ZZ Top

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ZZ Top

From respected roots rockers to bearded music video age icons, this Texas band maintained a consistently successful career throughout the 1970s and 1980s, embracing many new trends that crossed its path. While not as active in the late 1990s as they were in their prime, ZZ Top's three members (Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, and Frank Beard on guitar, bass, and drums, respectively) remain one of the few groups to have its original members intact after 25 years. Existing throughout the 1970s as a critically acclaimed, popular Texas blues-boogie band, the band updated its sound to include propulsive synthesizer rhythms. Further, ZZ Top was one of the first pre-music-video rock bands to immediately take advantage of the advent of MTV.

In the late 1960s, Billy Gibbons played in the Texas psych-punk band The Moving Sidewalks, and Dusty Hill and Frank Beard were the rhythm section for American Blues. Future ZZ Top manager Bill Ham brought the three together in 1970 and, due to Ham's plan of constant recording and ceaseless touring, by the decade's end the group had carved out a sizable niche as a popular blues-boogie band. In 1970, ZZ Top released ZZ Top's First Album, and by its third album it struck gold with its first major hit and concert staple, "La Grange," a tribute to an infamous whorehouse. "La Grange" (whose signature riff was based on the John Lee Hooker song, "Boogie Chillen") set the fire that would culminate in one the 1970s most successful tours, the year and a half long "Worldwide Texas Tour."

While their string of hits never abated through the end of the 1970s and into the early 1980s, it was the group's 1983 Eliminator album that propelled ZZ Top to superstardom. That the group adopted synthesizers and drum machines to augment their sound didn't hurt, but what perhaps helped most was their videos. With sunglasses and long beards, ZZ Top had a perfect made-for-music-video image, and they filled their videos with scantily clad, sexy women—a perfect formula for early MTV success. Eliminator contained a number of hit singles and videos, including "Legs," "Sharp Dressed Man," and "Gimmie All Your Lovin'." Choosing not to disrupt their successful formula, the group made their 1985 Afterburner in the image of their multi-platinum predecessor, and the album spawned the hits "Sleeping Bag," "Velcro Fly," "Rough Boy," and "Stages." Predictably, the group applied its "if it ain't broke don't fix it" philosophy to Afterburner's videos as well.

ZZ Top never climbed the commercial peaks of its mid-1980s period, but they continued to be a big concert draw, and their albums continued to sell respectably. The 1996 release of Rhythmeen, a back-to-basics album, cleared the table of the high production sheen and synthesizers that characterized their Afterburner and Eliminator period. The album was critically acclaimed and demonstrated that Billy Gibbons was certainly one of the most talented white blues guitarists this side of Stevie Ray Vaughan.

—Kembrew McLeod