There’s a heart-stopping moment in the film The Shawshank Redemption when Andy Dufresne crawls to freedom through what Morgan Freeman’s character Red narrates as “five-hundred yards of shit-smelling foulness I can’t even imagine”. Then redemption comes as he’s cleansed, arms outstretched, by the falling rain.
The scene sums up neatly the final few years of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s life. The shit-smelling foulness of his drug and alcohol addiction, near-death experiences and the toxic relationships few of us could even imagine. Then redemption for SRV comes with the recording of his final, addiction-free album, 1989’s In Step. To paraphrase Red: Stevie Ray Vaughan crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.
