For Your Weekend Listening Pleasure: The Fab T-Birds Tear It Up at Fair Park Coliseum in ’86

We began the day by looking at old photos of Stevie Ray and Jimmie Vaughan courtesy Kirby Warnock, who’s bringing Jimmie to the Texas Theatre for a very special homecoming show and chitchat. So, then, it’s only appropriate to end it with this recent find from 1986: Jimmie, Kim Wilson, Preston Hubbard and Fran Christina — otherwise known as the Fabulous Thunderbirds — at the State Fair Coliseum in 1986.

That was the band’s commercial heyday — right around the time “Tuff Enuff” was rattling around the Billboard Top 10, the band’s lone hit. I must have seen the band half a dozen times during that period; it was tough living in Austin back then without finding yourself at a T-Birds show at some point. That ’87 Riverfest especially comes to mind, but one among many how’d-I-end-up-here moments. Never disappointing; occasionally, enlightening. (And how’d “My Babe” never go Top 10?)

This show was a radio broadcast, via Westwood One, which is why it sounds like it was recorded tomorrow; the venue, intimate as a first date, doesn’t hurt either. (We were in there during the State Fair and couldn’t understand why the coliseum, which hosted the likes of Pantera and Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses way back when, has turned off the music in recent years.) I also like the fact the set list contains the band’s cover of a song co-written and recorded by another local great: “How Do You Spell Love” by none other than Bobby Patterson.