I keep promising a post at the end of February having to do with books I’ve read this month. Those include a biography of Stevie Ray Vaughan. I’ll jump ahead of myself for this post: The story will be long, and at the end will be the tiny part.
After Tom and I moved to Texas in 1989, we were able to go to a lot of concerts that would have been harder to attend in the deep South. In my years in Alabama, I was lucky enough to go to a musically significant concert with my brother, and Lynne and I were fortunate to see a few great bands in Birmingham and Atlanta (and even Huntsville once, with my sister). I knew one advantage of living in a large city like Houston was greater accessibility to all the arts, including music.
When Joe Cocker and Stevie Ray Vaughan toured together in 1990, this was a must-see for me. My 8-track tape of Joe Cocker’s I Can Stand a Little Rain got me through bleak nights as I adjusted to the changes of being a college freshman–leaving home, being further from my family and closest friends, and making new friends. A time like that is exciting but also challenging. So absolutely yes to seeing Joe Cocker live.
Probably because of Tom and his appreciation for the blues, I came to Texas with awareness of Stevie Ray Vaughan, and I remember sitting with Lynne one day in that first Houston apartment and playing whatever cassette Tom and I had of SRV, and she said, “I LOVE this kind of music!” So the three of us were all in for that June concert to kick off our summer.
The venue at the Woodlands Pavilion is outdoors, with limited covered seating; otherwise, everyone sits on the grassy hill behind the seating. I’ve enjoyed both choices there, but I was particularly grateful to be in the covered seating that day because I had the GRANDMOTHER of migraine headaches. Not the best condition for any concert, and Stevie Ray was famous for playing LOUD. I steeled myself to enjoy the music despite the headache. At least I wasn’t sitting in the bright sun while we waited for the show to begin.
Every concert has a vibe, and on that day, at that venue, the vibe was a sense of anticipation, of fun, and a kind of laid-back chill despite being a summer day (at the beginning of Houston’s ovenlike season). To take my mind off the headache, I people-watched. One man and woman in particular, in the row in front of us, were like a commercial starring young, photogenic people in love. While I don’t usually appreciate public displays of affection, they had a sweet innocence–they were living in the moment, sharing a happy occasion with someone they loved, glad to be there, young and alive.
Later, I began to watch three men a few rows ahead of us. I don’t know if it was the popped collars… pause for photo:
…or their rigid ability to sit side-by-side, never letting their shoulders touch despite the close seats, sharing only brief glances between them as they talked and laughed, that clued me in that they were gay and being careful not to signal that in any way (beyond the popped collars).
The June 1990 Becky didn’t know any gay people. Does that sound incredible? It’s because I was one of those straight people who undoubtedly had known lots of gay people, but other than one woman who came out to me as a lesbian in college, no one else I knew was ever openly LGBT or had shared that information with me.
As I sat there watching them, I had an epiphany. They were enjoying the day just as much as the man/woman couple in front of me, but they believed they were not in a place where they could be fully themselves. My head hurt so badly, and then my heart hurt, because of the injustice that three people felt they had to hide gestures of happiness–simple happiness–on the dangerous chance that any of the people around them would react badly, might say or do things that would hurt them emotionally, even to the point of escalating to hurt them physically, because of their perceived sexual orientation.
That day changed something inside me. I loved the company I was in, was thrilled with the performances of Joe Cocker and Stevie Ray with his band Double Trouble, and treasured every minute of the music, but images of those three men stayed with me after I left that night.
At the bookstore where I worked, I found a few works of fiction and nonfiction that would provide me stories and educate me about issues and concerns specific to LGBT people. At the end of that summer, on August 27, Stevie Ray Vaughan would die in a helicopter crash while leaving a Wisconsin concert venue, further locking my own concert experience in my consciousness. Four days later, our store hired another assistant manager whose name was Steve. Four days after that, Tom and I got another dachshund as a companion to our dachshund Pete. We named her Stevie for Stevie Ray Vaughan and Stevie Nicks.
Our little Stevie would live eight years longer than the assistant manager Steve, who became one of my most beloved friends. Steve was gay and had AIDS. When he became too ill to work, I became his caregiver and was with him when he died in June of 1992. His friends had become my friends, his family greatly loved by Tom and me. Some of my friends–namely Lynne and Princess Patti–spent time with and appreciated Steve. My mother loved him, too, and Lynne’s son Jess, young as he was, met Steve in the hospital, understood his illness, and had compassion for him. At Steve’s memorial service in 1992, some of my friends who’d never met him came because they knew what a loss his death meant not only to me, but to humanity. He should have had decades left, like so many other people taken by AIDS.
And like Stevie Ray Vaughan.
By the time I got to the end of reading Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan, I couldn’t stop crying. The book is formatted in stories and quotes from friends, family, musicians, and other people who knew SRV. Their feelings of loss and regret that someone so special was taken too soon certainly resonates. My friend Steve and Stevie Ray shared musical talent, a love of music, and a belief in its power to communicate and to heal. Like Steve, Stevie Ray had a goodness, a purity, and a love for others that was returned many times over. The day I saw him in concert, I’ll always believe there was something about Stevie Ray the person, along with his music, that changed something inside me.
So much of what I became, the purpose I found, the focus I had, and the work I did as a writer, can all be traced back to that concert in 1990. Because I saw. I understood. I wanted to find some way to make a good change. In the novel I was working on back then, I wrote my first gay character, a musician. It was my fledgling attempt to find words for that epiphany.
After I closed the book last week, I checked my online miniature instrument source, and they do have replicas of three of Stevie Ray’s guitars, including the one he named Number One, but they are 1/4-scale models instead of the 1/6-scale I prefer. So I thought, maybe I should look for a guitar pick. I found one, using a picture of Stevie’s head bowed as he holds Number One, as shown in this photo.
I ordered it. The woman at the online shop emailed me and said that she felt bad about the amount of postage I had to pay for such a small item, but that’s a post office rule, not hers, so she was including a bonus gift for me.
The day her package came in the mail, Tom brought it to me and waited while I opened it. The pick is perfect.
The bonus gift is a dog tag using a different SRV picture, still with Number One.
And when I turned it over, as if she knows me, this generous woman had put this dog tag on the back.
Tom Petty. Who I also saw at The Woodlands on a magical night with Tom. Whose music has been part of my soundtrack since the year I graduated from college. Who is forever connected to Princess Patti for me.
There is so much wonder in our lives, so many gifts from others, tangible and intangible, tiny and tremendous, so much magic in the Universe for us to cherish. I embrace it all.
