The TSU Toronadoes
“My Thing is a Moving Thing” released November 1969
“Play the Music Toronadoes” released July 1970
Frazier-McKay Productions

Walk long enough through a record label catalog the size of Stax Records’ and you can begin to categorize different artist types. Of course, you’ll find the well-known artists whose hit records brought lots of money and recognition to the label and to themselves. You’ll discover the “behind the scenes” artists who wrote, arranged, recorded, produced or performed on hit records that made other people famous. Almost every catalog includes artists who recorded one or maybe two sessions for that label. John Lee Hooker, for example, is one such Stax “one off” - his album That’s Where It’s At was released because Stax purchased session tapes recorded for but never released on another label. Hooker never recorded in a Stax studio or even signed a Stax contract.

The TSU Toronadoes were another Stax “one off.” In the mid-1960s, Nelson Mills (trumpet), Leroy Lewis (saxophone), Will Thomas (guitar), Calvin Harper (trumpet), Cal Thomas (vocals), Tanny Busby (bass) and Dwight Burns (drums) came together as the The TSU Toronadoes in and around Texas State University. Soon they were mentored and shepherded into the music business by Houston DJ Skipper Lee Frazier.

You’ve most likely heard the TSU Toronadoes before even if you didn’t know it: They drove the smokin’ instrumental backup behind “Tighten Up,” the ‘68 hit single for Archie Bell and the Drells that broke nationwide. “Tighten Up” was released on Atlantic Records, and through Atlantic’s distribution deal with Stax, the Toronadoes signed to the Stax subsidiary Volt, which released these two singles.

“My Thing is a Moving Thing” rocks a hard-driving instrumental but has vocals too. This funk stomp follows the parade of instruments pattern of Sly Stone’s “Dance to the Music,” with Cal Thomas’ falsetto calling out drums, bass (which responds with the melody from “Mary Had a Little Lamb”), guitar and horns, even down to the vocal “boom-boom” vamp to close. “My Thing” sounds recorded live the studio, raw cut and hot.

Similarly, “Play the Music Toronadoes” bumps and grinds very much like the Bar-Kays’ instrumental hit for Stax “Soul Finger,” a catchy instrumental riff paired with a female vocal that breathlessly urges, “Play the music, Toronadoes.”

With these two Volt singles, The TSU Toronadoes’ recorded road pretty much reached its end. Both singles are available on The Complete Stax/Volt Soul Singles Volume 2, where Rob Bowman’s notes call the Toronadoes “one of the great frat bands of all time.” You can also find “My Thing” on the ‘97 compilation Stax Funx.

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