ZZ Top

American musical group formed in Houston (Texas) in 1970, and consists of Frank Beard (drums), Billy Gibbons (vocals and guitar) and Dusty Hill (bass, vocals and keyboards). They are perhaps the longest-lived trio in the history of rock'n'roll, and their members have earned a well-deserved place of honor in that history as a "space age blues band". Like the state of Texas, where they come from, the ZZ Top combine rural primitivism and urban image in such a way that they have given rise to a perfect synthesis between provincial rock'n'roll and high technology. When in the late eighties Forbes magazine published the list of celebrities in the entertainment world with the highest earnings worldwide, only one rock group, U2, stood above ZZ Top among those who had amassed the greatest fortunes. However, they have managed to curiously stay away from the rock'n'roll high society circus, and also remain immune to the "rock messiah" syndrome that usually plagues other artists of their stature. In almost thirty years they have toured all over the planet with their tours, although they have never been away from their base in the south of North America for a long time, and the description that someone made of them when they were starting out, "that little old band from Texas", still fits them like a ring to the finger.

Billy Gibbons, who was a graphic arts student, started playing guitar in The Moving Sidewalks, a psychedelic-tinged sixties "garage" band whose debut single, "99th Floor," topped the Texas charts for five weeks in 1967. Dusty Hill and Frank Beard, meanwhile, graduated from The American Blues, a Dallas band better known for the fact that its members wore their hair dyed blue than for anything else. The three met in 1970 and the pact they sealed then has stood the test of time with overwhelming solidity. With the exception of the brief contribution of a guitar accompaniment by a stranger on one of their first albums, the three men have provided themselves with every last note and the last rhythm of those who have been included on their albums, although for this they have even had to learn to play the saxophone or to play a three-brass section, as is the case in some songs of their elepé Degüello. They have never enriched their live performances with extra musicians, and neither have they recorded or played with other bands.

Their manager and producer since day one has been Bill Ham, a hipster Texan with a management style very similar to Led Zeppelin's first manager, Peter Grant. Ham categorically removed ZZ Top from television throughout the seventies, and preferred the band's live performances to other types of procedures that guaranteed easier success. Although such principles had to be hard by force, the truth is that the foundations of the band were already unshakable by 1976, when the Taking Texas to the People tour took place, an ambitious production that had them a lot of time on the road along with all their outdoor life equipment and a nourished fauna (an ox, a 2,000-pound buffalo, half a dozen vultures, two six-foot rattlesnakes each, a pig and a wolf). Their aversion to TV softened in the eighties, when they became peculiar MTV stars thanks to a trilogy of videos directed by Tim Newman for the songs "Gimme All Your Lovin", "Sharp Dressed Man" and "Legs", all of them included in their successful 1983 album, Eliminator.

Presenting themselves since the eighties as the "Methuselahs of rock", ZZ Top is the only band that has seriously faced the commitment of aging in a market, that of rock'n'roll, which always trades with the currency of youth. Undoubtedly, the image that Gibbons and Hill devised for the group when its members were barely thirty years old has contributed to such permanence, an image in which the most outstanding note are long beards that have not been fashionable since the times of the Old Testament. This strategy freed them from worries from then on, since, unless they dramatically gain weight, they will not look older in twenty years from now than they look now.

Given the huge amount of works released by this band throughout its history, only those that have been most relevant are mentioned. The first is a 1973 elepe entitled Tres hombres, which was the number three of his production at that time. Some people think that this has been the best album of his entire career. The album's opening tracks, "Waitin' for the Bus" and "Jesus Just Left Chicago," are two of the greatest opening salvos of all time, along with "Route 66," from the Rolling Stones' first album, and "Whole Lotta Love" from Led Zeppelin II. In fact, the two inseparable songs continued to be an essential component in the set of songs that they played live on the occasion of the 1991 tour, Recycler. Another of the interesting cuts is "La Grange", a lewd tale set in a brothel that was a minor hit in the United States, as well as "Precious and Grace" and the surreal "Master of Sparks", whose unconventional lyrics are adorned with a somewhat questionable Texan folklore. Although Tres Hombres reached number eight on the American charts, it was never recorded on the British ones, and it is one of the most ignored great albums in the entire history of rock.

Another of the great works of ZZ Top is Degüello, published in 1979. This is a new collection of seemingly casual brilliance, which illuminates, among other things, Gibbons' consummate control of guitar textures. It oscillates between the perfect Fender sound of "A Fool for Your Stockings" and the Marshall sound of "Cheap Sunglasses". Half a decade before Michael Jackson and L L Cool J entered the scene, the ZZ Top demonstrated a perfect familiarity with the language of the street in "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide". The band's fascination with car racing is also revealed through another of those surreal fantasy lyrics, "Manic Mechanic," sung by Gibbons as if he were speaking through a battered megaphone. Dazzling versions of Isaac Hayes' "I Thank You" and Elmore James' "Dust My Broom" culminate a spectacularly rich composition.

When someone asked Gibbons what a guitarist could do to improve his technique, his answer was to go out and buy an album called The Sound of the Drags (a recording that collected the peculiar sound of car racing), and to absorb all the warm feeling it emitted. The success of Eliminator, an album released in 1983, is based precisely on having been able to capture that "warm feeling"; so much so that the elepé has become part of the legendary history of rock'n'roll, along with the car, the girls, the videos and the ten million copies that were sold of it. The trick they discovered was simple, but amazingly effective. They tweaked the guitar sound, made the choruses more dynamic and banished any kind of rhythmic overcrowding. Contrary to what is common on a heavy rock album, "Gimme All Your Lovin'", "Got Me Under Pressure", "Sharp Dressed Man", "Legs", "Dirty Dog" and "If I Could Only Flag Her Down" are held exclusively on a basic drum pulse.

In addition to Afterburner (1985), which was number two in the UK, two compilation albums by the band should also be mentioned: The Best of ZZ Top (1977) and Greatest Hits (1992), compilations that only share two songs, "Tush" and "La Grange", which gives a good account of the group's creativity. The Best of ZZ Top collects an acceptable selection of the band's work up to 1977, paying special attention to Tres Hombres (which provides four tracks out of a total of ten). Greatest Hits, which was catapulted to the singles charts for its cover of the song "Viva Las Vegas", shows the Moderna and commercial side of ZZ Top. However, several notable omissions are detected ("TV Dinners", "Velcro Fly", "Stages") and other rather questionable inclusions ("Gun Love", "Give It Up") that make this, according to some, a unreliable summary.