New Vehicles : His T-Birds’ Album Detours, but Wilson’s O.C. Label Stays True to Blues

When Kim Wilson moved to Orange County from Austin last year, local blues aficionados knew they were getting a valuable new neighbor, one of the leading figures on the contemporary roots-music scene.

But nobody expected that Wilson, the leader of the Fabulous Thunderbirds, would be coming here to start a new cottage industry. He is launching Blue Collar Music, a record label so devoted to deep-blues tradition that it will put out albums only in old-fashioned mono (see accompanying story).

An even bigger surprise: The singer-harmonica player has learned to juggle too.

And Wilson’s juggling act is pretty tricky and sensitive. At the moment, he is keeping six full-grown professional musicians in the air at once.

Two of the six are Danny Kortchmar and Steve Jordan, highly credentialed New York City studio aces who took over as the backing band and production team for “High Water,” a new Fabulous Thunderbirds album to be released July 29.

The other four are the somewhat miffed crew of respected players from Southern California who thought they were supposed to be making records with Wilson as the Fabulous Thunderbirds.

It’s a definite detour for the T-Birds, so Wilson had some explaining to do this week as he sat on the patio of his favorite Mexican fast-food joint, in the corner of a shopping center within walking distance of his condo.

He talked up this new, twin-engined model of the T-Birds with the enthusiasm and happy aplomb of someone who knows that however unprecedented the band’s separation into recording and touring lineups might be, it has yielded one of the best and most creatively daring and inventive albums of the band’s 23-year ride.

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Decked in a biker’s Sunday garb--clean blue denim vest, matching jeans and black cowboy boots--with a thin oval of beard ringing his mouth and chin, 46-year-old Wilson laughed heartily as he talked about life in Orange County, in the studio and on the road, where the T-Birds play well over 200 dates in a typical year--including shows tonight at the Coach House and June 22 at the Taste of Orange County festival.

His high-pitched heh-heh-heh rode atop chesty bursts of air, a lusty laugh that paralleled the textured composition of his singing voice and his harmonica style, which never have sounded better or more nuanced than on “High Water.”

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He said the T-Birds’ “very strange situation” developed unexpectedly early this year. Things were going along straightforwardly as he rehearsed a batch of new material with his fellow traveling Thunderbirds--guitarist David “Kid” Ramos, keyboards player Gene Taylor, bassist Willie J. Campbell and drummer Jimi Bott. All but Taylor have joined within the past two years to form a lineup that Wilson considers “the best unit I ever had.”

But when he turned in demos from that unit, Wilson said, he also included tracks he had been recording with Kortchmar and Jordan as an outside project. Kortchmar--a guitarist best known as a close sidekick of James Taylor and Don Henley--and Jordan--whose credits as a drummer include touring with Bruce Springsteen and Keith Richards--had produced and contributed instrumental work on two previous T-Birds albums.

The trio’s recordings caught the ear of executives at Windham Hill, the Thunderbirds’ new label. “They said, ‘We need a whole album of this,’ ” Wilson recalls, and soon the side project became the new T-Birds album, even though it lacked four of the five official band members. For the first time, the band will be billed as “the Fabulous Thunderbirds featuring Kim Wilson.”

Wilson shrewdly picked an idyllic spot--the Bahamas, where the T-Birds were on tour--to let his full-time bandmates know they were going to be supplanted on record by the big-name studio guys (to whom he refers as “Thunderbirds for a day”).

“It was disappointing to them,” Wilson recalls, “but they’re cool guys. They know what the big picture is, and that it’s no threat to them at all [in terms of their ongoing roles in the band]. They also know now how good the music is. I wouldn’t have done it at all” if he wasn’t convinced that the material that became “High Water” was special.

The album does contain powerful stuff, including some songs as catchy as any of the hits from the T-Birds’ commercial peak in the late-1980s. And it stretches the Thunderbirds’ already stylistically diverse music in interesting new ways.

Much of the album packs a nasty, spacious, lowdown, slightly spooky sonic ambience far afield from the usual roots-rock recording approach. Hip-hop beats crop up--not for the sake of trendiness, but in a way that ties R&B;’s present to its deepest, most elemental foundations. And in “Save It for Someone Who Cares,” Wilson essays reggae for the first time, with lilting, bittersweet, soul-tinged results worthy of prime Bob Marley or Jimmy Cliff.

For Ramos, the guitar player from Anaheim who has been one of O.C.’s leading players since his 1980s hitch in the James Harman Band, Wilson’s decision meant it was time to invoke the wisdom of learning to accept that which one can’t change.

“This band needs to be represented on CD, and it’s frustrating to me, obviously, but I’m not in a position to do anything about it,” Ramos said Thursday in a separate interview.

“It’s Kim’s band, basically. He’s in charge, and I’m not there to second-guess him or try to make waves or have any discord. Hopefully, I’m a professional enough guy that I can play whatever is called for. I’m not going to stand on stage and pout. I’m going to get behind [the new songs] and do the best I can.”

The band hasn’t worked up stage versions of the new songs yet; Wilson said that will happen after the album comes out. Meanwhile, look for the upcoming O.C. shows to be built around catalog material and some new, unreleased songs mutually worked up by the touring lineup.

If Wilson’s dream scenario comes true, the T-Birds will have their first hits since “Tuff Enuff,” “Wrap It Up,” “Powerful Stuff” and other swaggering, macho numbers that defined the band in the mid- to late ‘80s. But now the tempos are slower, the grooves crunchier, and the singing allows sweeter, more plaintive strains to temper the old swagger.

“I’ve become much more of a singer since the old days,” Wilson said. “In the last few years, I think I’ve made leaps and bounds. As you get older, you tend to have a little more compassion.”

His main reason for leaving the famous musical hotbed of Austin, where he formed the Thunderbirds with co-founder Jimmie Vaughan in 1974, was to be closer to his family (his father and brother live in Orange County; “High Water” is dedicated to his mother, who died recently).

But he said he’s been impressed with the Southern California music scene, with such venues as the Belly Up in Solana Beach and the Blue Cafe in Long Beach providing a ready outlet for traditional blues work outside of the Fabulous Thunderbirds.

“We’re pretty much in the heart of suburbia, but I love it here,” he said. The quintessential O.C. strip mall near his house is not a drawback to this blues traditionalist, but a rich garden of culinary possibilities. He still flies to Austin from time to time to hang out for a few days, but the cocooned life in a hillside development in Laguna Niguel agrees with him.

“I have a very modest condo. I don’t need that much. I think my neighbors probably think I’d rather rob them than talk to them,” Wilson said, figuring that his rough-guy look may be buying him some privacy. “Either they don’t know what I’m doing or they’re very cool about it and they don’t want to bother me. I like the anonymity.”

If “High Water” turns into a hit and blows his cover, one supposes that Wilson will be able to manage the intrusions of hometown fame along with the rest of his juggling act.

* The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Blue Spirit Band and Millertime Blues play tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $17.50-$19.50. (714) 496-8930. Also June 22 at Taste of Orange County, at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. $8. (714) 288-5827.