Would you believe, I have actually written about ZZ Top? I reviewed their Greatest Hits along with a Lynyrd Skynyrd box set.
ZZ TOP, Greatest Hits
Melody Maker, 1993
Like 'funk', like 'raunch', boogie is one of those rock'n'roll concepts that are elemental and un-analysable. There's probably some Rockschool equations that could enable you to go through the motions, but musicology can't endow or explain "feel", or account for the continuum that links such disparate instances as Led Zep's "Black Dog", T. Rex' "Get It On", Budgie's "Whisky River", MBV's "Slow", the Stones' "Can Ya Hear Me Knocking", Soundgarden's "Outshined".
Anyways, there ain't a lot of it about these days, least of all this side of the Atlantic. Brit-rock today emits an astounding dearth of rhythmic heat. The drums in most Anglo-indie merely mark time, nobody knows how to groove. For all the calls in these pages for a return to Seventies perversity and caprice (nice rhetoric, I'll prick up when somebody makes a record as freaky and regal as Ritual de Lo Habitual) let's not forget that half of what made T.Rex was the bottom end. Without the love-muscle-quaking slip'n'slide, Bolan was mere tinsel and glitterdust.
When it comes to smokin' rhythmic interplay, Brit-rock whippersnappers could learn a few tricks and licks from ZZ Top: arch-conservatives maybe, but there's little they don't know about the science of friction. The best tracks on this variable compilation come from that period (1979's Deguello, 1981's El Loco) just before the Texans' commercial breakthrough with Eliminator. "Cheap Sunglasses" is just so doggone funky; these old farts are survivors of an era when heavy rock had more in common with James Brown and The Meters than it does with the frigid frenzy of today's metal. Cutting between a low-down, dirty bass-shuffle and eerie, fractured bridge passages that are almost Oriental, "Sunglasses" is dada-boogie worthy of Beefheart's Clear Spot). Filtered through New Wave minimalism, "Pearl Necklace" has an almost Zen geometrical perfection. And with "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide", an ode to the pimp-rollin' pleasures of low-rider driving, ZZ lumber so limber.
The Eliminator stuff's just fine: is there anyone possessed of a booty who can resist the honeyed bludgeon of "Gimme All Your Lovin'"? Thereafter, with the lame Afterburner and Recycler, ZZ's bluesy raunch sat uneasily on top of programmed beats more appropriate to Janet Jackson. And even the deftest programmer can't get drum machines to elasticate time like a seasoned rhythm section....
Because I was reviewing the Greatest Hits, I wasn't able to squeeze in a mention of my absolute favorite ZZ Top track: Deguello's "Manic Mechanic". Which was a good showcase of Frank Beard's supple stickmanship...
Although it was the Eliminator hits that got me buying Deguello and El Loco, my ears had already pricked up a few years earlier when Tommy Vance played "Cheap Sunglasses" on his Radio One show. I was like, hmmm, this is pretty darn funky... like maybe they are better at this than Delta 5 and Gang of Four.
Strangely, although I bought "Gimme All Your Lovin'" as a single, I never got Eliminator and I'm not sure if I've ever listened to it all the way through.
Deguello is a stone classic, all killer no filler.
El Loco doesn't really stick in my memory except for "Pearl Necklace".
Being an innocent, pure-minded sort in those days, I had no idea how astonishingly dirty the song is.
"Pearl Necklace" is a classic Old Wavers go New Wave move... and a presentiment of what happened next.
Somewhere or other I read the fascinating story behind Eliminator. The impetus came from their studio engineer Joe Hardy. He made a scientific study of the radio, what hit and what didn't. And he discovered that there was an optimum tempo that could damn near guarantee commercial success and persuaded the band to record the whole album at that bpm. He regularized the rhythm with sequencing and did a sort of Butch Vig type job of burnishing the sound.
Which was already a wonderful combo of grit and slickness on Deguello.
I remember my old Melody Maker colleague Frank Owen, who later worked at Spin as an editor (we collaborated on some things there like we had at MM - a cover story on Jimi Hendrix, for instance)... despite being him your archetypal anti-rockist / only-into-black music tasseled-loafer wearing type, Frank found himself at a ZZ Top arena show in the early '90s. He came back blown away by the physical impact of the noise, the astonishing loudness. But probably being a lover of funk and hip hop, the groove aspect must have reached him subliminally too.
From the pre-Deguello era, this one stands out and is another Frank Beard skills showcase.
Used to hear it often on LA classic rock radio when we first moved here - but then that thing happened, the demographic centre of the classic rock listenership started to move forward through historical time. You stopped hearing ZZ Top and The Guess Who... more and more it was things like The Offspring and Sublime... and the last time I checked in it seemed like the centre was now in the early 2000s, The Killers and that kind of thing.
Hearing a ZZ Top song go into a Cars song on a classic rock station was a revelatory moment for me.... ah, the gap between Old Wave and New Wave starts to lose definition.... it's all rooted in the same kind of musicianship... just a slightly differently inflected idea of "tightness"
And then ZZ Top decided to go "New Wave" themselves, with the more mechanistic rhythm base but also with the videos - cleverly turning their fugliness into a visual brand.
Here are some quotes (via Andrew Parker) about the ZZ Top as hit machine era, including one from the guy who literally engineered this metamorph with a hybrid of real and unreal rhythm. Beard’s adaption to the new pop regime is rather like Stephen Morris from New Order shift from being a great, original drummer to a skilful programmer of drum machines.
"That's why Eliminator can sound like Frank Beard playing drums inside a drum machine rather than either “real drums” or “a drum machine.”
And the historical sources actually support this hybrid interpretation. One account says most of Beard's drumming was replaced by drum machine/Simmons electronic drums while retaining his acoustic tom fills and cymbal accents."
Texas guitar hero Joe Knight of Rangers writes to say that ZZ Top's "experimental album" is Tejas, from 1976 - the record before Deguello, and recommends we wrap our ears around this choice cut featuring Frank B shuffling it like "a southern fried Jaki Leibezeit"
