Two guys with beards, and a man known as Beard who doesn’t have a beard. These Nineteen Eighties movies. The automotive. The keyring. The furry, twirling guitars from Again To The Future III… To many individuals these issues are the essence of the self-styled Li’l Ole Band From Texas.
However such memorable photographs are removed from being the band’s solely contribution to rock. ZZ Top – Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard – are definitely amongst America’s musical elite; a band who took blues rock, gave it a Texan tweak, and produced gutsy music that amuses, amazes and will get your physique shifting for greater than 50 years.
From their Houston beginnings in 1969 when guitarist Gibbons, then with The Shifting Sidewalks, teamed up with bassist Hill and drummer Beard from The American Blues, ZZ have defied conference. They made such an influence with their first three albums – ZZ Prime’s First Album, Rio Grande Mud and Tres Hombres – that they have been quickly one of many largest stay points of interest within the US. Within the mid-70s they proudly had a map of Texas as their stage flooring, and had cacti and corralled livestock on stage with them.
After 1976’s Tejas, the trio selected a three-year break, returning in 1979 with the Deguello album, by which period each Gibbons and Hill had grown these trademark beards.
Within the UK, ZZ Prime remained a cult phenomenon… till 1983’s Eliminator appeared from out of nowhere and rearranged the charts. The logic was easy: easy-on-the-ear songs, a contemporary manufacturing, and MTV-friendly movies that had a potent mixture of intercourse, laughs and {hardware}. Out of the blue ZZ Prime have been in every single place. Like Aerosmith and Alice Cooper would do later within the decade, ZZ had reinvented themselves. And with staggering success.
After all, it was by no means going to final. Inside just a few years their industrial star was on the wane – no less than so far as file gross sales have been involved. It didn’t hassle them. They survived a scare when Hill inadvertently shot himself within the chest whereas taking off a boot (don’t ask), and even his loss of life in 2021 did not halt the ZZ machine, when his roadie, Elwood Francis – already sporting a suitably lustrous beard – stepped into the highlight.
ZZ Prime have change into a treasured American establishment, and 2012’s La Futura may not be their assortment of latest songs, as Hill had recorded elements from a sixteenth ZZ Prime album earlier than his loss of life. Right here, we solid our eye over their again catalogue and spotlight the important titles to personal.
…and one to keep away from
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