![]() The Hill brothers then joined Beard in a succession of Dallas groups including the Warlocks, the Cellar Dwellers and American Blues. Dusty found himself onstage in a Dallas bar, working out how to play bass as he went along. When Rocky formed a band called the Starliners, he needed a bass player and recruited Dusty, who had been learning to play the cello at the local Woodrow Wilson high school. His mother was a talented singer and a devotee of blues artists such as Bessie Smith, while his older brother Rocky was a guitar player and blues fan. Photograph: Chris Delmas/AFP/Getty Imagesĭusty was born Joseph Hill in Dallas, Texas, and grew up in the Lakewood district. Hill, left, with Billy Gibbons and Frank Beard. Afterburner (1985) was another multiplatinum smash, and gave them one of their most successful singles with Sleeping Bag, which reached No 8 in the US. Gibbons’s red 1933 Ford hot-rod became a video star in its own right.īy now Hill and Gibbons had adopted the chest-length beards, stetsons and sunglasses that gave ZZ Top a new cartoon-like image, with Beard confining himself to a moustache. It also found ZZ Top embracing the latest digital recording and video technology, generating a streak of sleek chartbusting hits including Gimme All Your Lovin’, Sharp Dressed Man and Legs, whose videos became heavy-rotation staples on MTV. (Asked why it didn’t follow the ZZ Top tradition of Spanish-language titles, Gibbons deadpanned that its real name was El Iminator). El Loco (1981) reached the US Top 20, but they hit the real big time with Eliminator (1983), which charted all over the world and has sold 10 million copies in the US alone. Degüello (1979) went Top 30 and brought them two of their best-known hits with I Thank You and Cheap Sunglasses. When they reassembled in 1979, their manager Bill Ham had secured them a new record deal with Warner Bros, which would result in new levels of success. “We tried to bring it over to Europe but we had a problem with the quarantine on the animals.”Īfter this, the group, who had been gigging and recording solidly for seven years, took a two-year break, during which Hill spent some time working at Dallas/Fort Worth airport. “It took a full day to set things up and a full day to take them down, so we only actually played one day in three,” Hill recollected. This came after their Worldwide Texas tour, an extraordinary multimedia event that featured a stage in the shape of Texas with Texan wildlife including steers, buzzards and snakes. K.G.Their next album, Fandango! (1975), reached the US Top 10 and gave them a Top 20 single with Tush, but the follow-up, Tejas (1976), was less well received, despite a Top 20 chart placing. Maybe it’s just because we got out of town on time.” The original recording was Gibbons solo with co-writer Linden Hudson playing bass on a synth (and, yeah, that’s a drum machine), but when ZZ Top played it live, Gibbons and Hill would trade lyrics, making the tableau described in the song a sort of twisted ménage à trois that would confound even Freud. “And if not, whose was it? Well, fortunately that kind of pressure we’re not under. “Everybody asks if ‘Under Pressure’ was about a girlfriend of mine,” Gibbons told Spin in 1985. By the time he’s ready for a break, in the song’s bridge, he expects her to beat him up and leave him in a ditch when he tells her it’s over, but hey, such was the imaginary life of ZZ Top in 1983. All he’s capable of is trying to keep up with her predilections for French food, art museums, and having sex in cars while wearing London Fog slickers. “Tush” (1975)īilly Gibbons never explains how he hooked up with a hoity-toity dominatrix cokehead in the Eliminator hit “Got Me Under Pressure,” because she got him so stressed out. If the guy’s got good wine, it’s OK.” The way the song seamlessly segued into Hombres’ bar rocker “Jesus Just Left Chicago” as if nothing happened made for one of the best one-two punches in the history of road rock. The thing about a bus is who you have to sit beside. “You can meet some very unique people on a bus and in a bus station,” Hill told Spin in 1985. The Homeric track that opened their iconic Tres Hombres album starts with a thin, precise bluesy guitar lick and a tight, sighing drum line that foreshadows the band’s electro-blues era, setting up Gibbons and Hill to plead for compassion in concert: “Have mercy!” Gibbons goes on to explain they’ve been waiting for the bus all day, with a bottle of booze and some leftover scratch, but, horror of horrors, when the bus arrives, it’s “packed up tight.” Blues harp virtuoso James Harman takes a solo, and by the time the song finishes up, the ZZ guys are dreaming of getting a Cadillac someday (fast forward to Eliminator ). ![]() Poor ZZ Top, they just wanted to get home.
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