Austin, Texas.
A second-hand guitar shop on South Lamar.
A hot Saturday morning in April of 1989.
Stevie Ray Vaughan was trying an old 1962 Stratocaster near the back wall when the young man said it, loud enough for the whole shop to hear.
“No offense, man, but whoever showed you that got the whole thing wrong.”
He looked at the customer beside him, then at the skinny man two racks over, the one with the long hair and the old Strat across his knee.
“Pride and Joy goes like this.”
He played it, fast, clean, perfect.
Then he pulled a pick out of his pocket, held it out across the aisle to the man with the Stratocaster, and grinned.
“Here, have a go if you want.”
“See what you can do.”
What the young man didn’t know was that the skinny guy he had just handed a pick to had written Pride and Joy himself in a little rented house in Austin for a girl he was in love with seven years earlier.
And he was already reaching out to take it.
Stevie’s morning had started early, before 7:00.
That was new.
For most of his life, 7:00 in the morning had been something that happened to other people.
A gray light you saw through a motel curtain on your way to bed.
But that spring, he had been sober for two and a half years, and his body had finally started keeping the hours of a normal man.
He woke up when the birds did.
He made coffee.
He sat on the back steps of the little house in Austin and watched the sun come up over the live oaks with the cup in his hands, and he still could not quite believe that he was alive to see it.
The band was off for 10 days between recording sessions.
The new record was almost finished.
They were calling it In Step, and it was the first album he had ever made without a drink in his hand or anything in his blood.
He was prouder of it than anything he had ever done.
And he was terrified of it.
Because for the first time, if it was any good, he would know that it had been him all along.
And if it wasn’t, he would know that, too.
That morning, he had pulled on an old pair of jeans and a faded blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow.
No kimono, no scarves, no silver conchos, and no hat.
Without the black hat, with his hair tied back and a pair of drugstore sunglasses on, he could walk down most streets in Texas without anybody looking twice.
People knew that hat.
They didn’t always know the man under it.
He had a Saturday ritual when he was home.
Breakfast tacos from a little trailer on South First, then a long, slow walk with nowhere to be.
And sooner or later, without ever really planning it, he would end up in a guitar shop.
He had heard this one before he saw it.
A Fender amp somewhere inside, and somebody running scales through it with the door propped open.
Old habit.
He walked in.
The shop on South Lamar had been there for almost 20 years under three different names and two different owners.
Guitars on every wall, floor to ceiling.
So many of them that the room seemed to hum with music before anybody played a note.
Fenders and Gibsons and old Silvertone from the Sears catalog.
Beat-up Martins and Gretsches with cracked finishes and stories nobody would ever know.
It had a smell Stevie could have recognized blindfolded.
Fresh strings, warm tubes, old wood, and the lemon oil the owner rubbed into the rosewood fretboards every Thursday morning.
At the back, there was a worn wooden counter with a coffee pot on a hot plate behind it.
A jar full of guitar picks next to the register, and a hand-lettered sign taped to the wall that said,
“Try before you buy.”
It had been there so long that nobody read it anymore.
They just did.
Behind the counter sat the owner, an old man named Walt Bishop.
Walt was somewhere near 70 with a white beard and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, and he had been selling guitars in Austin since before Stevie was born.
He looked up from the newspaper when the door opened.
He looked at the long hair and the blue shirt and the sunglasses for a long second.
Then, he nodded once and went back to his paper.
That was the whole greeting.
Walt knew exactly who had just walked into his shop.
15 years earlier, a broke skinny kid named Stevie Vaughan had come in here almost every week and traded in one beat-up guitar for another, sometimes for nothing more than a set of strings and a cup of coffee.
Walt had never said a word about it to anybody, and he was not about to start now.
It was the kind of shop that understood some customers needed to be left alone with the guitars.
Stevie walked slowly along the back wall, the vintage section.
A 1959 Les Paul hung behind glass with the price on a card turned to face the wall, so you had to ask.
Two old Telecasters from the early ’60s, one sunburst and one butterscotch, both worn down to bare wood in the places where a strumming arm rests.
A 1964 Gibson ES-335 tobacco sunburst hanging slightly crooked on its hook.
He looked at them the way he always looked at old guitars, not with wanting, with a kind of recognition, like you’d look at an old man on a porch who’d clearly been through a few things and come out the other side.
And on the very last hook at the end of the row, there was a 1962 Stratocaster.
Its sunburst finish had faded over nearly 30 years to something closer to honey and smoke.
The back of the neck was worn smooth and bare at the first five frets, where somebody had played those positions so many times that the lacquer had simply given up.
There were cigarette burns on the headstock, a long, deep scratch across the body where a belt buckle had dragged across it night after night for years.
Stevie lifted it off the hook with both hands, and he felt the weight settle into him.
Old weight.
The specific weight of something that had been played hard for a long time by hands that meant it.
It looked almost exactly like another guitar, a battered ’62 he had bought in a shop just like this one in 1974, the one he had played on every record and every stage of his life since, the one the whole world now called number one.
He sat down on the stool Walt kept near the back wall, laid the old Strat across his knee, and did not plug it in.
He just ran his thumb along the worn neck, feeling for the places where somebody else’s hands had been.
Cody Briggs walked in at half past 10:00 with his buddy Travis.
He was 22 years old.
He had just finished 2 years in the jazz guitar program at the University of North Texas up in Denton, one of the toughest music schools in the country.
He could read anything you put in front of him.
He could play bebop at speeds that made his teachers shake their heads.
He had a gig bag slung across his back with a brand new Fender inside and the kind of confidence that comes from being the best guitar player in every room you have ever walked into.
And tomorrow afternoon, he had the biggest audition of his life.
A touring country band out of Nashville was looking for a lead guitar player, a real band with a record deal and a bus and a summer of arenas booked from Tulsa to Atlanta.
$300 a week and a seat on the bus.
Cody had driven down from Denton the night before.
He had played the band’s whole album 40 times.
He knew every note on it, and he had told everybody back home, his mama, his girlfriend, his old high school band director, that he was going to get it.
He had not told anybody how scared he was.
He moved through the shop the way he moved through everything, fast, direct, knowing.
A young man who had already decided what he thought about most things before he looked at them.
He was good, genuinely good.
That was both the true thing about him and the problem.
He stopped at a sunburst Stratocaster on the middle rack, a newer one, and plugged it into a little Fender amp without asking.
The shop allowed it.
The amp crackled to life.
He played a few chords.
His technique was clean, tight, precise.
His picking was fast and perfectly even.
The kind of control that takes years of daily practice in a practice room with a metronome while other kids are out on Friday nights.
He turned to Travis, who was looking at a glass case of effects pedals.
“Listen to this.”
He played a run, something he had been working on all spring.
A long, twisting jazz line that climbed up the neck and came back down in a blur.
Travis nodded.
“That’s good, man.”
Cody smiled.
And then, because he always did when he wanted to show off in a guitar shop in Texas, he started playing Pride and Joy.
Not badly.
That was the thing.
Technically, note for note, it was accurate.
Every chord change in the right place, every lick from the record right where it belonged.
He had learned it from the tablature in a guitar magazine when he was 16, and he had practiced it until he could play it faster than the record.
But there was something about it that was missing in the way that a perfect photocopy of a painting is missing something.
It had all the information and none of the reason.
The light strings, the neat, precise little pick strokes landing exactly on top of the beat like a typewriter.
The shuffle sitting stiff and square on top of the rhythm instead of swinging underneath it like a man walking home happy on a Friday night with his paycheck in his pocket.
The song was there.
What the song meant wasn’t.
There was another customer at the rack beside Cody.
A heavy set fellow in his 40s in a feed store cap trying out a cheap acoustic.
He’d been playing slowly, working something out.
Halfway through, he’d tried a little phrase from Pride and Joy, a little lazily, a little behind the beat.
Cody heard it and frowned.
“No offense, man.”
He said loud enough for the whole shop to hear.
“But whoever showed you that got the whole thing wrong.”
The man in the feed store cap looked up, embarrassed.
Cody took the phrase and played it his way.
Crisp, fast, exact.
“That’s how it goes.”
Then he glanced toward the back wall where a skinny guy with long hair and sunglasses was still sitting on Walt’s stool with an old beat-up Strat across his knee.
He’d been sitting there for 20 minutes, not even plugged in, just running his thumb up and down the neck.
Cody figured he was one of those old Austin guys who’d been playing the same three blues licks in his bedroom since 1970.
So he reached into the pocket of his jeans, pulled out a pick, a shiny new one with the logo of his school stamped on it, walked across the aisle, and held it out.
“Here, no offense.”
“Have a go if you want.”
“See what you can do.”
Behind the counter, Walt Bishop slowly lowered his newspaper.
Have you ever been in a room where somebody handed you the chance to prove something?
Not to them, but to yourself.
Where the easiest thing in the world would have been to put the guitar back on the hook and walk out the door?
Steedie didn’t answer right away.
He looked at the pick in the young man’s hand.
Then he looked at the young man.
And something about him made Stevie stop.
It wasn’t the cockiness.
Stevie had seen plenty of that.
God knew he’d had plenty of it himself at 22.
It was what was under the cockiness.
Stevie could see it plain as day.
The way you can see a crack in a guitar through the finish.
The kid’s foot was tapping too fast.
His jaw was tight.
He kept wiping his right hand on his jeans.
This was a kid who was scared to death of something.
And he was trying to win a guitar shop because he wasn’t sure he could win whatever was coming next.
Stevie knew that feeling better than almost anybody alive.
15 years earlier, he had been that kid.
Skinny and broke and loud.
Sitting in on stages all over Austin.
Playing faster and louder than anybody in the room.
Because he was terrified that if he ever slowed down, somebody would notice that he didn’t know what he was doing.
That he was just a dropout from Oak Cliff who couldn’t read a note.
And for years after that, he had drowned that same fear in whiskey.
Every single night.
Until it nearly killed him.
He reached out and took the pick.
“Thank you kindly.”
He said.
His voice was soft and slow.
Pure Dallas.
Cody didn’t notice anything about it.
Why would he?
Stevie looked down at the pick between his fingers.
Then without a word, he turned it around so the pointed tip faced back into his palm and held it by the point with the rounded fat shoulder of the pick facing the strings.
Cody frowned.
“You’re holding it backwards, man.”
“I know.”
Stevie said.
He found the cable hanging off the nearest little amp.
An old blackface Fender Deluxe.
22 watts.
The kind of amp that tells the truth about whatever you put through it.
He plugged in the old Strat.
Then, he did something else Cody didn’t understand.
He reached up to the headstock, and one by one, he started turning all six tuning pegs down, just a little.
Each string dropping slightly flat until the whole guitar sat half a step lower than everything else in the shop.
“Now it’s out of tune.”
Cody said.
“Nope.”
Stevie said, still tuning.
“Now it’s in tune.”
He turned the volume on the Deluxe up to about five, not loud enough.
Cody stood in the middle of the aisle with his arms crossed, patient, amused.
The expression of a young man who has already decided how this is going to turn out.
Travis drifted over from the pedals to watch, the way you drift over to watch a car accident.
The man in the feed store cap set down his acoustic.
And Stevie Ray Vaughan sat on a wooden stool in the back of a second-hand guitar shop on South Lamar, an old, beat-up stranger’s Strat across his knee, a borrowed pick turned backwards in his fingers, and closed his eyes.
He didn’t start with the song.
He started with the shuffle.
Just the rhythm, the low strings, that lazy, rolling back porch groove that sits a hair behind the beat instead of right on top of it.
Like a man who knows exactly where he’s going and isn’t in any hurry to get there.
The fat, rounded edge of the pick digging into the strings, so the notes came out thick and warm instead of sharp.
Half a step lower, the old guitar sounded darker, heavier, like Texas thunder a long way off.
Cody’s head tilted, just slightly.
Then Stevie’s left hand slid up the neck, and the first lick of Pride and Joy came out of that little amplifier.
It was the same notes Cody had just played.
Exactly the same notes.
And it was a completely different song.
Every bend went up a little past where it was supposed to and hung there crying before it came back down.
Every note had a shape to it.
Some of them hit hard like a fist on a tabletop.
Some of them barely whispered.
In between the phrases, there was space, little silences, places where the guitar seemed to stop and take a breath and look around the room before it said the next thing.
The song wasn’t sitting on top of the rhythm anymore.
It was growing up out of it the way a live oak grows out of the ground.
One thing, inseparable.
Stevie’s foot found a slow beat on the floor.
His head went down.
His long hair fell across his face.
His lips moved a little the way they always did, silently mouthing the words he wasn’t singing.
The old 1962 Strat with almost 30 years of other people’s hands worn into its neck gave the sound a depth no new guitar could have had.
The wood seemed to remember every note it had ever played and the old Deluxe took that sound and spread it warm and even through the whole shop.
Not loud, not showing off.
Just there, the way a thing is there when it belongs in the room.
Behind the counter, Walt Bishop had taken off his reading glasses.
He had both hands flat on the counter top.
The way you put your hands down on something when you’ve stopped doing everything else and you need somewhere to put yourself while you listen.
Travis had come three more steps closer.
Not deciding to, just pulled.
The way you move toward a fire on a cold night.
The man in the feed store cap had his mouth open.
A young woman who had been browsing the acoustic guitars near the front window had been on her way out the door for the last 90 seconds and had not yet made it there.
She was standing with one hand on the door handle, not moving.
And Cody’s arms had uncrossed.
Somewhere in the second verse, without noticing, he had stopped watching with his eyes and started listening with something behind them.
His own pick was still in his hand.
He hadn’t put it away.
He just wasn’t thinking about it anymore.
Because something was happening to him that had never happened in any practice room in Denton.
He was hearing the song for the first time.
Not the notes.
He had always heard the notes.
He was hearing what the notes were for.
It was a love song.
That was the thing.
He had played it a thousand times and he had never once noticed.
Under all that swagger, it was a young man trying to tell a girl, as plainly as he knew how, that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
That he was proud of her.
That he didn’t know what he’d do without her.
It wasn’t a showpiece at all.
It was a man grinning so hard he couldn’t stand still.
And the skinny guy on the stool was grinning, too, with his eyes closed, like he was remembering somebody.
Then Stevie came to the solo.
The solo every guitar kid in Texas had tried to copy note for note since 1983.
With a hard, sharp pick and light strings, it was a speed exercise, a series of notes to be executed correctly.
With heavy strings tuned down half a step and the round end of a pick and those big, scarred, calloused hands, it was something else.
Each note was struck differently, the attack changing from string to string.
Some of the notes were hit so hard the old Strat seemed to jump on his knee.
Some of them he barely touched, bending them so slowly that they came up out of the silence like a voice.
He wasn’t playing fast.
That was the strangest part.
He was playing slower than Cody had played it.
And somehow it sounded like twice as much.
The whole thing breathed the way a picked typewriter line never can.
The guitar and the hands in a conversation that had been going on for nearly 30 years.
Ever since a skinny boy in Oak Cliff picked up his big brother’s guitar and never put it down.
Then the last phrase came.
The song settled back down into the shuffle it had come from, rolled around the room once more, and came to rest.
He let the last chord ring until there was nothing left of it.
The shop was very quiet.
3 seconds.
5.
Nobody moved.
Then Walt started clapping from behind the counter, quiet and deliberate.
The kind of clapping that doesn’t ask permission.
Travis joined in.
Then the man in the feed store cap.
Then the young woman at the front door.
And then, slowly, Cody.
Because his hands had started moving before he had decided to let them.
Stevie opened his eyes.
He had the same half embarrassed look he always had when a room went quiet on him.
He looked down at the old Strat in his lap.
Then he looked at Cody.
Cody was staring at his own pick.
The shiny new one with his school’s logo on it, still in his hand.
A small piece of plastic, its point sharp and perfect, with none of the history in it that the song needed.
“How long you been playing like that?”
Cody said.
He was genuinely asking.
The confidence had gone out of his voice.
But it hadn’t been replaced by defeat.
It had been replaced by something better.
Curiosity.
“Since I was about 7.”
Stevie said.
“My big brother had a guitar he wouldn’t let me touch.”
“So, I touched it every time he left the house.”
He turned the borrowed pick around in his fingers and held it up so Cody could see.
“Picks used to fly right out of my hand when I dug in.”
“So, one night I turned it around.”
“Been holding it this way ever since.”
“And them strings are a lot heavier than yours.”
“Heavy as I can stand.”
“Tuned down so I can bend them.”
“Took me years to build up the calluses.”
He held up his left hand.
The fingertips were hard and flat, scarred and shiny like old leather.
“There ain’t nothing wrong with the way you play it, man.”
“You play it clean.”
“I’ve heard fellows do things with a sharp pick and light strings I could never do in a hundred years.”
“And you’ve put in the work.”
“I can hear every hour of it.”
He set the Strat back on his knee.
“But that song wasn’t written to be played right.”
“It was written to be played happy.”
“When you play it like you did, you’re playing the notes.”
“When you play it like this, you’re playing the reason.”
He tapped the old guitar’s battered body.
“Learn both, then decide.”
Cody looked at the old Stratocaster, at those scarred hands resting on it.
He was working something out.
The expression of somebody taking apart a belief he’d held for a long time and checking all the pieces.
“Who are you?”
he said.
From behind the counter, Walt Bishop answered quietly.
The way you say something true that doesn’t need to be said loud.
“Son, that’s Stevie Ray Vaughan.”
Cody looked at Walt, then at the guitar, then back at the skinny man on the stool who was taking off his drugstore sunglasses a little sheepishly and rubbing his eyes.
The color drained right out of Cody’s face.
He had heard that name since he was a teenager.
He had heard Texas Flood blasting out out his daddy’s pickup truck on every long drive of his high school years, rolling across West Texas with the windows down.
His daddy, a pipeline welder from Midland, had taken him to see Stevie at the Midland County Coliseum when he was 16, and it was the night Cody had decided to play guitar for the rest of his life.
He had learned this exact song from a magazine that same year, and he had thought he’d learned everything there was to know about it.
He had not.
“Oh, no.”
Cody said.
“Oh, man.”
“Mr. Vaughan, I I didn’t”
“I told you to have a go.”
“You did.”
Stevie said, and he grinned.
“And I had one.”
“Thank you for the pick.”
The young woman by the front door laughed out loud and then covered her mouth.
Travis was looking at his buddy like he’d just watched him try to arm wrestle a grizzly bear.
But Stevie wasn’t laughing at him.
Cody could see that.
There was nothing in the man’s face but kindness.
And something else.
Something that looked almost like recognition.
“Sit down a minute.”
Stevie said and nodded at the amp next to him.
“You ain’t in trouble.”
Cody sat down on the edge of the amplifier like a kid called to the principal’s office.
“You were wound up tighter than a banjo string when you walked in here.”
Stevie said quietly.
“You keep wiping your hand on your jeans.”
“What’s coming up?”
Cody stared at him.
Then, to his own surprise, he told him.
The band from Nashville.
The audition tomorrow at 2:00.
The 40 times he played the album.
Everybody back home who’d been told he was going to get it.
“And what are you scared of?”
Stevie said.
Cody was quiet for a long moment.
“That I’ll play every note right.”
he said finally.
“And they’ll still say no.”
“And I won’t even know why.”
Stevie nodded slowly.
“Yeah.”
he said.
“That’s the worst one.”
He looked down at the old guitar in his lap.
“I’ll tell you something I don’t tell people much.”
“For about 15 years, I couldn’t walk out on a stage without a bottle in me.”
“Cuz I was scared of exactly that.”
“That I’d play every note right, and it still wouldn’t be enough.”
“So I played louder and faster and harder than anybody, so nobody would ever have time to notice.”
“Nearly killed me.”
“Two and a half years ago, a doctor in Germany told me I had about a month left if I kept on.”
Cody didn’t say anything.
He couldn’t.
“I’ve been sober since then.”
Stevie said.
“And you know what I found out when I finally slowed down enough to listen?”
“Folks don’t come to hear you be right.”
“They come to hear you mean it.”
“Right is the floor, man.”
“You already got the floor.”
“Meaning it is the house.”
Then he nodded at the gig bag on Cody’s back.
“Get your guitar out.”
“Play me one of them Nashville songs.”
“The one you’re most scared of.”
Cody looked at him like he’d been asked to sing in church.
“Right now?”
“In front of you?”
“Ain’t nobody else here worth being scared of.”
Stevie said.
“Walt’s heard worse.”
“Ain’t you, Walt?”
“Heard you in 1974.”
Walt said without looking up from his paper.
Stevie laughed so hard he had to hold on to the old Strat.
So Cody unzipped the gig bag, plugged his brand new Fender into the little amp beside him, and with his hands shaking, he played the song.
A slow country ballad from the band’s album with a long aching guitar part at the end.
A part he had practiced so many times he could play it in his sleep.
He played every note right.
When he finished, Stevie was quiet for a moment.
“What’s that song about?”
he said.
Cody blinked.
“What?”
“The words.”
“What’s the fella singing about?”
Cody had to think.
He realized with a hot feeling in his face that in 40 times through the album, he had never once really listened to the words.
He had been listening to the guitar.
“It’s about a guy whose daddy’s sick,”
he said slowly.
“And he’s driving all night to get home to him before it’s too late.”
Stevie nodded.
“Your daddy still around?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Back in Midland.”
“He the one who used to play my records in the truck?”
Cody stared at him.
“How’d you know that?”
Stevie shrugged.
“Most of you young fellows, it was somebody’s daddy’s truck.”
He looked at the fretboard of the old strat for a moment.
“Mine’s gone.”
“Almost 3 years now.”
“He used to sit at the kitchen table in Oak Cliff and tap his hand on the oilcloth to the blues on the radio.”
“Never told me he was proud of me one time in his whole life.”
“But I’d give every guitar in this shop to drive all night and get home to him one more time.”
The shop was very quiet.
“So, play it again,”
Stevie said gently.
“But this time, don’t play the guitar part.”
“Play your daddy’s truck.”
“Play the radio in it.”
“Play the drive home.”
Cody looked down at his guitar.
Then, he took a breath and he played it again.
It was not perfect.
He rushed one bend and clipped the end of a phrase.
But somewhere in the second verse, his shoulders came down.
His foot stopped tapping too fast.
And when he got to that long aching part at the end, he let it be slow.
He let the notes hang.
He let a bend go up a little past where it was written and stay there and cry the way he had just heard it done on Pride and Joy.
When he finished, the young woman by the front door wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
Travis was staring at his friend like he’d never seen him before.
Stevie didn’t say anything for a few seconds.
“There he is,”
he said quietly.
Then, without another word, he started up that slow rolling shuffle again on the old Strat, low and easy, and nodded at Cody to join in.
And for the next 20 minutes in a second-hand guitar shop on South Lamar on a hot Saturday morning, Stevie Ray Vaughan played the blues with a scared kid from Midland he had never met before.
He didn’t take over.
He didn’t show off.
Every time Cody stepped out to play something, Stevie dropped down underneath him and played rhythm, steady as a heartbeat, leaving him all the room in the world.
And when Cody played something good, Stevie would grin and shake his head and holler,
“Yeah!”
over the music, the way the old bluesman on the East Side used to holler at him when he was 17.
People started drifting in off the sidewalk.
A mailman, two kids on bicycles, a woman with a bag of groceries.
By the time they finished, there were a dozen people standing in the aisles of Walt Bishop’s shop, and none of them had any idea what they were watching.
All they knew was that it was the best thing they had heard in their lives.
When it was over, Stevie unplugged the old 1962 Strat and handed it back to Walt.
“Good guitar,”
he said.
“Treat it right.”
He picked up his sunglasses off the amp.
Then he stopped next to Cody on his way to the door.
“You play good, man,”
he said.
“You put in the work.”
“Don’t you ever stop.”
He paused.
“But tomorrow, before you play a single note, listen to what the song’s asking you for.”
“They ain’t all asking for the same thing.”
He walked toward the door.
Then he stopped once more at the jar of picks next to the register.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he reached in and picked one out.
A plain, cheap, tortoise shell one.
No brand on it at all.
The kind Walt sold for a dime a piece.
He turned it around in his fingers, so the fat, rounded end was pointing out.
Then he handed it to Cody, the same way Cody had handed one to him an hour earlier.
“Here.”
He said,
“Have a go.”
Cody took it.
He looked down at it, and he couldn’t say anything.
“Keep that.”
Stevie said,
“Not cuz you need it.”
“You don’t.”
“But on the days you’re certain, you know the only right way to play something, you might want to look at it and remember there was a Saturday morning you found out there was another one.”
He handed back Cody’s shiny school pick, too.
“And keep yours.”
“You earned it.”
Then he walked out onto South Lamar, into the heat of the Saturday morning.
The traffic going by.
A radio playing somewhere across the street.
He turned left toward the taco trailer and whatever the rest of his day was going to ask of him.
Behind him in the shop, Cody stood in the middle of the floor for a long moment.
A pick in each hand.
The shiny one from school and the plain one from the jar.
He looked at them both.
Then he put the shiny one in his pocket and he turned to Walt.
“Can I use the back room, app?”
“Cables on the hook.”
Walt said.
Cody went into the little back room and closed the door.
He took the cheap tortoise shell pick and turned it around the way he had just seen it done, so the round end face the strings.
It felt wrong in his fingers, clumsy.
He played the first lick of Pride and Joy.
It sounded terrible.
He played it again.
Still terrible.
He played it again.
He stayed in that back room for 3 hours.
When he finally came out, Walt was locking up the register for the night and Travis had long since given up and gone to get supper.
The next afternoon at 2:00 in a rented rehearsal hall off Interstate 35, Cody Briggs walked in to audition for the band from Nashville.
There were six other guitar players waiting in the hallway.
Most of them were older than he was.
All of them were good.
He could hear them through the door, one after another.
Fast, clean, every note right.
When it was his turn, the band leader, a tired, gray-bearded man in a denim jacket, asked him to play the slow ballad.
The one about the sun driving all night to get home to his daddy.
Cody plugged in.
He reached into his pocket, and instead of the shiny pick from school, he took out a plain, cheap tortoise shell one and turned it around in his fingers.
Then, he closed his eyes.
And he played his daddy’s truck, the radio, the long drive home across West Texas in the dark.
He rushed one note.
He didn’t care.
When he finished, nobody in the room said anything for a few seconds.
The band leader was looking at the floor.
Then he looked up and asked Cody one question.
“Who taught you to play like that?”
Cody thought about it.
“A fella in a guitar shop,”
he said.
“Yesterday.”
He got the job.
That night, he called home from a payphone outside a gas station on Riverside Drive.
His daddy answered on the second ring, the way he always did, gruff and tired from a long week on the pipeline.
Cody told him about the job, about the bus and the arenas and the $300 a week.
And then, before he could stop himself, he told him about a skinny man on a stool in a guitar shop on South Lamar, and an old Strat tuned down half a step, and a pick turned around backwards.
There was a long silence on the line.
“Son,”
his daddy said finally, and his voice sounded strange.
“You’re telling me you played the blues with Stevie Ray Vaughan?”
“Yes, sir.”
Another silence.
Cody could hear him breathing.
“Well,”
his daddy said,
“I’ll be dogged.”
And for the first time in his whole life, Cody heard his father cry.
He spent that whole summer on a tour bus, playing arenas from Tulsa to Atlanta.
And every night, before he walked out on stage, he took a plain tortoise shell pick out of his shirt pocket, turned it around, and looked at it for just a second.
He never saw Stevie Ray Vaughan again.
16 months after that Saturday morning on South Lamar, on the night of the 26th of August, 1990, Stevie played a show at Alpine Valley in Wisconsin with Eric Clapton and Buddy Guy and his brother Jimmy.
Afterward, in the early hours of the 27th, he climbed into a helicopter in the fog.
It never reached Chicago.
He was 35 years old.
Cody heard the news on a truck stop radio outside of Knoxville.
He went back to the bus, climbed into his bunk, pulled the curtain shut, and took a cheap tortoise shell pick out of his shirt pocket.
And he stayed there, holding it, until the sun came up.
That fall, Walt Bishop got a letter in the mail at the shop on South Lamar.
It was from a guitar player in Nashville he’d met exactly once.
Inside was a check and a short note.
“For the old ’62 Strat on the back wall.”
“Please don’t sell it to anybody else.”
“I’ll come get it when I’m home.”
Walt took the old Strat off the hook that afternoon, and he put it behind the counter.
And when Cody came in at Christmas to pick it up, Walt handed it to him.
And then, he said something he had never told anybody.
“He used to come in here when he was your age,”
Walt said.
“Broke as a church mouse.”
“Trading one beat-up guitar for another.”
“He’d sit on that same stool and play till I closed.”
“Turned his picks around even then.”
He looked at the old Strat in Cody’s hands.
“He never once told me how good he was.”
“He didn’t have to.”
Cody Briggs played guitar for a living for the next 30 years.
He played on records in Nashville and on stages all over the world.
And when he finally got tired of airports, he came home to Texas and started teaching.
Teenagers, mostly.
Kids with fast hands and fancy degrees and something to prove, who walked into his little studio in Austin like they had already decided what they thought about everything.
Sooner or later, every single one of them played him “Pride and Joy”.
Fast, clean, every note right.
And every single time, Cody would smile and reach into a little dish on his desk and pick out a plain, cheap tortoiseshell pick.
And he would turn it around so the round end faced out.
And he would hand it to them and say,
“Here, have a go.”
Then, he would take down an old, beat-up 1962 Stratocaster off the wall, tune it down half a step, and show them the difference between playing the notes and playing the reason.
He still has that first pick.
It lives in a little frame on the wall of his studio under a faded photograph of a guitar shop on South Lamar that isn’t there anymore.
Underneath it, in his own handwriting, there is one line.
“Right is the floor.”
Meaning, it is the house.
Because sometimes, the most important lesson of your life doesn’t come from a teacher or a school or a stage.
Sometimes, it comes from a stranger on a stool in the back of a guitar shop on a Saturday morning who takes the pick you handed him, turns it around, and shows you that the room you’ve always been the best guitar player in just got a whole lot bigger.
If somebody ever showed you a different way to do something you were sure you already knew, you’re in good company.
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