![]() They have songs about getting up in the morning with a hangover and going out first thing to buy some cheap sunglasses. They are funny, smart and know their cultural signs and how to put them into a rock ‘n’ roll context.Īnd ZZ Top have a sense of humor. ZZ Top are a great band because they play authentic, close-to-the-roots, gutsy, white boy’s blues and rock ‘n’ roll. The video partnership of the band-with their distinctive image-and director Tim Newman (Randy’s brother) has led to a three-part series (the latest being “Legs”) of videos that are distinctive, funny, and play on an interesting conceit of the band as spectral outsiders observing and laughing at the glamorous commotion that Newman’s mini-plots cook up.Īll of what has happened to ZZ Top has been hard and fairly won, and well deserved. At September’s MTV Video Awards (an event MTV hopes will become the rock video equivalent of the Grammys) ZZ Top was nominated for six awards, and the video for “Sharp Dressed Man” won for Best Direction. ![]() Even more surprising, after all these years, ZZ Top has become hip, with music fans of punkish sensibility picking up on the irony that stings so sharply around the edges of the band’s lyrics and image, and with “Legs” proving the band’s ability to adapt to today’s dance pulse without sacrificing its individuality.īuilding on the success of the video for “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” the band has gone on to become true video stars. So ZZ Top have become even more monumental. and another million-and-a-half in the rest of the world. charts for over a year and a half, selling over four million copies in the U.S. By the end of 1984, the record had been listed on the U.S. That was before the twelve-inch remix of “Legs” brought ZZ Top to the floor of the dance clubs and to the Urban Contemporary airwaves, winning them an entirely new audience of people who would normally be allergic to the term “boogie band.” And that was before Eliminator became a commercial phenomenon. That was before the group embarked on its most massive world tour yet, playing everywhere, and forever. To New Music hipsters, however, ZZ Top were old ten-gallon hats, an aging aggregate of absurd beards and beer guts.īut that was before the first video from Eliminator, “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” proved to be one of the more entertaining and artfully done videos getting heavy rotation on MTV, where it became that channel’s most requested video. for as long as they liked, playing five or six nights a week, drawing ten or fifteen or twenty thousand fans in any city they hit. , when their Eliminator album started climbing the charts, ZZ Top had already long been a monumental band. Hardy had worked with Gibbons and ZZ Top from 1983's classic Eliminator onwards, while the cover of the new album features an illustration of the band's iconic 1933 Ford Coupe.From the February, 1985 issue of High Times comes Richard Grabel’s feature on ZZ Top, whose debut album, ZZ Top’s First Album, came out 50 years ago on January 16, 1971. Hardware’s title is a tribute to recording engineer Joe Hardy, who died after a short illness in 2019. The desert settings, replete with shifting sands, cacti and rattlesnakes makes for the kind of backdrop that lends an element of intrigue reflected in the sounds created out there.” For the most part, it’s a raging rocker but always mindful of the desert’s implicit mystery. "To let off steam we just ‘let it rock’ and that’s what Hardware is really all about. "We holed up in the desert for a few weeks in the heat of the summer and that in itself was pretty intense," says Gibbons.
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