Written by As anyone who watched Stevie Ray Vaughan perform at the Reading Festival in 1983 can attest, no one was ever better at turning an ambivalent or hostile audience into a crowd of mind-boggled believers. But this wasn’t always the case.
The following year, Huey Lewis and the News set out on the US leg of their Sports tour, and Lewis picked Vaughan to open the shows.
“Stevie Ray’s manager at the time asked for more money than they were worth,” Lewis wrote on social media this week, retelling the story. “My agent said, ‘This is ridiculous. We can’t pay them this kind of money. They’re not worth anything. We’re just helping them by putting them on the tour. They should be paying us. Blah, blah, blah.’
“I said, ‘Forget about it. Just pay him. Trust me. You’ll be glad you did.'”
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The first show of the tour was at the 7000-capacity Zoo Amphitheatre in Oklahoma City, OK, where Lewis watched horrified from the wings as his crowd ignored the Texan genius altogether.
“They were just killing it,” says Lewis. “Then the song ended, and there was a moment of dead silence. Then the audience started chanting, ‘Huey, Huey, Huey, Huey.’
Gene Triplett, covering the show for The Oklahoman, confirmed Lewis’s analysis.
“His scrambling, incredibly articulate riffs and solos recalled all the gifted blues-rock heroes of a bygone era (Hendrix, Michael Bloomfield, the heydays of Johnny Winter and Eric Clapton), but few people seemed to care, and he wasn’t called back for an encore,” wrote Triplett. “Much of the crowd seemed more concerned with the long lines at the beer taps.”
After Double Trouble finished their set, they dejectedly retreated to their tour bus, where Lewis found them and gave a rousing speech.
“Look, fellas, you’re tremendous,” he told them. “Here’s the thing, the audience is invested in us. They know our music. They play the record on the way to the venue. No matter how good you are, they’re bound to think that we’re going to be much, much better. There’s no way you’re going to score here. What’s going to happen is, when they go home tonight, they’re going to say, ‘Hey, you know what? That first band was pretty good.'”
Lewis finished by telling Vaughan and Double Trouble to relax, and that they’d enjoy the rest of the tour. They did, and each headline set by The News would finish with Vaughan guesting on Lewis’s Bad Is Bad.
“Stevie Ray Vaughan was great,” Huey Lewis guitarist Chris Hayes told Vertex Effects in 2025. “He toured with us for a year. It was like every night was a guitar lesson.
“He was as strong as an ox. The guy had the hands of an ironsmith. He was so strong that he would crush your hand when he shook it. The guy was super strong and really wiry and muscular.”
Hayes also saw a different side of Vaughan when the two shared a bottle of Canadian whisky (the brand endorsed by Dave Grohl).
“One night, about halfway through the tour, he said, ‘Hey Chris, come on the bus with me. I want to hang out,'” Hayes remembered. “I went, ‘Great! I get to hang out with Stevie Ray Vaughan! This is freaking awesome!’ So he kicks all the other guys in the band off the bus and makes them ride on the crew bus, and it’s just me and Stevie on the bus with a bottle of Crown Royal.
“We just drank that whole bottle of Crown Royal. Of course, he could handle it. I was sick as a dog in the morning, because it’s not the safest thing to drink, but man, it was such a great time for me because he was kind of one of my heroes.”
Audio from an FM radio broadcast from the Sports tour featuring Vaughan guesting on Bad Is Bad can be heard below.
