Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Stratocaster are one of those iconic guitarist/guitar pairings – Brian May and the Red Special, Jimmy Page and his Number One 1959 Les Pauland others.
Less well-known, but equally air-tight, was the relationship of one of Vaughan’s foremost guitar heroes, the always-underrated Lonnie Mack, to the Gibson Flying V. And Mack’s loyalty was not without reason.
His V of choice happened to be a ’58 model known as “Number 7,” so named because it was the seventh V to ever roll out of Gibson’s factory, then in Kalamazoo, Michigan. As if that distinction didn’t make it noteworthy enough, Mack also famously had the guitar fitted with a Bigsby vibrato unit attached to a piece of stainless steel spanning the guitar’s wings.
Now, there are stories aplenty of guitarists abandoning their signature (literally and otherwise) guitars in special, typically guest, appearances – Washburn man Nuno Bettencourt, for instance, used a Les Paul for a mini-gig with Steven Tyler just last month.
When Vaughan invited his idol to jam onstage with himself and his band, Double Trouble, one night, though, both guitarists’ particularly strong loyalties proved to be a slight sticking point. Vaughan’s arsenal, you see, was solely comprised of Strats.
Stevie Ray Vaughan with Lonnie Mack – Wham – YouTube
“Lonnie came into an Austin club where we were playing,” Vaughan told Guitar World in a 1983 interview. “I asked him if he would play, but Lonnie, the master of the Flying V, said he wouldn’t touch anything but a Gibson, and so he just got up and sang his ass off. Later he said he wanted to produce us.”
Vaughan, as it turns out, would soon produce himwith the two working closely together on Mack’s 1985 comeback album, Strike Like Lightning.
On that album, Mack and Vaughan re-worked the former’s pioneering instrumental, Wham (the first record that Vaughan ever bought) as Double Whammy. Asked about the recording of the re-working in a 1986 interview with Guitar WorldMack gave insight into the chemistry that first flickered that fateful evening.
In response to a question about how he “arranged” his parts with Vaughan, Mack said with a laugh, “I’d just say, ‘go!’
“I’d say, ‘Okay, you play rhythm, take the second solo,’ like that; we never worked anything out in detail. Or like when we did Whamit was obvious I was going to do the intro, so I just played until I decided it was time for him, got it right there and then nodded at him.
“So he played it for a while, then he looked at me, I got the message and I took it,” Mack continued. “Very informal: I like it like that.”