My Vinyl Collection 172
The Fabulous Thunderbirds; Toots & the Maytals. From Austin to Kingston, music history from my shelves. Alphabetically listed, 33 rpm, Vinyl.
1189. The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Tuff Enuff (1986)
Kim Wilson was born in Detroit in 1951 and in 1960 moved with his family in Goleta, Calif., where his father was an executive for General Motors. Goleta has a unique place in American military history as the town where in 1942, a Japanese submarine shelled the USA mainland for the first time. The attack at Elwood Oil Field caused only minor damage but triggered a scare that led to the round-up of Japanese-American citizens.
The town is also part of American music history, where Wilson, founder and leader of the Fabulous Thunderbirds, picked up his first harmonica. “I was 17 years old. It was a Marine band that cost $1.75. I saw a guy playing a harp in school, and blues was big with a lot of white kids at the time. I got serious about my influences — like George ‘Harmonica’ Smith and James Cotton.
“California radio at that time changed my life forever. Especially living in Goleta. Wow. Everything was on AM radio plus you had those offshore stations. And between the two, you’d hear everything from Little Walter, Bobby Bland, Slim Harpo — all this blues. Next thing you know I’m playing with Eddie Taylor, Johnny Shines, Fenton Robinson, Albert Collins, Lowell Fulson.”
He moved to Austin in 1974 and formed the Thunderbirds with guitarist Jimmie Vaughan. The pair fused blues, rock, and and R&B, became the house band at Antone’s and made music put in a niche called roadhouse Texas blues. By 1986, when the album on my shelf was released, Wilson and Vaughn had created the arch-type blues bar band.
Tuff Enuff crossed over into the pop arena, getting heavy rotation on MTV, cracking the Top Ten, selling a million LPs. The T-Birds won the W.C. Handy Award for best blues band. One the record, the band sounded to me like it might slide over into the comfort of the mainstream, a notion soon dispelled watching Wilson react to his fans in New Orleans.
“You’ve got to write your own chapter in the book and blow. That’s what I did. No one can take that away from me. It’s about musical freedom. I do whatever it takes to get an emotional response from an audience. Each influence takes you in a different direction. It’s more about feeling than being an acrobat who plays a zillion notes.
“And now you got these guys walking into clubs with Marshall stacks calling their music the blues and it’s just pollution. There’s this misrepresentation of what real blues is.”
The kid who started with the $1.75 Marine harmonica has survived his share of personal hassles and health scares over the years. His latest version of the Thunderbirds is set to get back on the road May 16 in South Boston at the Prizery. Wilson is 73.
1190. Toots & the Maytals, Funky Kingston (1975)
All over America/ People keep on asking me for/ Funky Kingston/ But I ain't got none/ Someone take it away from me/ You got to go on and fetch one/ Funky Kingston, now/
They keep on asking me/ But I ain't got none/ Somebody take it from me/ You got to go on and fetch one/ Funky Kingston, now/ Funky Kingston, now Funky Kingston, now
Birth parents die young. At 11, it’s Toots Hibbert the orphan. To brother John’s in Trenchtown. Kingston. May Pen gone, mon. Barber shop gone.
“Easily the biggest act in Jamaica before Bob Marley.” That’s according to Chris Blackwell, the Dragon Records owner who “turned the world on to reggae music.” “Funky Kingston” the single, was released first on Toots’ debut album in 1973 in the UK as well as Jamaica then later in the USA on a drastically revised second Funky Kingston LP, the one lodged on my shelves, celebrating life despite hard times. Still. From the street. Producers of other up-and-coming Jamaican bands were adding big horn sounds and James Brown runs, but Blackwell keeps it simple here, under a spell. Delicious covers of “Louie Louie” and “Country Roads.” “Maytals” means “do the right thing,” in Rastafarian.
“Time Tough” is new on the 1975 American version. On the break. Swaggering out of the gate. No chip. Just push and pump. Toots into the struggle inside the working classes. From a culture that’s been taken away.
Euro-centrism attacked. Were the whites on the run then? In the early and later seventies. Reggae, once spread off the island, became a force, at least at a cultural level, a force backed by the Jamaican people and ever increasing allies in London, South Africa and across the Caribbean.
Dancing the rocksteady beat. No more Quadrille and Maypole. Somebody in the English press called the new sound “Jamaican rock and roll.” In one sense, as a rebel music, it’s true.
“Funky Kingston” owes its beat to the same African roots as USA blues and soul and what they share makes funk. Funk from Kingston. One-drop drums. Stinky offbeats from out of the piano, from the rhythm guitar. Toots high and low, beating the repeats of the lyrics so each is his own. Each to its own.
A trio of voices almost always. Triangles on clouds.
Toots brings in each one, one-by-one: “Let me hear your funky guitar . . . now reggae.” A guitar solo. A fusion-forward experiment here and there. Lump out all up — back it up over the colonialism, poverty, migration. Sometimes you have to think political. Caribbeanizing the dancing counts. Even that can be political.
Toots as a kid enjoyed the fruits of colonization, for a while taking on the British posture. Until the deaths of both his parents, both Seventh Day Adventists. At his brother’s in Kingston he learned multiple instruments. Toots and the Maytals was formed in 1961. The elements lined up. The Oxford English Dictionary credits Toots and the Maytals in the etymology of the word "Reggae.” The group has the most No. 1 songs in Jamaica with 31.
Toots Hibbert died in a Kingston hospital in 2020 from the COVID-19 virus. He was 77.