A Box Set Covers Jimmie Vaughan’s Fabulous Thunderbirds Years: Review
by Jeff Burger
The Jimmie Vaughan Story, a limited-edition five-CD set released in 2021, includes performances from every stage of the Austin, Texas-based blues-rock guitarist and singer’s career. If you missed that compendium or want more, however, you can find it in 2025’s The Jimmie Vaughan Years: Complete Studio Recordings 1978–1989.
This new four-CD set, which contains five hours of music, features Vaughan’s work with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, the blues, rock and R&B group he co-founded in 1974 with singer and harmonica player Kim Wilson. (Vaughan left the band in 1990 to play with his brother, Stevie Ray Vaughan. He launched a solo career after Stevie’s death.) Only about two dozen numbers from The Jimmie Vaughan Story are duplicated in the new, 139-track collection, which comes with a generously illustrated, LP-sized hardcover book. It includes notes on the recordings by critic Bill Bentley and extracts from interviews with Vaughan, Wilson and others.
Related: What were the best reissues, boxed sets and collections of 2025?
The first 13 tracks in the new set are among the most notable. Recorded in 1978 with the Roomful of Blues horn section, they are all previously unissued and produced by Joel Dorn and Doc Pomus, who began his career as a blues singer before achieving fame as the writer of numerous pop and rock classics. Also featured on Disc One is the Fabulous Thunderbirds’ eponymous debut LP, a powerful mix of covers and originals that first appeared in 1979.
Disc two adds What’s the Word? and Butt Rockin’, from 1980 and 1981, respectively, while a third CD offers 1982’s T-Bird Rhythm, which Nick Lowe produced, and 1986’s Tuff Enuff, the band’s bestselling album, whose title cut became its only top 10 hit. The final CD delivers Hot Number, from 1987, and Powerful Stuff, which appeared in 1989. Dave Edmunds, who played with Lowe in Rockpile, produced Tuff Enuff and Hot Number.
Not everything on these Fabulous Thunderbirds albums is fabulous, and the later albums are particularly weak, with a surfeit of formulaic, mainstream blues-rock. But Vaughan and Wilson can be formidable singers and players and, particularly on the early LPs—the ones they recorded before they seemingly began making concessions to commercialism—they and their bandmates deliver more than a few high-octane winners.
The set, released Nov. 7, 2025, is available in the U.S. here, in Canada here and in the U.K. here.
Burger wrote one of the first interview-based profiles of Bruce Springsteen to be published in a national magazine. He has interviewed many other music-world luminaries as well, including Steve Van Zandt, Roger McGuinn, John Sebastian, Wolfman Jack, Tom Waits, Foreigner’s Mick Jones, Billy Joel, Steve Forbert, Tommy James, the Righteous Brothers, Gordon Lightfoot, Deep Purple’s Tommy Bolin, and members of Steely Dan and the Marshall Tucker Band. He has also interviewed many other public figures, such as Suze Orman, Daymond John, James Carville, Donald Trump, Sir Richard Branson, F. Lee Bailey, and Cliff Robertson.
His books include Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters, Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters, and Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters, all of which are published in the U.S. and Canada by Chicago Review Press. The books have been republished in numerous other countries.
Burger has been the editor of several periodicals, including Business Jet Traveler, from which he retired in 2024. During his 20 years at that
publication, it received more than 120 major editorial awards, including multiple wins for the world’s Best Consumer Travel Magazine in the annual Folio:Eddie competition.
Burger lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey. His wife, Madeleine Beresford, is a puppeteer and former preschool director and teacher. The couple have two grown children.
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