It’s crazy enough that, in the synth-happy early ’80s, Stevie Ray Vaughan had a top-20 hit with a Strat-fueled, 12-bar-blues shuffle called Pride and Joy. Even more bizarre is that, that same year, his raunchy Albert King–inspired bends graced a bona-fide mega-hit, David Bowie’s jittery Let’s Dance, which spent a solid three weeks at the top of the charts.
Let's Dance – and the album of the same name – is notable because it served as the world’s introduction to Vaughan’s dynamic fretwork. Vaughan met Bowie at the 1982 Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. After SRV's performance, Bowie was so impressed that he later said, “[He] completely floored me. I probably hadn't been so gung-ho about a guitar player since seeing Jeff Beck with his [pre-Yardbirds] band, the Tridents.“
