The Live Alive Tour was a concert tour through North America and Europe, undertaken by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble from 1986 to 1988. At the start of the tour, Vaughan and bassist Tommy Shannon had both achieved sobriety. Their success with overcoming long-term drug and alcohol addiction had been attained by entering a rehabilitation facility, where they stayed for four weeks. Although Vaughan was nervous about performing while sober, he received encouragement from his bandmates. Throughout the tour during performances, Vaughan would warn his audiences about the dangers of substance abuse.
Consisting of nine legs and 207 shows, the tour began in Towson, Maryland on November 22, 1986 and ended in New York City on December 31, 1988. The first five legs alternated with visits between the United States and Canada, before the sixth leg took the band to Europe. The final leg incorporated stops in the northeast, midwest and west coast, before the group's return to the northeast in December 1988.
Although Vaughan and Double Trouble did not follow a set list, all thirteen songs from Live Alive were performed at least once during the tour, and as many as eleven of them were included in each of the band's performances. The tour was generally well-received and provoked many positive reactions from music critics, most of whom took note of Vaughan's soberiety—in 1988, Rhys Williams of The Daily Tar Heel noted that "his enthusiasm seemed to reflect his cleaned-up image". He would continue this lifestyle in the following years, before his death in a helicopter accident in 1990.
Background
Stevie Ray Vaughan is widely regarded as one of the most influential electric guitarists in the history of blues music, and one of the most important musicians in the revival of blues in the 1980s. Allmusic describes him as "a rocking powerhouse of a guitarist who gave blues a burst of momentum in the '80s, with influence still felt long after his tragic death." Despite a mainstream career that spanned only seven years, Vaughan eventually became recognized among musicians as the future standard for success and promise in blues. Biographer Craig Hopkins explains that Vaughan's talent was the result of the youth culture in the 1960s: "the popularity of playing instruments as a form of teen entertainment, the prevalence of teen dances, the success of his older brother, the practicality of playing guitar as an outlet for a shy boy and the singular, intense focus on the guitar all contributed to create one of the best electric guitar players of all time."
Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, Vaughan began playing guitar at the age of seven, inspired by his older brother Jimmie Vaughan. He was an apt pupil, no less quick to learn than his brother, and was playing the guitar with striking virtuosity by the time he was fourteen. In 1971, he dropped out of high school and moved to Austin the following year. Soon afterward, he began playing gigs on the nightclub circuit, earning a spot in Marc Benno's band, the Nightcrawlers, and later with Denny Freeman in the Cobras, with whom he continued to work through late 1977. He then formed his own group, Double Trouble, before performing at the Montreux Jazz Festival in mid-July 1982 and being discovered by John Hammond, who in turn interested Epic Records with signing them to a recording contract. Within a year, they achieved international fame after the release of their debut album Texas Flood, and in 1984 their second album, Couldn't Stand the Weather, along with the supporting tour, brought them to further commercial and critical success; the album quickly outpaced the sales of Texas Flood.
After the addition of keyboardist Reese Wynans in 1985, the band released Soul to Soul and toured in support of the album, which was their first as a quartet. However, Vaughan's drug and alcohol habits continued to escalate. In September 1986, the band traveled to Denmark to begin a European leg of the Soul to Soul Tour. By this time, Vaughan had reached the peak of his substance abuse. He would consume a quart (0.95 L) of whiskey and an ounce (28 g) of cocaine each day. According to biographer Craig Hopkins, his lifestyle of substance abuse was "probably better characterized as the bottom of a deep chasm."