Not long after Flash was released, the Moving Sidewalks broke up after two of Gibbons' bandmates were drafted into the Army, and he chose to form a more blues-oriented group. He started playing in rock bands when he was living in California with his family, but it wasn't until he returned to Texas that he formed his first band of note, the Moving Sidewalks, a psychedelic outfit who cut a local hit called "99th Floor" (a nod to the 13th Floor Elevators, who Gibbons acknowledged as a key influence) and an album called Flash. King had a greater impact on the young Gibbons, and for his 13th birthday, Billy was given an electric guitar and an amp. However, witnessing a recording session with B.B. Born in Houston, Texas in 1949, Gibbons was the son of a musician who encouraged his passion for music when he initially showed interest in playing percussion instruments, his father arranged for him to take lessons with Latin music icon Tito Puente. ZZ Top was formed in 1969 by guitarist and songwriter Billy Gibbons. 1973's Tres Hombres was their first major success and the point where their trademark sound found itself, 1983's Eliminator introduced the streamlined, new wave-influenced approach that brought them their greatest success, and 2012's La Futura, the final studio album from the original trio, was a return to form that delivered Lone Star guitar raunch with flashes of electronic sheen.
Their stardom faded a bit in the mid-'90s as their albums stopped topping the charts, but they remained a popular live act that could reliably fill large venues and give fans a great show more than 50 years after the act debuted. At their core, ZZ Top's songs never changed that much, taking standard blues figures, filtering them through Gibbons' precisely raunchy guitar, marrying them to the simple but funky groove of Hill and drummer Frank Beard, and adding lyrics steeped in surreal wit as they dealt with sex, booze, the blues, and the glorious idiosyncrasies of life in Texas. This gambit made them one of the only groups of their era to not only survive in the new arena of pop, but to become more popular than ever, gaining a new audience without sacrificing the old one.
Early zz top series#
In the 1980s, they cannily reinvented themselves, hot-wiring their sound with sequencers and synthesizers and becoming unlikely MTV heroes with a series of clever videos that turned bearded frontmen Billy Gibbons (guitar) and Dusty Hill (bass) into an eccentric visual signature.
They started as a trio putting their own spin on blues & boogie rock, and became arena rock stars in the 1970s. The rarest pressings of the early albums must be Japanese London pressings of the first three, those are the only ones missing in my collection.Īlso I don't get the multiple comments about the early albums being inherently noisy (if they are because of wear it's another thing of course), that is not my experience.Known to the world as "That Lil' Ol' Band from Texas," ZZ Top were had a thoroughly unique career. I have even found sealed US copies of all of them, and some I got cheap too because an eBay seller repeatedly listed ZZ Top auctions as "Z Z Top" which made them not show up unless you searched like that (which I had learned to do), so there's a tip. On the other hand Rio Grande Mud may have been the hardest because there is a UK pressing around. I think First Album might actually have been easiest to find, and that could be because it never got a European release on London, so more import copies could have made their way here.
Click to expand.When I was collecting I didn't find the first two were that much harder to find (in shops), but that could be because the US pressings weren't the ones originally sold here anyway so they were all equally scarce.
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