Tres

The next several years found the boys digging deeper into the new technology, as the Eliminator follow-up, Afterburner, took their sound into outer space. The ’33 Ford was now a space shuttle on the record cover and in the video for “Sleeping Bag,” the synth-heavy tune that went all the way to #1 in 1985.

“Rough Boy” went Top 5 and was an uncharacteristically serious slow song, but it was an effective fusion of the band’s blues roots and their more modern sound.

With a bigger budget, the trio’s live shows became Vegas-worthy extravaganzas. By the time Recycler came out in 1990, the ZZ Top stage included a massive auto junkyard set with a construction crane, car crusher, a conveyer belt that moved the guys across the stage, and, of course, leggy babes in spike heels.

The momentum launched by Eliminator propelled the boys through the rest of the ’90s.

They had come a long way from singing about “Bar B Q,” a glorious and greasy slice of grunge from 1972, and by the time of the new millennium and a meatier sequel, “Poke Chop Sandwich,” they were bringing the power with blistering guitar vibrations and an even greater sense of urgency. On another track from XXX, they stepped it up with bellowing bass and a slight hip-hopping rhyme sensibility, but “Crucifixx-A-Flatt” was still unmistakably the product of that street-savvy little ol’ band from Tejas.

These days, it’s back to the basics, just three guys quickly approaching 60 but still rocking as effectively as they did on that first record’s opening track. They remain in perfect synch, an organic union with the same lineup since album one. It’s their Southern home-styled recipe for success, and it landed them in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2004.

Billy Gibbons is keenly aware and appreciative of this uniquely rare creative situation. “That’s really a value not only with a trio, but any kind of aggregation, be it a two-piece, a three-piece or ten-piece. Everybody working toward the same goal is really important. We would like to think we could read each other’s minds. Sometimes we can. Then there’s the moments when we’re not sure who’s doing what or who’s going to do what. It gets interesting.”

He is also thankful for the best rhythm section in rock and roll, a duo whose dynamic force is less about support and more about driving the engine. It’s a bass/drummer combo that goes all the way back to their teens.

“They’ve been at it as a working force from the beginning,” says Gibbons of Hill and Beard. “Their backbone, their understanding of what they’re doing is almost seamless. They make up a really true solidarity. Their interaction, it’s really a solid platform. It allows me to go stretch out in ways that I might not be able to do, if you’re having to concentrate on getting the rhythm guys together. I don’t have to even think about it. It’s just solid.”

This many years of understanding one another musically makes studio time that much more productive, and spontaneity remains vitally important.

“Most of the … in fact, all of the things we do are ‘dive in there and go after it.’”

The songs are still credited as Gibbons, Hill, and Beard. Such is the democratic approach to the unit, but it’s also appropriate, as each plays a vital role not just in the final sound, but in the creation from the get-go.

Gibbons explains: “There’s one funny bit. Someone said, ‘How do you write these pieces?’ Generally, Dusty and I will hunker down in one corne

by  Rush Evans

That exposure to sounds kept ZZ Top’s minds open, but it wasn’t a calculated business move to change creative direction. It was simply organic.

“I don’t know if there was much thought to design it as much as it just occurred. One of the key pieces to the sound is the fact that as musical instrument manufacturers starting inventing new contraptions to play on, we embraced them with a sense of experimentation,” remembers Gibbons with a laugh. “Of course, as the old saying goes, we instantly threw the manuals out the window. So a lot of that stuff was purely experimental, and at the same time we didn’t hesitate to embrace it. It was really interesting.”

It was interesting, and it took all three players to get the best out of each other. Again, it was Beard’s drum beat that drove “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” and Hill’s bass line that drove “Sharp Dressed Man.” With those two furious tracks, they knew they were onto something fresh, new and exciting.

It was the same three guys on the same instruments with the same incredible knack for tidy, sharp riffs, but something was different, even beyond the new contraptions.

“One element that helped make Eliminator what it turned out to be [was] a key sense of focus toward timing and tempo,” says Gibbons. “There’s a lot of value in finding a good groove. When you’ve hit the sweet spot, you want to stay in it. You don’t want to lose it. That’s one thing that helped that record: its sense of timing.”

Timing was only the first detail that drove Eliminator.

“The second thing is there was a lot of attention aimed toward developing a fierce guitar tone, where before some of the guitar sounds were a little cleaner,” says Gibbons. “This record, top to bottom, is absolutely fierce in the guitar department. Those guitar sounds were raging. We experimented with a couple of amplifiers. We came back — it sounds so simplistic — we came back to using the tried-and-true Marshall hundred-watt amp head, and that did wonders to regain that ferocity. Once it started to gel, the three of us were keen on making sure everything was working together. Not only was the guitar taking on this ferocious character, Dusty fell in line and cranked up the wattage on the bottom end, as well. By and large, the collective work was really a great moment of exchange between the three of us.”

As the mighty Eliminator tracks were coming together in ’82, another of the biggest rock stars of the day was making the record that would change his music and career forever, and he was facing the daunting reality of immeasurable musical impact. Bruce Springsteen knew that his new batch of jangly and grandiose songs would make what he called “The Loud Noise,” and that awareness gave him pause and conflicted hesitation over when and how to release what would become the Born in the USA album.

The guys in ZZ Top had no such dilemma. They were facing a similar future, not aware of — and therefore not intimidated by — the impact of their own “loud noise” from a blockbuster album.

“We had a very strident sense of confidence with the completion of the studio sessions,” says Gibbons. “Each track held some meaningful moment that, collectively, we suspected was gonna be well-received. Didn’t quite know that it would fly over the moon like it did! But it was a work that we felt really confident in marching forward with. It was cool.”

It was cool. Eliminator hit the street in 1983 sporting a badass flaming-red hot rod (a 1933 Ford coupe) as the cover model, a car that starred in a trilogy of videos that dominated MTV and all popular culture throughout the year.

“Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” and “Legs” found the guys in matching cheap sunglasses and smooth moves, while leggy Playboy models (yes, several of those girls were centerfold Playmates) pranced and danced to great visual effect. Hand gestures in unison with minimalist steps (not exactly dancing, but they did have choreographer Paula Abdul working the moves out with the guys), lent humor to the proceedings.

The new style, presentation and attitude made those songs sound even better. The band’s new image was filled with equal parts mysterious chic and cheesy kitsch. Two more songs, “Got Me Under Pressure” and the synth-driven “TV Dinners,” were radio hits, as well, the latter with yet another memorable video, this time with a gremlin crawling out from beneath the aluminum foil on a frozen dinner (for those who remember life before microwaves).

“I Got the Six” maintained the group’s ongoing propensity for clever sexual innuendo that had started back in the ’70s. The album’s brash title was the first in a long time without a Spanish touch, though Gibbons would joke that it was actually called “El Liminator.”

The girls, the car, the beards, the sunglasses, the flash, the raunchy fun and just the right amount of new technology in the studio made ZZ Top the most recognizable rock stars in the world. They had become the arbiters of cool; they were bad (in the good sense), and they were definitely nationwide. Even Johnny Carson sported the shades, beard and ball cap when the guys performed on “The Tonight Show.”

by  Rush Evans

by  Rush Evans

With any other band, the story would have ended there, and it would have made sense. There was a new decade underway, a new political climate, and a new musical wave, with clothes and haircuts as electrified as the tech-heavy songs being played — or programmed.

There was also a new TV channel that played music-video clips all day and night, so those clothes and haircuts became that much more important. How could three boogie blues players already in their thirties (and wearing that long facial hair) find a place among the slickly presented and produced musicians of this new generation?

It started simply enough. One day in 1982, after just having begun recording sessions for the next ZZ Top album, Frank Beard (whose Degüello-era beard would not last) called Billy Gibbons and told him to turn on the television. There was an engaging music show on with rock band after rock band singing along to their own songs in different settings, some with a storyline. After being transfixed by this unusual series of songs for several hours, Gibbons called Beard back and asked, “When is this thing over?”

It turned out that the show wouldn’t be over for the rest of the ’80s. MTV and its new musical generation had been born. Whether the three Texans took that next album’s influence from the 24-hour television show or things just evolved in the studio is academic, but something happened, and it happened fast.

Arriving early for the session one day, Beard started hammering out a new rhythm on the drums. It was just as cool as the one in 70 earlier ZZ Top songs, but this one really jumped, and the other two players fell right in upon their arrival. It’s rare that a song is born on the business end of two drumsticks, but that is what happened with a little tune called “Gimme All Your Lovin’.” The same thing happened with a Dusty Hill bass line, and by the time Beard and Gibbons joined in, a song called “Sharp Dressed Man” rocked right onto the tape.

“Even 25 years later, it’s refreshing to recognize the elements that are present,” remembers Billy Gibbons of those sessions. “There is that bluesy thread that strings through all of the compositions, and at the same time, Eliminator was more of a pop record in looking at the material that has fronted ZZ for so many decades. This particular release has a more pop appeal. The nature of the songs, the compositional elements, they come across as pop material more than anything else. It’s certainly not a hardcore blues record.”

There is a bluesy thread stringing through all the memories of Billy Gibbons, the guitar player who hasn’t seen his own face in 30 years now, still sporting the trademark low-hung beard that he and Dusty Hill refuse to shave. They are walking advertisements for the band that is way more than just their day job.

A few hours before a gig in Austin, just a few miles as the crow flies from that football stadium they played some 35 years ago, Gibbons shares his thoughts on that turning-point period for the band in 1982. He had already dedicated most of his life to rock and roll before then, too.

Gibbons’ father was 50 when he married for the second time, this time to a woman 30 years his junior. The very hip young mom took her 8-year-old son to see Elvis Presley in ’57, and that was all she wrote. Billy was playing guitar by the time he was 13, and he never looked back.

The Moving Sidewalks’ “99th Floor” secured the band an opening act slot for shows with Janis Joplin, The Doors and Jimi Hendrix in 1968, which led to Billy’s friendship with the world’s most innovative guitar player, who would declare on “The Dick Cavett Show” that Billy Gibbons was the finest guitarist of his generation.

After hitting the 99th floor, the stellar guitarist was aiming even higher, and he soon moved on to his new vision, the band that would become ZZ Top. There was another pair of players working with Gibbons at first, but soon he would find Beard and Hill, who had both been working in a band called American Blues (which included Dusty’s brother Rocky Hill, who continued a blues career in Texas until his death on April 10, 2009 at 62).

After the true lineup connected, a 1969 single was released titled “Salt Lick” that was backed with “Miller’s Farm,” still an incredibly rare find (search for it in Goldmine ads!).

Then came that decade of tight blues boogie, and by the time of MTV, the trio was ready, willing and certainly more than able to face the changing musical times.

“One thing for sure, at the time, so many records were making headway that had been invented with a techno backbone,” says Gibbons. “And it was certainly taking effect with what we were hearing. There’s no getting around it; you’re influenced by what you’re exposed to.”

by  Rush Evans

You could hear it in the first second of the first song on the first record. It was tight but with an ever-so-slight guitar drawl, and just one second later, a wailing steel guitar dropped in on top of the powerful rock and roll below.

A real drawl — that is, a singing human one — came in nine seconds later into “(Somebody Else Been) Shaking Your Tree.” It was 1971, it was the hardest of rock, and it was unmistakably Texan, even though nobody had ever heard such a sound.

“Well, I’m tryin’, yes I’m tryin’ just to get a line on you
Where you been?
Where you been?
But I’m havin’ trouble puttin’ a find on you
I’m wearin’ thin.
I’m wearin’ thin
Somebody else been shakin’ your tree
Supposed to be savin’ all that stuff for me”

Texas had, of course, already been responsible for some of the very best rock and roll, but this had little in common (on the surface, anyway) with Buddy Holly And The Crickets. And while it had plenty in common with the Texas Wall of Sound that came from psychedelic pioneers The 13th Floor Elevators, this was blues-based rock and roll — really hard blues-based rock and roll.

The blues had plenty of roots in Texas, too, and it was the blues that drew a guitar player from Houston and a rhythm section from Dallas together.

The guitar player, Billy Gibbons, had fronted a band called The Moving Sidewalks, whose rocking nugget, “99th Floor,” was an underground hit. Drummer Frank Beard and bass player Dusty Hill had been playing in bands together since they were kids, and they found musical synchronicity when they connected with Gibbons in 1969. All three players were just 20 years old.

With a tip of the hat to bluesmen ZZ Hill and BB King, the power trio considered calling itself ZZ King, but that homage was a little too obvious. ZZ Top they would be, and the top was where they were headed, in a very short time.

Their hard-driving blues boogie powered through night after night in clubs across Texas, on their first album (ZZ Top’s First Album) and Rio Grande Mud, their second album. It was the third release, Tres Hombres, that made a blast from Texas to both coasts and back.

In a dirty little ditty about the same brothel that inspired the Broadway play “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” the group got widespread airplay, even though the song didn’t even crack the Top 40. That was okay, as it was the advent of FM radio, and that’s where the hard-edged four minutes of unforgettable guitar hook and vocal growl called “La Grange” took flight.

Those four minutes were enough to propel the band to headline a footballstadium gig just a few short years after playing the National Guard Armory in Alvin, Texas, to a paying audience of one. It was 1974 and 80,000 sweat-soaked fans gathered at the University of Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin for a show that included friends and contemporaries like Santana, Joe Cocker and, in their American debut, Bad Company.

The event was humbly titled “ZZ Top’s First Annual Texas Size Rompin’ Stompin’ Barn Dance and Barbecue.” It was also the last annual, and the university never quite got over it since they had to replace the football field’s brand-new Astroturf after ZZ Top fans carved it up in the shape of the State of Texas (from the 50 yard line to the 40; legendary Texas football coach Darrell Royal was not amused).

Shortly thereafter, the fourth album, Fandango, would include another sexually charged, tough little tune called