For Your Weekend Listening Pleasure: Robert Cray and Stevie Ray at Club Redux For Q102

​Back in January 1987, if memory serves, Club Redux stood at the site of the present-day Taco Cabana on Lower Greenville, and that old Observer ad you see at right more or less hints at the kinds of acts that played there back when -- a little bit of this, a whole lotta that. But that advertisement (which I just found, tucked beneath beneath a Clay McNear-penned StreetBeat item headlined "Gimarc, Zoo go separate ways" -- oh no) doesn't tell half the story of Robert Cray's appearance at Redux that January night, in support of Strong Persuader.

So happened one of those gigs was being recorded for Q102 -- or "K-102," as Cray says at the end of Aaron Walker's "T-Bone Shuffle," before the audience lets him have it. And, so happened, a "young Mr. Stevie Ray Vaughan" was in the audience that night, and joins Cray for the final three numbers: "False Accusation" (from Cray's '85 record), a monstro nine-minute jam that closes out the first set, and show-closer "New Blood."

Cray and Vaughan were tight -- "very tight," says SRV biographer Joe Nick Patoski. They met at the San Francisco Blues Festival in August 1979, and Cray, born in Georgia and raised in Virginia, latched onto to Stevie and Double Trouble, hoping the band would teach him a thing or three about being a proper Texas bluesman. "They played a bunch together," Patoski says, "all the way to the very last gig." He means Alpine Valley, Wisconsin, on August 26, 1990, when Cray, Stevie and Jimmie Vaughan, Buddy Guy and Eric Clapton jammed on "Sweet Home Chicago" the night before Stevie was killed.

This 1987 flashback comes and goes from the Internet. Act now, before the memory fades.