The 1970s File Feature
What A Wonderful Thing We Have
What A Wonderful Thing We Have: The Fabulous Rhinestones and Late-Period Psychedelic Soul The Fabulous Rhinestones occupied a specific and somewhat underappr…
01 The Story
What A Wonderful Thing We Have: The Fabulous Rhinestones and Late-Period Psychedelic Soul
The Fabulous Rhinestones occupied a specific and somewhat underappreciated niche in the early 1970s American music scene: a multiracial ensemble that blended elements of rock, soul, funk, and psychedelia into a sound that resisted easy categorization and, in part because of that resistance, never found the mass commercial audience their recordings clearly demonstrated they deserved. "What A Wonderful Thing We Have" represents one of their most accessible and immediately appealing efforts, a soul-inflected pop track that made a brief but notable appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 during the summer of 1972.
The group was formed in Canada and subsequently relocated to the United States, building a following on the club and college circuit through extended touring and energetic live performances before securing a recording deal. Their lineup centered on guitarist and vocalist Harvey Brooks, who had an exceptional and verifiable pedigree as a session musician: he had played bass on Bob Dylan's landmark album Highway 61 Revisited in 1965 and contributed to several other important recordings of the late 1960s rock era. His presence gave the group both musical credibility and a direct personal connection to the folk-rock and psychedelic movements of the preceding decade that shaped their sound in important ways.
The group released their debut album, The Fabulous Rhinestones, in 1972 on Freewheelin Records, distributed through Just Sunshine Records, the label founded by Michael Lang, a co-producer of the original Woodstock festival. This connection gave the group a certain cultural prestige within the rock community and positioned them within the same broad ecosystem of post-Woodstock rock, soul, and fusion acts working to define what popular music would sound like in the 1970s. "What A Wonderful Thing We Have" was drawn from that debut album, and its production reflected the era's fusion sensibility with considerable skill and ambition.
The production incorporated elements of Memphis soul, Chicago rhythm and blues, and the more expansive, improvisation-friendly approach associated with late-1960s psychedelic rock and its 1970s descendants. The result was a sound that appealed to album-oriented rock listeners and soul fans in roughly equal measure, though the single edit created for radio airplay necessarily compressed some of the track's more expansive qualities to fit within conventional radio formatting.
The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 5, 1972, entering at number 84. Its chart movement was modest, advancing incrementally through 83 and then 79 in successive weeks before reaching its peak position of number 78 on August 26, 1972. The song spent only four weeks on the chart, reflecting the commercial limitations the group faced without the promotional infrastructure of a major label to sustain radio rotation beyond the initial enthusiasm of individual programmers.
The Fabulous Rhinestones went on to record two further studio albums, Freewheelin' in 1972 and Rhinestone in 1973, both of which demonstrated continued creative ambition and the group's expanding range as composers and performers. The broader pop marketplace of the early 1970s was crowded with fusion acts making similar bids for crossover attention, and the group's deliberately eclectic approach made it difficult to position them cleanly in any single radio format, which limited the sustained promotion any one label could provide.
The legacy of The Fabulous Rhinestones has grown over the decades, with reissues and retrospective coverage drawing renewed attention to the quality and ambition of their recorded work. Harvey Brooks's remarkable session history gives the group's recordings a special place in the broader story of 1960s musicians carrying their experience and expertise into the 1970s rock and soul landscape, bridging generational and stylistic divides through exceptional individual musicianship and broad professional versatility. The group's work on albums distributed through Just Sunshine Records represents a distinctive and underappreciated chapter in the story of early-1970s American rock and soul fusion, and "What A Wonderful Thing We Have" stands as their most commercially visible moment, a brief but genuine intersection with the mainstream pop audience that their broader catalog amply supports.
02 Song Meaning
Gratitude and Recognition in "What A Wonderful Thing We Have"
"What A Wonderful Thing We Have" is organized around the act of recognition: the moment in a relationship when a person steps back from the immediate texture of daily life and acknowledges, with unusual clarity and heartfelt gratitude, the genuine value of what has been built with another person over time. The song is not about falling in love or navigating the inevitable difficulties of a developing relationship; it is about the arrived-at awareness of what a good, sustaining relationship actually means in the fullness of experience.
This perspective places the song within a relatively specific and underexplored emotional register in the canon of soul-influenced pop. Many songs in the genre address the beginning of love (pursuit, attraction, the excitement of new discovery) or its difficulties (jealousy, separation, misunderstanding, loss). Far fewer address the experience of mid-relationship recognition: the moment when the excitement of novelty has settled and what remains is something deeper and more durable than initial infatuation. "What A Wonderful Thing We Have" occupies precisely that emotionally mature and somewhat rarer space.
The word "wonderful" in the title carries more weight than casual contemporary usage might suggest. In its fullest etymological sense, wonder implies something that exceeds ordinary expectation and continues to surprise even when it has become familiar. The narrator is not simply saying that their relationship is comfortable or satisfactory; they are saying it retains a quality of active surprise and ongoing gratitude that keeps it from becoming merely routine or taken for granted. This is a sophisticated emotional position, and one that acknowledges the genuine risk of complacency in long-term relationships without having succumbed to it.
The Fabulous Rhinestones' musical approach reinforces this emotional content through the character of the performance itself. The group's blend of soul warmth and rock expressiveness creates a sonic context that feels both intimate and celebratory simultaneously, a combination that mirrors the emotional experience of gratitude within an established relationship very precisely. Gratitude is at once private (felt in the interior of a person) and worthy of open expression and even celebration, and the music holds both qualities at the same time without resolving one into the other.
There is also a communal quality to the song that reflects the group's origins in a musical moment deeply invested in collective experience and shared human feeling. The early 1970s were marked by an idealistic investment in what could be built and shared among people, a somewhat optimistic counterweight to the cultural fractures and disappointments of the late 1960s. A song celebrating what two people have built together fits naturally within that broader cultural mood, anchoring the idealism of the era to the specific and verifiable experience of a particular relationship.
The song ultimately poses a simple but demanding question: can we see clearly and gratefully what we actually have, rather than focusing habitually on what we lack or fear might be lost? Its answer is affirmatively celebratory, and that affirmation, rendered through memorable melody and genuine vocal conviction, accounts for its enduring appeal within the Fabulous Rhinestones' catalog and among listeners who encounter it across subsequent decades.
→ More from the 1970s File
View all 1970s hits →
Keep digging