you know the first time you know as far as music making music came
together with bill bill carter
and myself being Stevie Ray Vaughan's double trouble
and bill had done his record stomping grounds and he'd written the song Willie
The Wimp
and
stevie's brother jimmy vaughan played guitar on it. I'd never met jimmy before just had seen
him play with the T-Birds and i was a big fan
we met the day that we were going to record
just at the studio
i was just glad that he called me you know and i got to do what i wanted
and he wanted me to do that, so
and Ruth too, so uh... we had fun and there was no pressure and sorta...
to in my mind it was anti music business
we were recording and
and I showed him some songs and then i think was it seems like it was a day or two
later that
we got this article in the paper it was in the austin paper but it was
written by a fellow named bob green who's a journalist and writer for the
chicago tribune i think it was the tribune
and there's an article about this guy willlie the wimp
william stokes
junior who was uh...pimp drug dealer that was murdered and was into cadillacs
and so they buried him in this
coffin, that
looked like a cadillac with wheels and there's a grill and all that stuff, it was
really a great article I mean it was so interesting
I remember looking at it before we were going into the studio
I told Ruth, I said, man look at this man this is really cool we oughta
do something with this and this old riff I remembered from the old sort of kinda from
an old song from where i came from that duhn... duhn... duhn..dunna.
duhn... stole it, basically
and interpreted it in my way
as it were
and uh...
the reason I started writing lyrics to it because it was all there, I mean it was all
the article so we kind of started writing in and driving to the studio and got to the studio
and you know, "Hey Jimmie, dig this"
it was pretty severe for the time you know i mean
nobody i'd never heard a song anything like it so we recorded it. Do you remember how long it took?
two takes
I don't which one they must have picked mm the best one, I don't know
Is that normal for you, just to knock something out that fast
Well, when you get excited about something and everything sounds good,
you do that
if it takes three weeks you know you might oughta get a new song
Stevie said, have you heard this record, I said no but I knew he had done it but i hadn't heard it
and he played the track
willie the wimp
Stevie and Chris and them heard it, they wanted to do like immediately but i don't think they told us
cuz they were afraid to tell us they were gonna record it and they did it when we weren't
paying attention. We loved it
I wanna start doin this, they said, so let's do... we did
and then we ended up recording it on our live record
never know where a songs gonna land or
windup
i got a phone call from somebody in mississippi
they call and I answered the phone and they said is this bill carter and I said yeah, well this is uh
detective somebody I forget his name in uh...
jackson mississippi or somewhere and I said, I didn't do it!
but uh
he said back, he said
he said well we're investigating a homicide
of this guy
and uh... evidently i think he told me I think for some reason he did tell me
that it was some black guy in a cadillac
that they found murdered
the interesting thing about it was they found him just in the front seat dead
with a knife stuck in his chest
with the lyrics
to Willie the Wimp. You know...
and
I mean, you know,
i mean poor guy but i mean it is
i mean I thought
first thing i thought was that's actually
I thought it was pretty cool in a way, just that
in my own sick mind at that because it was so unreal, it was like it didn't
really happen it's like something in a movie or something I though what a cool thing
for a movie but it was a actually really and I told Stevie the story i thought that
man you gotta
hear this
and i thought he would, you know
I thought he would think, wow that's
pretty cool, but he he he never played the song again, it really affected him, that's where
that song wound up.