Like the state of Texas, where they come from, Top ZZ combines rural primitivism and urban image in a way that has led to a perfect synthesis between provincial rock’n’roll and high technology.

When Forbes magazine published the list of the world’s top-earning entertainment celebrities in the late 1980s, only one rock group, U2, ranked above ZZ Top among those who had amassed the most money. fortunes. Yet they have curiously managed to stay away from the high-society rock’n’roll circus, and remain immune to the “messiah of rock” syndrome that usually plagues other artists of their stature. In almost thirty years they have toured the entire planet, although they have never been far from their base in the South of North America, and someone’s description of them when they started, “that little old lady from Texas”, even today They fit like a glove.

billy gibbons, who was a graphic arts student, began playing guitar in The Moving Sidewalks, a 1960s psychedelic “garage” band whose debut single, “99th Floor,” topped the charts. Texas charts for five weeks in 1967. dusty hill and frank beard, meanwhile, graduated from The American Blues, a Dallas band best known for the fact that its members wore their hair dyed blue more than anything else. The three met in 1970 and the pact they sealed then has stood the test of time with overwhelming strength. Except for the fleeting contribution of a guitar accompaniment by a stranger on one of their first albums, the three men have been self-sufficient to the last note and the last rhythm that they have included in their albums, although they have even had that learn to play the saxophone or play a section of three metals, as is the case with some songs on his album Degüello. They have never enriched their live performances with extra musicians, nor have they recorded or played with other bands.

Their manager and producer since day one has been Bill Ham, a maverick Texan with a management style very similar to that of Led Zeppelin’s first manager, Peter Grant. Ham adamantly eschewed ZZ Top from television throughout the 1970s, preferring the band’s live performances to other 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 on tour for a long time. along with all his outdoor gear and a host of wildlife (a steer, a 2,000-pound buffalo, half a dozen vultures, two six-foot rattlesnakes, a hog and a wolf). Their aversion to television softened in the 1980s, when they became quirky MTV stars thanks to a Tim Newman-directed trilogy of videos for the songs “Gimme All Your Lovin,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” and “Legs.” all of them included in his successful 1983 album, Eliminator.

Presenting themselves since the eighties as the “mausoleums of rock”, ZZ Top is the only group that has seriously faced the commitment to age in a market, that of rock’n’roll, which always trades with the currency of youth . Such permanence has undoubtedly contributed to the image that Gibbons and Hill conceived for the group when its members were barely thirty years old, an image in which the most prominent note is the long beards that have not been in fashion since the times of the Old Testament. This strategy freed them from worry from then on, because unless they dramatically gain weight, twenty years from now they won’t look any older than they do now.

Given the enormous number of works published by this band throughout its history, only the most relevant ones are mentioned. The first is a 1973 LP titled Tres Hombres, which reached number three in their output at the time. Some people think that this has been the best album of his 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” by Led Zeppelin II. In fact, the two inseparable songs remained an essential component in the set of songs they played live on the occasion of the 1991 Recycler tour. Another interesting cut is “La Grange,” a salacious tale set in a brothel that was a minor hit in America, as were “Precious and Grace” and the surreal “Master of Sparks,” whose offbeat 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 charts, and is one of the most overlooked great albums in rock history.

Another of ZZ Top’s great works is Degüello, released in 1979. This is a new collection of seemingly casual brilliance, illuminating, 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 LL Cool J came onto the scene, ZZ Top demonstrated a perfect familiarity with street language on “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide.” The band’s fascination with auto racing is also revealed through another one of those surreal fantasy lyrics, “Manic Mechanic,” sung by Gibbons as if he were speaking through a broken megaphone. Dazzling versions of Isaac Hayes’s “I Thank You” and Elmore James’s “Dust My Broom” culminate in a spectacularly rich composition.

When someone asked Gibbons what a guitarist could do to improve their technique, his answer was to go out and buy a record called The Sound of the Drags (a recording that captured the peculiar sound of car racing), and I absorbed all the warm feeling it emitted. The success of Eliminator, an album released in 1983, is based precisely on having managed to capture that “warm feeling”; So much so, that the LP 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 surprisingly effective. They trumpeted the sound of the guitar, energized the choirs and banished any type of rhythmic massification. 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 carried out exclusively with a basic battery 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 until 1977, with special attention to Tres Hombres (which contributes four songs out of a total of ten). Greatest Hits, which was catapulted to the singles charts by its version of the song “Viva Las Vegas”, shows the more modern and commercial face of ZZ Top. However, there are several notable omissions (“TV Dinners”, “Velcro Fly”, “Stages”) and other rather questionable inclusions (“Gun Love”, “Give It Up”) that make this, according to some, a summary of Little trust.