Legend is not a word you see me either putting into print or uttering very often because I think it is widely used out of context. But until this album release, legend is exactly what the tale of the Doc Pomus recordings of The Fabulous Thunderbirds in 1978 had become.
For many years there were rumours circulating about the possible existence on tape of the studio recordings made by Doc Pomus in the days before the T-birds had a record deal. But nothing had ever surfaced – even as a bootleg - so the legend took shape.
In 2018 I started working with Jimmie Vaughan on his archive for material to include in The Jimmie Vaughan Story box set. He remembered the T-birds sessions with Doc and when I mentioned the possibility of the existence of tapes, he said he recalled having them and they were probably in his storage. We spent a couple of days looking but ran out of time as we got sidetracked into unearthing all kinds of other things that needed to be documented and considered for use.
Bill Bentley had agreed to write the notes for the Jimmie project and while we were talking about what was likely to be in the collection, he said that he believed Doc’s daughter and son-in-law had the original tapes. I followed up with them and sure enough, there were some tapes but they had been flood-damaged and left untouched after drying out for fear of further deterioration. I retrieved them and after the painstaking efforts of a restoration specialist, we were able to recover the tracks there were originally approved by Doc for album release, along with several alternate takes and other snippets. They were successfully transferred without any audio treatment and have been preserved for your listening pleasure.
After hearing what we got, Bill Bentley commented “This collection is a searing celebration of American music at its best which has laid silent all these decades. Sometimes high points in music take years to find daylight. And, finally, that's exactly what has happened now. It's a commonly known fact in deep music circles that Doc Pomus was a uniquely soulful songwriter and all-around enormously interesting, good guy. He wrote incredible songs for all kinds of unequalled artists. Word on the band’s growing audience had reached Doc Pomus and early in 1978 he decided to record them and shop it to some labels. At the time, Doc figured that thirteen of the twenty-eight tracks they cut were deemed worthy of pitching to record companies as a complete album. But for no known reason, the powers-that-be in those years just stepped over the possibility of making the release a reality and “poof”, it was gone.”
Without a record deal. the band stuck at it. Thankfully, on the heels of the Pomus album disappointment, a break was right around the corner for them. Asleep at the Wheel's head honcho Ray Benson was friends with Takoma Records boss Denny Bruce, and told Bruce about the Fabulous Thunderbirds, who promptly saw the band play at Antone's on his next Austin visit. It didn't take but one night for Denny to fall for the band and offer them a contract. Bruce knew there was no one else on the landscape who could deliver blues as exciting as the T-Birds could and he got them into the studio again for their debut album GIRLS GO WILD.
There are no overdubs. The horns from Roomful of Blues and their keyboard man Al Copley joined the T-birds for some of these sessions. It’s proof positive that there simply wasn’t anybody else anywhere near as good as the T-birds doing this kind of stuff at that time. And there’s very few who could come close even now. ~ Malcolm Mills
