A Bainbridge man, his Iowa bandmates take the stage again after 40 years.

Nearly 40 years ago, five shaggy musicians lugged a box of records into an empty pasture.

They’d spent the previous two years roaming the farmlands of Iowa, delighting gyrating throngs of Midwestern youths who crowded into barns and ballrooms and high school gymnasiums to see them play. They had rocked and they had rolled. They even cut a record.

Then came the Vietnam War, and with it the draft orders that would for decades silence the music of the Thunderbirds. Their band trailer, emblazoned with the words “Danger: Explosive Sounds,” would be combustible no more.

Despondent, they headed for an open field.

One by one, they sent copies of their record hurtling through the Iowan air; one by one, they blew them out of the sky with a 22 caliber rifle.

“We decided to go skeet shooting,”said Thunderbirds’ guitarist Carl Adams, now a Bainbridge Island resident.

Afterward, four of the five Thunderbirds, including Adams, traded boogies and beats for the boots and barracks of the military. They didn’t speak again. Adams never went back to Iowa.

Then, in November of 2004, while clearing some clutter in his North Madison home, he came across an old Thunderbirds record.

Just for fun, he looked up the band on the internet. What he discovered shocked him.

“A copy of the record had just sold on eBay for $750,” he grinned.

Adams tracked down his former bandmates. Like him, they’d long since moved on to day jobs. Guitar strings had slackened and gathered dust in obscure corners of their homes. Music had been replaced by family.

But in the interim, unbeknownst to them, collectors clamored for copies of the Thunderbirds’ lone recording. Garage band music had seen a resurgence.

“Hey Little Girl,” the single from the record, had made its way onto playlists around the world. A group of collectors had recently voted the record among the best and most collectible 45s of the 1960s.

People still dug the birds whose tunes had been turned into clay pigeons. It was time to get the band back together.

Three of the five members reassembled in Iowa. They bought vintage equipment and a new trailer, and hired a new drummer and second guitarist to round out the line-up.

On Labor Day weekend, they played to a crowd of 1,600 in their home state as part of a ceremony that enshrined the Thunderbirds in the Iowa Rock and Roll Association Hall of Fame.

Their induction lifted them alongside other revered musicians like Richie Hayward and the Everly Brothers.

To top it off, the reunited Thunderbirds recently recorded a CD and have begun playing shows in their old haunts.

For the now-not-so-shaggy musicians, rock and roll is back.

The band was founded early in the 1960s as the “Midnight Specials” by brothers Stan and Steve Brown of Lenox, Iowa, who played bass and keyboards respectively. They joined cousin Roger Brown, a drummer, and local guitar instructor Dean Harper and took on the name Thunderbirds.

When Adams, a guitarist from Burlington, Iowa, met Stan Brown at Iowa State University, the band was complete.

In their heyday, between 1965 and 1967, the Thunderbirds performed two or three nights a week across five Midwestern states. Crowds varied, from sticky to sparse. Venues did as well. Bars, skatelands, teen centers, National Guard armories – notes from the Thunderbirds fluttered throughout.

They played a few original songs, but their forte was covering the most popular dance music of the day. Performances were cut into five-song “show times,” with drum bridges in between.

They kept a swift tempo – the goal, after all, was to keep the kids dancing – and did their own choreography. When a recording came out that piqued their interest, the band would huddle around the radio or record player to decipher the tune.

“People thought it was pretty cool that a song had only been out a few weeks and we were already playing it,” Adams said.

Then, abruptly, came the end.

Despite their popularity, none of the members ever made an effort to reunite after the war. None played in another band.

Adams ended up in Hawaii, where he met future wife Colleen.

A job at Boeing brought the couple to Seattle from California. They eventually found their way to Bainbridge Island, where they’ve lived for the past 25 years.

When Adams called his old college roommate with news about the record, he was met with disbelief that soon gave way to excitement.

There were setbacks.

Roger Brown had moved to Florida. Harper had been stricken by Parkinson’s Disease that left him unable to play guitar.

The other Thunderbirds pressed on, filling the void with veteran musicians Rick Hoadley and Don Reineke.

Finally, some 42 years after playing their first show – a sock hop at Lenox High School – the band climbed the same stage in the same rickety gymnasium, instruments in hand.

A few of those in attendance had also been at the first Thunderbirds show.

“This is Iowa,” laughed Adams. “Not much changes. They still had the same old basketball hoop in the gym. The same people still live on the same farms.”

And still like the same old songs, captured in fragments of plastic that so long ago fell victim to youthful disappointment in the skies above an Iowa pasture. Knowing the value of the records today, Adams can only smile in resignation.

It’s not about the money anyway.

He said the band still doesn’t know yet where their unlikely reunion will lead them. Someday he’d like to play a show in the Northwest. For now, though, the Thunderbirds are just trying to have a little bit more rock and roll fun.

“We’re not trying to be virtuoso musicians,” Adams said. “But people still like this kind of music and that’s what makes it so fun.

“We’re going to ride it out for awhile.”