Billy Gibbons has a suggestion for aspiring rock musicians. "Come on down to Texas," he says, "it'll either make or break you. Folks around these parts have a way of letting you know what they think of your act, and if they don't like it, well . . . let's just say that things once got so bad that this one promoter had to put chicken wire around the bandstand to catch the beer bottles people were throwing."
ZZ Top seems to have earned the message implicit in such behavior, for nowadays about the heaviest thing being thrown at them are ten-gallon hats. They've given the kids of the South what they want to hear -- a steady stream of high-power, no-nonsense blues-boogie -- and the kids have rewarded them by making them Dixie's most popular band since the Allman Brothers. Their last three appearances in Atlanta were before sell-out crowds, and in New Orleans, Warehouse owner Bill Johnston said he "could have sold out the place for five more days." Though little more than an obscure name in most major northern markets, ZZ Top's regional popularity is such that they recently headlined a Houston festival over the cumulative likes of Wishbone Ash, Savoy Brown and the Doobie Brothers.
This regional discrepancy is the source of much concern to the three-piece band. "Makin' it up North" has become somewhat of an obsession with them. "We just think it's a matter of exposure," Gibbons explains. "People got to hear us before we can hope to sell 'em our records."
"It's no accident that they're this popular in the South," chimes in Bill Ham, the group's manager, coproducer and author of some of their earlier material. "When we were just getting started we must have played a couple hundred gigs a year, all of them in and around Texas. We played so much that word-of-mouth started carrying our reputation, and that's the way its gonna have to be up North too."
Ham is an ex-promotion man who makes no bones about the importance of giving people what they want to hear. Having been so successful on a regional basis he's now leaped headfirst into the task of saturating the East and West Coasts with the ZZ Top sound. Their third album, Tres Hombres, has been out 40 weeks but recently surged to Number 59 on Billboard's chart after release of the album's single, "La Grange," which pushed album sales to 81,000 for April alone (a quarter of total sales). Considerable behind-the-scenes hustle has landed the band gigs supporting the likes of Uriah Heep and Alice Cooper, and paved the way for a spring tour where they will be the headliners.
"This is our big chance," admits bassist Dusty Hilt. "We're gonna play so well that they'll forget glitter ever happened."
Indeed, ZZ Top is probably about as far from the glitter scene as a contemporary band could be. Their individual musical roots sink deeply into the Texas blues tradition, with names like Jimmy Reed, Bobby Blue Bland and B.B. King rolling off their tongues as if they were old personal friends. Hill and drummer Frank "Rube" Beard have been playing in Texas bands for half their lives -- Beard claims he gave up his marriage to keep playing and their one brush with the glitter scene is something they'd just as soon forget.
"We used to he in this band called the American Blues," Hilt remembers, "and we thought it would be kinda neat if everybody dyed their hair blue. It didn't work, in fact all it ever got us was into fights. Man, I still shudder whenever I hear someone say, 'Hey music man' that's how we used to always get called out."
While all this was going on, Gibbons was fronting the marginally successful Moving Sidewalks, a psychedelic superband which at its height had the pleasure of touring with the then new Jimi Hendrix Experience.
"Jimi and I got along fine -- real fine," Gibbons notes with a wide grin. "Of course I was only 17 at the time and a really impressionable sort, but when I first met him I was really floored. He'd dyed his hair orange and like I'd never seen anything like it before. He really taught me a lot about the guitar."
After kicking in the Sidewalks and several abortive versions of ZZ Top, Gibbons finally settled on the current version after Beard brought in his old friend Hill. Two years of incessant playing finally landed them a recording contract with London, which suited Gibbons just fine, "As long as I could remember I'd played those Rolling Stones records and wanted to have my own band on that label," he said.
ZZ Top got their first taste of Northern musical prejudices when Ham arranged with Concerts West for them to back up the Stones at their Hawaii gig. "People would look at us when we went onstage, drop their jaws and moan, They're a cowboy band,"' Hilt recalled. "In the end, though, we'd just blow 'em away and they'd scream for us to come back. We'd feel kinda funny with the Stones watching us from behind, waiting for us to finish."
The band realizes that it will be a long road to cracking a Northern market that regards them as little more than a "Southern Grand Funk," but the prospect of even more incessant touring doesn't seem to phase them a bit.
"Hell, if we didn't want to play in front of people we wouldn't be much of a band, now would we?" Hill asks. "Besides, we like it up there!"
[From Issue 162 — June 6, 1974]