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With the turn of a new decade, Sahm was offered something of a lifeline, with a new
record contract from Sonet Records, swiftly followed by a fine blues based album -

“Hell of a Spell” (1980). The album is a typical selection of the type of music he always
loved to play, and includes a couple of great blues covers (‘Next Time You See Me’ and
‘The Things I Used To Do’), some excellent originals, and even a Brook Benton song.

As always with Doug Sahm’s bands, the backing musicians are suitably laid back, and
all the solos seem to fit perfectly with the songs. As a guitarist, he was no upfront
hotshot player, but instinctively seemed to know when to play and when to leave a gap,
in order to provide the best groove.

Three years later he produced a live album - “Nuevo Wave” which is in a similar vein
to “Hell Of A Spell”, with reworkings of ‘Wooly Bully’, ‘Mendocino’, ‘She’s About A Mover’

and ‘T-Bone Shuffle’. The album was actually credited to ‘The Sir Douglas Quintet’, but
it was really another solo
album.

Later in the decade he
teamed up with old friends
Freddy Fender, Flaco Jimenez

and Augie Meyers to form
‘The Texas Tornados’, playing
a soulful mix of country
music, blues, ballads, Texas

rock & roll, and conjunto.
They signed to Reprise
Records, and released a first,

self titled, album, sung in
both English and Spanish,
which garnered excellent
critical reviews, as well as

good sales - charting in the
Billboard rock, Latin and

country charts. A song from
the album (‘Soy de San Luis’)
received a Grammy award in
1991 for the best Mexican-American performance.

The band toured in the 1990s, and released a number of other successful albums,
including “Zone Of Our Own” and “Hangin’ On By A Thread” Not content with the
success of the ‘Texas Tornados’, he enlisted the help of his sons and reformed ‘The Sir

Douglas Quintet’, as well as running a part time blues revue known as ‘The Last Real
Texas Blues Band’, which produced the fine 1994 live album I alluded to earlier.

The ‘Tornados’ were planning a concert tour in 2000 when Sahm was found dead in
his hotel room in Taos, New Mexico - the victim of a heart attack at the age of 58. He