Pan Alley

Couldn't Stand The Weather is Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble's follow-up to their excellent debut album Texas Flood. While a more diverse album than their debut, this album is a little inconsistent combining some of their best music ever with a few tracks being just decent.
The best tracks are absolutely killer. "Cold Shot", a mid-tempo shuffle, is an excellent track with Stevie Ray singing more subdued than usual. "Tin Pan Alley" is slow blues at its best with one of Stevie Ray's best vocal performances. His guitar playing is impressive throughout with Double Trouble being the perfect backing band playing with equal amounts fire and subtlety. "Stang's Swang" is the first of Vaughan's instrumental jazz tracks and one of the best songs on the album. The title track is one of their best tracks featuring a great riff and an excellent solo by Stevie Ray.
~John Alapick~

Oakland/San Francisco-area bluesman Tucker sings in a manner undeniably derivative of Bobby "Blue" Bland, and he stands in this style quite strongly. A horn section adds extra juice, but it is the pianist/organist Bill Heid who really provides the spark that powers this full bodied authentic blues machine….

Thanks in part to the luridly alluring title and the enthusiastically informative liner notes by Bob Koester, this solid collection was many a young musician's introduction to the men who pioneered blues piano in the first half of the 20th century. Roosevelt Sykes is the best represented artist here, and his leering vocals are hard to resist: After hearing the ribald metaphor of "Dresser Drawers," you'll never view furniture quite the same way again.

Belatedly, all of Kid Creole and the Coconuts' albums can be purchased on CD, and through the Sire and Columbia years, 1980-1992, every damn one is worth it. This is something else. Though the four cuts with Creole's name on them set the tone, it assembles side projects August Darnell oversaw for ZE, and double-damn if most don't hold up–Aural Exciters, Don Armando's Second Avenue Rhumba Band, Machine's fashionably charitable "There But for the Grace of God Go I," and the long-lost prize, Cristina's neo-nihilist takeover of Peggy Lee's/Leiber & Stoller's merely existentialist "Is That All There Is?"