thunderhead

In the early seventies O.T. ,Ronnie and myself ( Mike Dagger) were the core members of a popular New Orleans cover band “Paper Steamboat”. At that time David and the Giants a Laurel, Mississippi cover band played many of the same venues and Bobby T began jamming with Dagger, Dobbs and Ware along with Steve Bacharach on keyboards and Johnny Spade. The desire to form a powerful original band is what drove 3 of the Steamboat members to ask Bobby T to be part of the new project. We all agreed and set out to find a second guitarist and after trying 3 local New Orleans musicians Pat Rush was asked to join the band and so Thunderhead was formed in late 1974. We rehearsed for 2 weeks, took a week vacation and then opened up at “The Flying Dutchman “in Charleston, S.C. We were signed by Paragon Agency out of Macon Georgia (The Allman Brothers agent) and began touring small venues. Johnny Winter who from time to time jammed with the Steamboat and then the new Thunderhead Band, asked us to join his tour and we opened for Johnny at Several venues around the South. We then embarked on a tour that took us to Louisville, Kentucky, Knoxville, Tenn., Ashville, North Carolina, Atlanta Ga., and Lansing Michigan where we opened for ZZ Top. After the concert with ZZ Thunderhead received a call from Johnny Winter who suggested we record our first album and he would produce it. We immediately went back to Bogalusa where “The Studio In the Country was just finishing up an album with “Kansas”, and we began recording several tunes with Johnny producing and playing on several cuts and Edgar singing back up vocals and playing piano. The album was shopped around and well received, but ABC was the only major label that made an offer. It was a very disappointing offer for the band, because they wanted us to record the entire album with a different producer. Back in those days there were no options, as there are today, to release the album independently, so we took the deal despite our disagreement about Johnny’s role .