Steve Van Zandt Reveals His Opinion On David Bowie and SRV

A tweet revealing the opinion of E Street Band guitarist, Steve Van Zandt, on the bad blood between David Bowie and Stevie Ray Vaughan was recently posted.

The E Street Band is known in Texas. However, Vaughan’s band Double Trouble failed to become nationally famous. Record producer Jerry Wexler then suggested they attend the Montreux Jazz Festival. On July 17, 1982, they took the stage, playing arrangements, renditions, and some original works, but the audience responded negatively.

As a result, Vaughan was pretty disappointed, but decided to continue even after the show. Double Trouble then performed at the Montreux Casino and entered the studio to record new songs. While they were in the studio, Bowie called the guitarist to invite him to collaborate on his album Let’s Dance because he was impressed with their performance.

Vaughan accepted Bowie’s offer and recorded the guitar parts on six songs in January 1983. It turned out to be a significant success, so Bowie offered Vaughan to be the featured instrumentalist for his upcoming Serious Moonlight Tour. However, the guitarist abandoned the tour because the contract renegotiations for his performance fee failed.

A Twitter user recently shared a photo of Vaughan, Bowie, and Nils Lofgren. Upon seeing the photo, Van Zandt tweeted the following:

“Is that Nils? Looks like Chris Layton, Stevie Ray’s drummer (and later Arc Angels).”

One of his fans then asked:

“Also, did Bowie and Stevie make up by then? I thought Stevie resented being offered so little money to tour with Bowie.”

Van Zandt replied:

“I don’t think it was long-term bad blood. Bowie helped break him in America. And I helped break him in Europe around the same time by choosing him to open for my Rockpalast broadcast out of Germany that went live to 14 countries and 25 million viewers.”