober, sharp, and playing like a man who had gotten his life back and meant to use every minute of it.

The brothers had been promising a record together since they were kids. Jimmie has told the story more than once. Their dad would send them into the living room with their guitars to play for company, and somebody would always say the same thing: that's great, boys, maybe someday you can make a record together. Someday took decades. Stevie said for years that an album with his older brother was the one he wanted to make. Rodgers, who had stayed close to Stevie after the Bowie sessions, finally got them into the studio in 1990. They cut Family Style at Ardent Studios in Memphis, the Dallas Sound Lab, and Skyline Studios in New York. Rodgers brought his own crew, including bassist Al Berry and drummer Larry Aberman, and he sat in on guitar himself. Doyle Bramhall, Stevie's longtime writing partner and a drummer who had been in the Dallas picture since the brothers were teenagers, played drums on parts of the album. The horn section on "Hard to Be" belongs to Stan Harrison and Steve Elson, with David Spinner on background vocals. Bob Ludwig mastered it. The package was art-directed by Tony Sellari, with photographs by Lee Crum.

Rodgers has said the three of them felt connected in the room, and that he pushed the brothers to keep the themes light. He wanted the record to sound like the good time they were having. He had to tell Stevie more than once not to write anything too heavy. Then Jimmie and Rodgers turned around and wrote "Tick Tock," and handed that one to Stevie to sing. Family Style is not a Double Trouble record and it is not a Thunderbirds record. It is the sound of two Dallas guitarists meeting a producer who came up through Chic and Bowie, and deciding the blend was worth it. Some critics at the time wanted more traditional blues. The album still climbed to number seven on the Billboard 200. It later took the Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Recording, and Jimmie's instrumental "D/FW," with a spoken intro from Rodgers, won Best Rock Instrumental Performance. The Canadian certification followed. The American one went platinum.

"Hard to Be" is the door you walk through. Stevie and Bramhall built it as a straight love complaint, the kind of lyric Bramhall and Stevie had been trading since the early Dallas days. It is hard to keep an arm's length from his baby. When she is gone it drives him crazy. When she is in his arms he is in heaven. He looks through her eyes and sees a paradise, then flips the image and calls her a live wire, a house on fire, his burning desire. The groove sits in a bright major key and moves at a clip that feels closer to a soul shuffle than a slow blues. The horns punch the turns. The two guitars answer each other the way only brothers who learned in the same living room can answer each other. Jimmie plays with that clipped, economical Texas bite. Stevie leans in with the wider vibrato and the vocal strain that always sounded like he meant the last line as much as the first. They share the lead vocal. That matters. This was never billed as Stevie with his brother sitting in. It was billed as the Vaughan Brothers.

The sessions ran about three months. Jimmie has called the whole album one of the highlights of his life, serious and heavy to him while they were making it, a long time coming and a great time doing it. They finished the record. On August 27, 1990, after a show at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in Wisconsin with Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, and Jimmie on the bill, Stevie boarded a helicopter in fog and did not make it home. Family Style came out nearly a month later. It is his last studio performance, and the only studio album the brothers released under that name. The closing track, "Brothers," says the rest of what the title could not fit. The opener, "Hard to Be," is the handshake.

Around here we file Family Style next to the records that prove Dallas and Fort Worth did not just borrow the blues. We sent it back out with a different accent. Jimmie kept playing. He has carried the Tilt-A-Whirl Band, cut his own albums, and stayed on the road as the older brother who got to keep the guitar. Stevie's catalog, from the early Double Trouble sides through In Step and this last collaboration, never left the rock and blues stations that still know a real solo from a sample. "Hard to Be" is the deep cut that opens the record, the one that does not get the same air as "Telephone Song" or "Tick Tock," and the one that tells you exactly who is in the room before the first chorus is over.

If you want the rest of the story, the station that still plays it like it matters is The Zoo. Jimmie Vaughan keeps the family name in the present tense at his official site, on Facebook, on Instagram, and on X. Stevie's catalog and news live at SRV Official, with the estate pages on Facebook and X. Put "Hard to Be" on and let the brothers finish the sentence their dad started in that Oak Cliff living room. The guitars already know the way.