ZZ Top were one of America’s greatest bands. (They’re still around, touring every year, but the chemistry between guitarist/vocalist Billy Gibbons, bassist/vocalist Dusty Hill, who died in July 2021, and drummer Frank Beard was alchemical and irreplaceable, and the band’s current bassist, whose name I can’t even remember and don’t care to look up, is a literal placeholder — he was Hill’s tech, and plays the dead man’s old equipment. So I think of ZZ Top in the past tense now.)
I was born at the tail end of 1971, so I learned about ZZ Top when they reinvented themselves in 1983 with the release of Eliminator and its massive hit singles “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” and “Legs.” I loved those songs as a 12-year-old boy, and I still love them today. The follow-up album, Afterburner, not so much. But gradually, in fits and starts, I discovered their incredible back catalog, first via the misbegotten ZZ Top Sixpack, on which they ’80s-ized their earliest work (stay away, it’s a travesty), then later via the real versions of those albums. If you’ve never heard ZZ Top’s 1970s work, particularly the overdriven Tres Hombres, the psychedelic country rock of their often-overlooked masterpiece Tejas, and the bluesy street funk of Degüello, you’re missing out on some of the best music of that decade.
In the ’90s, though, ZZ Top were in a weird position. Their 1990 album Recycler was a hybrid of the electronic pop sound they’d pursued on Afterburner and the grimier blues-rock of Eliminator and Degüello, but it didn’t sell as well as its predecessors (it went platinum, but Afterburner had sold five times that, and Eliminator ten), and it didn’t have any pop hits. And yet, they were still enough of a commercial force that when their Warner Bros. contract expired, their manager Bill Ham convinced RCA to pay them $35 million to join that label’s roster.
Antenna was released on January 18, 1994. It reached #14 on the Billboard album chart (Recycler had reached #6) and was ultimately certified platinum. There were four singles: “Pincushion,” “Breakaway,” “PCH,” and “Fuzzbox Voodoo.” None were pop hits, but they got rock radio airplay. The industry was still willing to push ZZ Top.
Antenna is a good album. It’s grimier than Recycler; its electronic sounds (programmed beats, sequencers, and even discreet samples) owe more to hip-hop or even industrial than to synth-pop. (Gibbons has big ears, as musicians say; some of the drum machine beats on Eliminator were borrowed from Ministry records, and he later sampled Autechre on “Dreadmonboogaloo,” from 1999’s XXX.) But the guitars often have real bite, and the songs cover a pretty broad range, as ZZ Top songs go. In addition to the funky “Pincushion,” there are heartfelt blues weepers like “Breakaway” and “Cover Your Rig,” big stompers like “Fuzzbox Voodoo” and “Cherry Red,” and songs that don’t seem to be about anything at all like “World of Swirl” and “Antenna Head” (it’s worth noting that these goofier tracks are both sung by Dusty Hill — that was often his role). A couple of tracks, “Lizard Life” and “Girl in a T-shirt,” seem even more assembled than their previous material; they’re basically vocal and guitar laid over programmed backing tracks. It’s not a record made by a band on creative autopilot. But there wasn’t really a place in the pop landscape for ZZ Top in 1994, and they were stuck playing to fans who remembered their ’80s heyday, if not their ’70s boogie era.
The band would make three more albums for RCA — 1996’s Rhythmeen, 1999’s XXX, and 2003’s Mescalero. Each of these records has something to offer, but none is a total success. Rhythmeen ups the grit on Gibbons’ guitar and gives Frank Beard the sharp, ringing snare drum sound common to rock records from the mid ’90s to the early ’00s. XXX is even noisier, but the more electronic tracks are weird (cf. “Dreadmonboogaloo” and “Beatbox,” which almost sounds like Rob Zombie) and the last four tracks are new songs recorded live, a trick they’d previously pulled on 1975’s Fandango! Their only studio album of the 2000s, Mescalero, is an extremely mixed bag, combining their 21st century “industrial blues” sound with the psychedelic country heard on Tejas; there are marimbas, accordion, pedal steel guitar, and harmonica. Unfortunately, it’s far too long, delivering 17 tracks over 66 minutes. Pared back to its 10 best tracks, it could have been a career high point. They came back strong on 2012’s La Futura, and there are rumors that they had another record nearly finished when Hill died. Maybe we’ll hear it someday.
I finally saw ZZ Top live in 2007. Gibbons looked skeletally thin (as can be seen on the DVD Live from Texas, recorded about a month after the NYC show I went to), but the band was locked in, and the music was wall-shakingly loud; it was a fucking great show. Almost the entire set was drawn from their ’70s and ’80s albums, of course. There were a few surprises — they covered Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady,” and dragged out “Tube Snake Boogie” and “Pearl Necklace,” from 1981’s relatively overlooked El Loco. But the newest song they played was… “Pincushion,” from Antenna.
— Phil Freeman