ZZ Top History 3
On August 16 1975, ZZ Top came as close as they ever had to a hit single, when "Francine" peaked at #41 on the Billboard chart, just as their new album was being released.
Fandango! was released in 1975, and unusually, it was a half-studio, half-live album. It was an important album for the band. Their previous three albums, it seemed, inevitably fell into the hands of nationally-published critics who didn't know, as the band put it, the difference between Elmore James and the kid boning up on wah-wah next door. The live segment was recorded during three days of concerts in front of a typically frantic audience at the Warehouse in New Orleans. The album remained on the charts for 83 weeks and sold in excess of a million copies. It also included live versions of songs from their debut album; "Shaking Your Tree", "Brown Sugar," and "Back Door Love Affair". Their traditional show-opener "Thunderbird" (a rocking ode to that 59cent-a-pint nectar of the gods) also featured.
The album included ZZ Tops first Top 20 hit single "Tush", which was been used on movie and TV soundtracks by the score since. Dusty recalls the writing of Tush:
"wrote it in Florence, Alabama. It was about the hottest show we ever played. While we were rehearsin' in the afternoon we found this riff and just started playing it. I was up at the mike singing whatever came to mind and that's where my mind was at that day."
The song, Frank Beard recalls, was written in one go:
"We started playing this riff and the way it was written is exactly the way we played it that day. That was easy. It's not like beating your head against a wall writing"
Many radio stations across the country started to ban the song, on the grounds that it was "indecent". Billy Gibbons alays claimed that "Tush" was a direct reference to the song "Tush Hog" by Roy Head. However, "Tush" can also refer to a part of the female anatomy. Although "Tush" provided the band with their first top 20 hit single, it would have done far better if it wasn't for the lack of radio airplay.
"Fandango" is a word that described the weeklong blowout that American and Mexican cowboys would indulge in when they'd come in from the range and whoop it up at the end of a trail drive. In other words, this is a party album.
Another outstanding track, was studio cut "Balinese" which like most ZZ songs is steeped in Texas mythology. "Balinese," is a funky shuffle tribute to a gambling dive on a Galveston pier.
"Mexican Blackbird" is a country-tinged tune based on the true story of a Mexican prostitute.
For me, the albums best song has got to be "Heard it on the X". This song has become a ZZ legend over the years, and all three guys have spun many yarns about it:
Heard It On The X" is a tribute to the great X radio stations of Mexico which might feature a preacher selling autographed pictures of Jesus and an hour of great blues records separated only by an advertisement for goat gland operations which Billy explains "is a kind of sex change operation racket invented by this Dr. Brinkley who went to Mexico when they ran him outta the States a long time ago."
The infamous "X" station was built in Mexico in 1936, just across the border from Del Rio, Texas. Brinkley, who was banned from the air in Missouri by the FCC for selling goat gland sex potions to witless impotent farmers, wanted to open an outlaw station so powerful that it would blanket not only Texas, right across the border, but also the entire United States (and beyond!) with its signal.
"To do this," begins Gibbons, effortlessly but fascinatingly weaving one of his scores of tales, "he'd have to have at least a half a million watts, which not only covered the U.S. and Canada, but also beamed south to Antarctica, East and West Indies, and parts of Europe." The market Brinkley and his Mexican cohorts were mainly after, though, was the Texas and Mexican audience of farmers and small town folk. "He would use country and western music to attract the farmers," Gibbons continues. "He was selling goat glands, chickens, harmonica lessons, HillBilly records, and gospel music. Everything under the sun was being sold.""They had-now dig this," Frank Beard interjects, "...they had autographed prayer clothes of Jesus Christ." The "X" also had Wolfman Jack at one point, and a lot of Texas teens grew up listening to the Wolfman spinning rock & roll, rhythm & blues, and blues records, to go along with the country, gospel, and native Mexican music that was also played on the station.
Billy went on to say:
"During the Second World War the Germans came over and tried to take the gear back to Europe with them to use as broadcasting equipment, because they couldn't buy it there. There was a big shoot-out down there, but they lost"
Featured on the covers of both Time and Newsweek magazines during the same week. ZZ Top became the most popular band ever to play the New Orleans, City Park Stadium.
Next project - a new album and like "Rio Grande Mud", "Tejas" was overflowing with imagery.
"Tejas" is sometimes considered to be one of the bands weaker efforts, but still includes standard ZZ Top mythology in songs like "Snappy Kakkie"
It's another word for piece of ass," Gibbons confesses, "but it's also affectionately referred to women, like a girl's name. It's a little child-like tune, about calling her name, Snappy Kakkie. 'I said, hey Snappy Kakkie do you want to play?' it's real child-like, yet the lyrics unearth the kind of ominous feeling of controls people put on one another. Government controls, maybe
"Tejas" , although not as commercially successful as its predecessors, did show a more experimental attitude from the band, encompassing their normal feel as well as Country, and to a degree, dance music (although not as in "Dance music" as we know it today). The album spawned ZZ Top's fourth hit single, "Arrested for Driving While Blind" reaching #74 on the Cashbox chart.
In some places Billy took to playing fiddle (a 1941 Rickenbacker electric) to get that authentic western feel on the album.
In keeping with the direction they were heading in, "Tejas" soon went Platinum, but the real monster was just beginning to stir.....
The huge success they were by now enjoying only encouraged the boys to aim even higher, and 1975 - 1976 saw The World Wide Texas Tour being introduced. It kicked off on May 29th at Graves Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was, at the time, the most ambitious rock tour ever staged. On stage with the band were images of their home state, from haystacks, and farming tools to live bison, cactus, rattlesnakes, buzzards and even Longhorn cattle roaming the stage. $140,000 worth of livestock were used on the show. The Longhorn and a Buffalo were raised up on Sizzor lifts either side of the stage for fifteen second appearances. Cacti and other authentic vegetation was included. The band even included their mascot, a Havelina pig. During one performance, the lighting was so hot that the buzzard's wings started to smoke!!! Everything was used positively in the production - even the transporter trailers the band used were part of the show (having had Texan landscapes painted onto them). The animals were all very well cared for, as the ASPCA discovered on the frequent occasions when they inspected the production. The animals were cared for by Ralph Fisher, who really went to town on their care. The rattlesnakes were given their own air-condioned plexi-glass domes to live in. For weeks before the tour began, Ralph acclimatised the creatures by playing hours worth of ZZ Top music to them. Eventually though the snakes had to go, because the stage vibration was simply too upsetting for them.
The tour was a massive critical and financial success (grossing $11.5 million, the most ever for any act) but was physically and emotionally very draining. Not only was it huge in the revenue stakes - but logistically it was massive (1.2 million tickets sold, 1,440 man hours needed to erect the stage etc). $140,000 worth of Texas livestock was shipped across the country to set the scene. By tour-end, Newsweek reported that ticket sales exceeded Elvis Presley's, attendance exceeded Led Zeppelin, and record sales beat The Rolling Stones. The minimum time required to erect, dismantle, and then transport the set was three days.
The outlook for the band was now extremely rosy - they had two platinum selling albums, still selling in large numbers. They had just finished the most commercially successful tour ever. They now had a legion of new fans who attended the Worldwide Texas Tour, who were looking to buy ZZ Top products. So what did the band do to capitalise on this... they want on holiday!!.... for three years!!!!!
ZZ's label used the sabbatical to keep the coffers full , by releasing the compilation "The Best of ZZ Top" in 1977, to ZZ Top - Starved fans. It included all of the classics such as "Jesus Just Left Chicago," "Heard it on the X," "Tush" and "La Grange."
Frank set of for a "Weeks" cruise in the Caribbean and just didn't come back. Part of the time he lived like a hermit', the rest of the time like an international playboy. Dusty tried scuba diving off the Cayman Islands and sailing around the Pacific.
Billy lived for a time in a Paris art colony and then, on the island of Madagascar.
However, although exhausted from the overwhelming workload, ZZ Top used this opportunity to move from London Records, to giants Warner Bros, after some shrewd negotiation by Bill Ham.
Bill was demanding $1 million dollars for a label to sign up the band, and in September '78 he got it - from Warner Brothers. Bill also rather shrewdly made sure that Warner Brothers bought the rights to ZZ Top's back catalogue, in view of the way London Records had treated the Rolling Stones. When the Stones switched labels to record with Atlantic, every time they tried to release a new studio album, London would issue a rehashed greatest hits package - obviously, this damaged the takings for the new album. Bill Ham was determined that this was not going to happen to ZZ Top.
On their return, the band brought out their hugely popular "Deguello" which included what was to become yet another ZZ classic, "Cheap Sunglasses". They also returned with what would eventually become the most famous aspect of the guys - huge beards!!!! (Unbelievably, Billy and Dusty had each grown their beard's without knowing the other had done the same - oooh - Twilight Zone music!!)
Their new image was to prove a boost to their career. As Frank recalled the story of how, one day in the lobby of New York's Gramercy Park Hotel,
"The elevator opens and this guy gets out. He's wearin' hot pants, black fish net tights, a feather boa and make up and he's carrying a bullwhip over his shoulder and two leatherette women on his arms. He marches through the lobby and I'm elbowin' Dusty goin' "Goddamn, look at that." And we look around - and everybody in the whole lobby is staring at us!"
"Deguello" was named, in the ZZ Top Tex-Mex tradition, after the death march played by Mexican soldiers as they stormed the Alamo.
Deguello (1979) included Isaac Hayes' "I Thank You," (I Thank You reached #34) and another favourite with fans, "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide." Billy made "I Thank You" even dirtier than the Hayes version by substituting the word "Me " for "It". This changed lyrics like "You didn't have to squeeze me" to " You didn't have to squeeze it". "I Thank You" gave the band only their second AM radio hit single.
The album did suffer a hitch, when distribution had to be temporarily halted. This was due to a legal argument amongst members of Elmore James' estate, which resulted in problems with other artists releasing covers of his music. Because "Deguello" included a ZZ version of "Dust My Broom", they were affected.
Also on the album, was more evidence of Billy's increasingly odd sense of humour. "Manic Mechanic" was about a seven foot high racing driver who Billy claimed to know.
ZZ Top never used musicians from outside the trio, (apart from Pete Tickle, their road manager, who played acoustic guitar on "Rio Grande Mud") so when a horn section was needed for Deguello, they did it themselves!! They learned enough sax to play a three part harmony, and credited the session to The Lone Wolf Horns. (Lone Wolf being Bill Hams promotions company)
Dusty recalls fondly:
"Yes, we learned that part, and it took us forever! None of us were horn players, and we honked and squeaked, and made all sorts of cattle sounds, you know, we would draw all the wild animals over to where we were because they'd hear these sounds... Anyway, we learned the parts, and someone asked me why I didn't just go and hire a three-sax set. But once again, it didn't seem that odd an idea at the time. We took a couple of lessons and learned the parts and played them. And then what we did when we toured back then - this is a little time before the videos were pop-ular - we put it on a screen behind us. We called them The Lone Wolf Horns, like they were a separate three guys. I've since forgotten how to play, even that much."
The horns appeared on the tracks "Hi-Fi Mama" and "She loves my automobile".
Frank explains :
"We wrote "Hi-Fi Mama" and we said if ever a song needed horns it's this song. We've never used any outside help before on any of our records. Like Billy will get down on his knees and play an organ's foot pedals with his hands or something. We've always managed to get what we wanted ourselves. And so I said "Let's go buy saxes and learn how to play saxes. It can't be that hard. "
The band went out and bought themselves a saxophone each, and then hired someone to teach them how to play basic stuff. Billy then transposed it all for the album.
They worked out how to play by each blowing one note simultaneously, recording it, and then blowing the next note etc.
However popular the album was with the fans, the band yet again had problems with the press reaction to it:
"Just in case it has escaped their notice, America has undergone one or two mighty big changes in the years ZZ Top has been away...five years ago, people might-at a pinch - have tolerated these mean lookin' hombres and their wooly west-via-Las Vegas supperclub blues mongerings. My grandpappy even reckons they had a couple of million sellers back then as well. But the times, they've been a-changing. ZZ Top last recorded in 1976, and no doubt back then, they did seem a litle subversive, a little dangerous. But since then, we've had the Pistols, we've had The Clash and we've had The Ramones. And try as I might, I can't find a single thing on this record which makes me sorry for that. Its out of date, out of time, and as soon as I finish writing this and get down to the exchange shop, it's out of my house"
However, two of ZZ Top's worst press enemies were converted by "Deguello" - Lester Bangs, and Robert Christgau. Christgau wrote:
"These guys got off the road for real...sounds as if they spent all three years playing the blues on their front porches. The strident arena technique (which marred earlier records) is gone, every song gives back a verbal phrase or two to make up for the musical ones it appropriates, and to vary the trio format, they've figured out where to put them....I've heard a shitload of white blues albums....This is the best by miles"
In 1980, ZZ Top made their eagerly anticpated return to playing live, with the Deguello tour. But.. shock, horror - they weren't dressed like cowboys anymore! John Travolta and "Urban Cowboy" made sure of that. And they had huge beards.... apart from Frank Beard, who claimed he was so far behind the others that he'd never be able to catch up!
The tour was the band's biggest grossing yet. Gone were the Texan landscapes, but in came The Lone Wolf Horns.
Frank:
"We made a film of the three of us playing saxophones, so , whenever we went on the road, we'd lower a screen and The Lone Wolf Horns would walk out and join us for three songs"
1980 saw the band leave the US for Britain for the first time. They played a special on "The Old Grey Whistle Test" on April 15, followed by two concerts at Hammersmith Odeon.The band found the UK very open to what they were playing, especially because bands like Def Leppard were emerging, and fans were quite willing to include ZZ Top as a heavy metal band.
As soon as the "Deguello" tour finished, Billy vanished on his travels again. He ended up on the Indian sub-continent, on a (he claims...)200 mile walk through Tibet in search of the Abominable Snowman. "I had an encounter with something up there," he remarks mysteriously. "I don't know what it was, but I wrote a song about it called "(I Wouldn't Touch it With a) Ten Foot Pole."