Powerful Stuff

The Zoo Crew has got a good one on the turntable for the Zoo Freaks tonight, and it is the kind of record that still kicks the door open when it comes around on the station. “Powerful Stuff” by The Fabulous Thunderbirds, from the album of the same name, is Texas blues rock with a radio smile on it, and the story behind the track is almost as loud as the groove. You can catch the whole freeform ride, deep cuts and all, over at THE ZOO.

The song did not start life as an album cut the way most folks remember it. It showed up first on the soundtrack to the 1988 Tom Cruise picture Cocktail, and it was the first single pulled from that album. The soundtrack went to number one and sold more than twelve million copies around the world, which meant a whole lot of people who had never set foot in a blues joint heard Kim Wilson lean into a chorus about getting knocked sideways by something stronger than a bar drink. On the pop chart the single climbed to number 65. On rock radio it did better, peaking at number 3. For a band that had already broken through with “Tuff Enuff” a couple of years earlier, this was the last time they cracked the Hot 100, and it rode in on a movie about bartenders shaking drinks in the islands.

The writers were not the usual Thunderbirds crew. “Powerful Stuff” came from Michael Henderson, R.S. Field, and Wally Wilson, outside songwriters who handed the band a ready-made hook. Terry Manning produced it, the same Memphis hand who had been in the orbit of the group as they moved from club blues toward a glossier sound. The track was cut in Memphis, with sessions tied to Ardent Studios, and then it became the title song of the 1989 album Powerful Stuff on CBS Associated. That record runs a little over forty-two minutes, ten songs, and it sits between Hot Number and Walk That Walk, Talk That Talk in the catalog. Alongside the title track you get “Rock This Place,” which later hit number 10 on the rock chart, Kim Wilson originals like “Emergency” and “She’s Hot,” a Jerry Lynn Williams pair in “One Night Stand” and “Close Together,” an Isaac Hayes and David Porter number called “Now Loosen Up Baby,” and a tip of the hat to Slim Harpo with “Rainin’ in My Heart.”

What makes the album matter to longtime fans is who was still in the room. This was the last studio record with Jimmie Vaughan on guitar. The lineup on Powerful Stuff was Kim Wilson on vocals and harmonica, Vaughan on guitar, Preston Hubbard on bass, and Fran Christina on drums. Vaughan left not long after, heading off to cut Family Style with his brother Stevie Ray. So when the needle drops on this one, you are hearing the classic late-eighties Thunderbirds on the way out the door, still tight, still swinging, but already dressed for a bigger stage than Antone’s on a weeknight. Critics at the time were split. Some heard a band making too many concessions to album-rock radio. The Zoo Crew hears a band that knew how to put a stomp under a chorus without losing the Texas grit that got them the gig in the first place.

The name on the sleeve goes back to a much smaller room. The Fabulous Thunderbirds came together in Austin in 1974. Jimmie Vaughan, a Dallas kid who had been playing since the early sixties in outfits like the Swinging Pendulums and later Storm, was holding down Sundays at a rib joint called Alexander’s, where anybody who could play might get waved up on the break. Somebody brought Kim Wilson in. Wilson tore it up on harmonica, and Vaughan knew he had found his singer. Wilson had been born in Detroit on January 6, 1951, raised in Goleta, California, where he sometimes went by Goleta Slim, and he had already led a Minneapolis band called Aces, Straights and Shuffles. He got hip to the blues late in high school, sat in with players like Eddie Taylor while he was still a teenager, and soaked up Little Walter, James Cotton, Big Walter Horton, Slim Harpo, and Lazy Lester. By the time he hit Austin he was ready.

The early bill sometimes included Lou Ann Barton and drummer Otis Lewis. Barton and Lewis moved on, bassist Keith Ferguson came in from the same Austin circle that had included Storm and the Nightcrawlers, and Mike Buck took the drum chair. The “Fabulous” got tacked onto Thunderbirds so they would not be mixed up with another band using a similar name. One old account ties the Thunderbird handle to a Nightcaps song of that title. Either way, the group planted itself at Antone’s, the downtown blues room Clifford Antone opened in 1975 and billed as Austin’s home of the blues. They became the house band, opening for and backing Buddy Guy, Albert King, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Muddy Waters, and Jimmy Rogers, who might stay two or three weeks. Vaughan later said they played about five years before they had a record, leaning on Louisiana swamp blues rather than straight Chicago because Chicago blues was already crowded. Ferguson, whose father collected records, pushed that direction. Vaughan once said that when Ferguson joined, it felt like having a battleship behind you, and Ferguson did not want a second guitar cluttering the pocket.

The first albums, Girls Go Wild in 1979 and What’s the Word in 1980, on the little Takoma label, sold in small pressings and are now treated like cornerstone Texas blues. Fran Christina replaced Buck on drums. The band toured behind Rockpile and worked with producers like Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe. National radio mostly ignored them until Tuff Enuff in 1986 went platinum and the title song hit the Top 10. Hot Number in 1987 cooled off. Then Cocktail handed them “Powerful Stuff,” and for a minute the whole country was humming a Thunderbirds chorus again. After Vaughan left, Wilson kept the name alive with new lineups, still on the road a couple hundred nights a year, still the harmonica player out front.

If you want the band in their own words and pictures, the official home is The Fabulous Thunderbirds, where they are still posting new records, including the Grammy-nominated Struck Down. Their verified Facebook page is FABULOUS THUNDERBIRDS on Facebook. The Instagram account is @fabuloustbirds. On X they post as @ThunderFabulous. Those are the places the current crew points people, right alongside the station link for THE ZOO. Spin it loud, Zoo Freaks. This one still qualifies as powerful stuff.