In memoriam: Magnolia Thunderfinger

…and it is the story of a letter. The kind of letter you dread. The kind of letter that says, “I’ve had it. I’m done. I’m gone.” The kind of letter that can cause nine years of your life to crumble in on itself. That dissolves those years like smoke. That leaves only cold coals and memories.

Skid Jones got such a letter. So did T-Bone and Chico. The shortened, paraphrased version: “I no longer want to be a member of Magnolia Thunderfinger. Love, GB.”

For nine years, Magnolia Thunderfinger has been a mainstay of the Sacramento music scene. There are a million stories. Motorcycles ridden through clubs. Instruments and bars aflame. Altercations and fistfights. It’s the stuff of rock ‘n’ roll legend, really. And like all legend, within lies a grain of truth. The facts are these: Skid Jones on guitar and principal vocals, T-Bone on bass, Chico on drums, GB on lead guitar.

But in nine years, times change. The band becomes legendary and the legend becomes entrenched and the band becomes entrenched by the legend. The danger is the legend eclipsing the reality, the band becoming, as both GB and Chico have noted, “a caricature of our former selves.” To the audience, the band is still amazing, but to the band itself the intensity begins to fade.

Enter the letter. A letter that perhaps spelled out what everyone in the band already knew: that it was time Magnolia Thunderfinger closed up shop and went home.

Allow me to repeat: Four best friends. Nine years.

Perhaps it is the letter that has made these last few shows so stellar, so utterly inspired. Three final shows: one at the Distillery, one at the Boardwalk and, then, the final moment, at Old Ironsides on July 12. It is your last chance for what can only be described as a transfusion of fire: Motörhead meets Carl Perkins. Sweat-drenched. Clapping. Screaming. Skid’s voice raw. T-Bone flailing against his bass strings, his arms flapping like a straw man aflame. Chico crazed at the drum kit, insane. GB like a liquid man at the fretboard. Flawless. Perfect. The audience chants one prominent Thunderfinger chorus in unison: “Cocksucker! Cocksucker!”

But after that moment, what happens? The retirement of a legendary band does something to the scene. Shakes it. Makes it tremble. Confuses it. As Kevin Seconds wrote upon hearing of Thunderfinger’s retirement from the scene, “Where will we go for the rock?”

Where indeed? Chico will put down the sticks and pick up a guitar to work on his own music, backburnered for nearly 20 years. T-Bone will perhaps front a new band. GB has purchased a digital recorder, supposedly to demo new material. Jones, a longtime columnist for Alive & Kicking, talks of writing a book. The friendship—and the music—will continue, but Thunderfinger, alas, will not.

But before all that, the four friends who are Magnolia Thunderfinger will play its last show. One wonders if, years from now, on dark, moonless nights, there might still be something left of Magnolia Thunderfinger: a distant, otherworldly sound; voices chanting to the roar of distant guitars; the ghosts of Sacramento’s music past reciting a single word: “Cocksucker.”

Best of luck, gentlemen. You’ll be missed.