Music
Bramhall's bond with old friend went far beyond writing
By Brad BuchholzMay 6, 2004
Doyle Bramhall has a quiet sense of grace about him -- which is a bit perplexing at first, considering he makes a living playing the drums and shouting out the blues. He has the dense, muscular build of a man who dug trenches and laid pipe as a young man. His voice is smoky and low. Yet Bramhall's essence is gentleness.
Behind the drum beat, Bramhall's blues are kind-hearted, too. There's nothing mean-spirited in his notes. Doyle's defining songs are affirming, introspective, richly aware of the present. They are about our interior world, not the superficiality that surrounds us.
"You can't change it, can't rearrange it. If time is all that we've got, then baby let's take it."
Do you recognize the words? They're from the Stevie Ray Vaughan hit "Change It," a song about overcoming guilt and shame, from the 1985 "Soul to Soul" album. Doyle Bramhall wrote that song. He wrote many, many others. No other writer collaborated with Vaughan more intimately than Doyle Bramhall.
In all, Bramhall wrote a dozen songs for, or with, Vaughan -- including many of the triumphant "recovery" songs recorded near the end of Stevie's life. They are famous titles: "Life by the Drop." "Hard to Be." "The House is Rockin'." "Lookin' Out the Window." ...
"Stevie and I weren't just partners in music; we were partners in life," Bramhall once said. "We knew every time we got together (to write), something good was going to happen. ... It felt like therapy for us -- because that's what it was. I'd go home at night, feeling so good, so filled up."
"Hello there, my old friend , not so long ago it was til the end. We played outside in the pouring rain. On our way up the road we started over again. ..."
Bramhall -- the man who wrote these words in "Life by the Drop" -- was born in Dallas, raised in Irving. His father worked in a concrete plant. His mother worked in a grocery store. On the weekend, at his Aunt Helen's house, the adults would spin records and dance in the living room. During the week, Bramhall and his twin brother Dale would do neighborhood music revues out of their garage. Young Doyle pretended to be Ricky Nelson. Dale was Elvis.
As a teenager in the 1960s, Bramhall hung out with a group of young Dallas musicians -- Denny Freeman, Jimmie Vaughan, Paul Ray -- who would, in time, become staples of the Austin blues movement. He was 17, visiting Jimmie at his parents' house at Oak Cliff one day, the first time he met Stevie: "All of a sudden I hear this wonderful guitar playing coming from the bedroom," says Doyle, retelling the classic story. "So I crept over to the door, pushed it open, and there's this little kid inside -- he must have been 11 or 12 -- sitting on the bed, with these incredible sounds coming out of his guitar. ..."
As a singer, young Doyle could be lowdown in the style of John Lee Hooker -- and croon "Georgia on My Mind" out of soulful respect to Ray Charles. He played in four different bands with Jimmie Vaughan, including Storm. He fronted a band called The Nightcrawlers in 1975 featuring Stevie Ray Vaughan. Doyle was deep into Austin blues before Antone's. Clifford Antone always maintained that he opened his original Sixth Street club so that Doyle and his buddies would have a place to play.
Yet this shy, gentle man -- so polite, so soft-spoken -- was anything but that as a young man. Booze and heroin almost killed him. Bramhall lived in a world of such excess through most of the 1970s that the years of guns and dealers and starvation are little more than a blur in his memory. Eventually, he moved away from Austin -- and the drugs that were so available to him here -- to save himself. But even then, he was socially anonymous for years: no permanent address, no phone, no driver's license.
Bramhall finally got clean in the 1980s. Shortly thereafter, Stevie Ray Vaughan got clean, too. They walked each other through the process of staying sober, like brothers. Doyle still has letters Vaughan sent him from rehab -- letters in which Stevie prints his return address as a patient ID number, not "Stevie Ray Vaughan." On the other side of pain, Vaughan and Bramhall talked and wrote about the "walls of denial" that had once surrounded them and their secret addictions.
"A wall of denial is falling down. Wo, it's falling so hard, down to the ground. Never knew something so strong could be washed away by tears. But this wall of denial was just built on fear."
Doyle recalls that he and Vaughan struggled to come up with words to match Stevie's tumbling guitar riff at the start of "Wall of Denial," from Vaughan's "In Step" album of 1989. After the two gave up for the day, Bramhall was driving home on a Dallas tollway when he felt the opening passage surge through him. He almost had an accident, in his excitement, trying to get to the phone to call Stevie.
This was very typical of the way Vaughan and Bramhall worked. They would talk for hours -- and then things would spark, spontaneously. During the writing of "Tightrope" at Stevie's house, the two friends were trying to find words to fit a song about emerging from a whirlwind of addiction. Doyle took a bathroom break at one point and lingered at the mirror. ...
"Lookin' back in front of me, in the mirror's a grin. Through eyes of love I see, I'm lookin' at a friend."
Stevie considered Doyle's line, and responded:
"We all have our problems, that's the way life is. ..."
And Doyle finished the stanza:
"... My heart goes out to others who are here to make amends."
When Stevie died in the helicopter crash after leaving a Wisconsin concert in August 1990, Bramhall took his death hard. He found it difficult, for a long time, to play those famous songs he wrote for "In Step" and "Family Style" and "Soul to Soul" at live shows. The gentle man cringed at the thought that someone in the audience might think, "Hey! That's a Stevie Ray Vaughan song! How dare you rip that off!" It's a little easier, now.
"For me, it's like, 'Who better to do those songs?' " he says. "They still make me feel something special when I play them."
Bramhall has grown accustomed to public misunderstanding, related to his music. His singing voice, for example. It reminds a lot of people of Stevie Ray Vaughan. But what most people don't know is that young Stevie admired Doyle's rugged vocal technique and incorporated parts of it into his own singing style. In truth, it's Stevie who sounds a lot like Doyle, not vice versa.
What's more, Bramhall is frequently confused with his son -- young guitar slinger Doyle Bramhall II, a founding member of the Arc Angels who is currently writing with Eric Clapton and playing in Clapton's touring band. Within family, the father is known as "Big Doyle" and the son is known as "Little Doyle." Never mind that "Little Doyle" is much taller than his dad -- and that he may someday soon be very "big" in the music business.
"I'm really proud of him," the father says of the son, who he once cradled in his arms at a Fats Domino show at Armadillo World Headquarters. "Doyle plays from within -- and that's what Stevie did, that's what Muddy Waters did. When he plays his music, his passion comes through."
Big Doyle doesn't correct the casual fan who starts talking to him about his guitar work with the Arc Angels -- or begrudge another who mistakes his son for the man who wrote with Stevie. He's too gracious for that. Bramhall has faced so much -- addiction, his friend's death, a longtime fight against hepatitis C -- that such trivialities are easily dismissed. In so many ways, the words of "Life by the Drop" are more true today than they were 15 years ago.
"No wastedt time, we're alive today, churnin' up the past there's no easier way. Time's been between us, a means to an end. God, it's good to be here walkin' together my friend."
Doyle Bramhall lives with his wife, Barbara Logan -- co-writer of "Life by the Drop" -- in West Texas now, south of Alpine. During the past 10 years, he's released two well-received solo albums ("Bird Nest on the Ground" and "Fitchburg Street"); helped launch the career of Indigenous, a band of Native American blues rockers; and collaborated with singer Jennifer Warnes on her most recent album, "The Well."
Bramhall has also produced three albums, most notably Marcia Ball's "Presumed Innocent," which won a W.C. Handy award in 2001 for best blues album. This summer, he'll enter the studio again to begin recording a new solo album -- the first, he says, to showcase his own compositions.
"I think the secret to it all is taking what you do -- what you love the most -- and concentrate on that," says Doyle Bramhall. "It's so easy to get sidetracked in this world. But I believe the spirit is within everyone."
bbuchholz@statesman.com 912-2967
