Nine years before he got his big break in George Thorogood and the Destroyers, a young Texan guitarist by the name of Jim Suhler seized his chance to make an impression on Stevie Ray Vaughan.
“I met him for the first time in 1989,” he tells Guitar World. “We had a family jewelry shop in Dallas and Stevie had an old antique watch he brought in to get repaired. I just happened to be there when he came in. In fact, I walked right past him when my dad was talking to him.”
Suhler had yet to break into the music industry at this point. It would be another three years before the release of his debut album as Jim Suhler and Monkey Beat, and his father wanted to help him achieve his dreams.
“My dad called me back and said, ‘Son, there’s somebody here you want to meet.’ And it was Stevie,” Suhler recollects. “I was in my late 20s trying to get it together. I hadn’t met George at that point, so my dad asked him: ‘Do you have any advice for my son?’
“I was really embarrassed by that,” he admits, “but Stevie said to me, ‘Yeah, keep it clean.’ To me, one of the greatest parts of his legacy was his sobriety and him helping others through that journey.”
With those words still ringing in his ears, Suhler awaited Vaughan’s return to the store. But it was a day that never came. Inexplicably, the guitarist never returned to pick up his watch.
So when he and his band rolled into the city once more a year later, in 1990, he knew what he had to do.
“I took the watch out to where he was playing, got backstage, and gave it back to him," Suhler says. "He had a light — an aura or energy — about him. It was palpable. It was real and he was very powerful. God bless him. He was a great man.”
The show, as part of the B.B. King–headlined Benson & Hedges Blues Festival, would prove to be one of SRV’s last. The guitarist died tragically that August.
But where one legacy ended, another began. Buoyed by his idol’s advice, Suhler developed his career as a solo artist with a slew of album releases. He was also featured on Robert Ealey's 1995 album, If You Need Me, before he caught Thorogood's eye.
Since then, Suhler has gone on to enjoy quite the career, releasing four studio albums as part of Thorogood's band. During that time he's opened for AC/DC and performed with Joe Bonamassa and "The Reverend" Billy F. Gibbons, who officiated at his wedding.
Suhler tapped Joe Bonamassa for a Hendrix-esque number on his 2007 solo album, having seen the guitarist “killing it” with a Rory Gallagher cover while on the road with Thorogood in San Diego, in 2001. He says he needed “superhuman skills” to bring the song to life, and Bonamassa, who has recently talked about why he's brought Dumbles back into his live rig, was the man for the job.
As for his Gibbons-bolstered wedding, Suhler says, “You haven’t lived until you’ve gone out on the town in Texas with Billy Gibbons. His influence is very big on me, personally as well as musically.”
For more from Stevie Ray Vaughan, check out his recently revived classic GP interview, which sees him talking about jamming with B.B. and Freddie King, Dumble amps, and dodging bullets while playing his earliest shows.
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