ZZ Top’s first album turns 50
Years before the beards, ZZ Top released “ZZ Top’s First Album,” a recording with a title that exuded both descriptive understatement and brash implication of more to come.
When it was released 50 years ago this month, the band’s debut record leaned toward the former as it arrived without much of a fuss. “ZZ Top’s First Album” never hit the Billboard 200. And it yielded no hits.
Unlike the 1973 breakout album “Tres Hombres” and “Eliminator,”
from 1983, when ZZ Top became MTV superstars, the band’s beginnings were sufficiently humble to earn its nickname, “that little ol’ band from Texas.”
But play it all these years later, and ZZ Top’s first album serves as a trailhead for a remarkable career for the longest-running, intact lineup in rock ’n’ roll. It remains the bluesiest recording the Houston-based trio would make while also using the blues for its own purposes, namely to create groove-heavy, sometimes lewd, party music that went from obscure to ubiquitous to gauche to ageless across those 50 years.
Singer and guitarist Billy Gibbons likes to introduce the band with “the same three guys, same three chords.” “ZZ Top’s First Album” is the beginning for those three guys, those three chords, covering 10 songs and 35 minutes.
“The good news,” Gibbons says, “is that the freshness of the rawness on that album still holds true.”
Adds singer and bassist Dusty Hill, “I really like a lot of the songs from that record. We don’t play them very often. Part of it is that we started having hits later, and there are songs people ex
pect. That leaves less space for some of these. But I still like a lot of those songs. Everything we do kind of starts there.”
Here is how they got there. ZZ Top’s first single isn’t called “ZZ Top’s First Single.” Rather it was titled “Salt Lick” with “Miller’s Farm” as its B-side. Both were written by Gibbons, who was figuring out his next musical move after his band the Moving Sidewalks was halted by the draft and the war in Vietnam.
The Sidewalks were a psychedelic rock band. And so was ZZ Top at the outset, an earthy permutation of a sound taken to the bank by the Doors and Procol Harum. Gibbons, Sidewalks drummer Dan Mitchell and the immensely talented keyboardist/ bassist Lanier Grieg found their own play on the idea of an organand guitar-based rock lineup.
Grieg left for what Mitchell called “a conflict of musicianship,” and then Mitchell left to take a proper job when he started a family. Billy Ethridge briefly held down the bass.
When Gibbons went looking for a new drummer, he found Frank Beard, new to Houston, having moved from Dallas, where he’d been in a band called American Blues with the Hill brothers, bassist Dusty and guitarist Rocky.
Beard got the job, and vouched for Hill, who sat in for an audition that, according to the band members, ran hours as they improvised on “Shuffle in C.”
“Breaking in a band is so much fun,” Hill says. “It was new and exciting to us. I’d played in a three-piece with my brother, and I loved playing with my brother, but everything was different with Billy. And Frank and I were comfortable playing together. So we got tight pretty quick.”
Gibbons’ manager, Bill Ham, sought a label deal and found one offer, with London Records. The band played its first gig on Feb. 10, 1970, at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Beaumont. The band played every manner of gig in its early years, including one that was attended by a single attendee, who got a free Coca-cola from the band hoping to keep him from leaving. But something was happening.
“We developed a system,” Hill says. “At the time, we didn’t know we were developing a system. We hadn’t been together that long. We were just trying to work as much as we could to survive. We had a few songs, and we played them every (expletive) night.”
The debut album was recorded in Robin Hood Studios, an unassuming space in Tyler handbuilt by Corsicana native Robin Hood Brians. He was a musician and recording engineer whose interest in rock ’n’ roll got him booted from his parents’ house in Tyler, so around 1963 he and a friend built and set up a studio in a shed on the family property.
“We had these high hopes for the sort of place we would record,” Hill says. “We got there, and it was just this house in a dry county. So there was jack (expletive) to do. Go to the studio, go back to the hotel, eat. It was the perfect opportunity to write, rewrite, think about what the songs needed.”
Brians recalls a certain focus around the sessions, a byproduct of Ham’s tightfisted control of the band. Only five people were in the studio: Brians, Gibbons, Hill, Beard and Ham. Sometimes Brians’ mother would be the sixth, delivering drinks or sandwiches.
Brians says the band members “had their concept when they first walked in the door. They gave me the impression they’d spent a lot of time in rehearsal halls getting everything right. There wasn’t a sense that they were writing in the studio. They knew their stuff.”
Still, the live sound ZZ Top had been refining over a year required some adjustments in the studio. Ham had strong opinions but limited studio experience. He was adamant there wouldn’t be instrumental overdubs, so Brians says he sent the manager to a neighboring county for barbecue, giving the band about 90 minutes to record Gibbons doubling rhythm tracks on guitar but slightly out of tune, giving the songs a fuller sound.
The sound was formidable. Gibbons was a major guitarist on the cusp of discovery, having grown up surrounded by music. His father was a pianist and orchestra conductor; his mother played music in church.
“He came to the blues with more sophistication than a lot of people who ended up playing blues guitar,” Brians says. “His intelligence and education helped him create a sound.”
Hill and Beard did more than create a pocket for Gibbons’ guitar. For 50 years, they’ve cut cavernous grooves, often moving particularly slow and low before dropping out entirely, creating a moment of silence that precedes a guitar solo.
ZZ Top would modify that sound over a half century. But the rudiments are all there on “ZZ Top’s First Album.”
The 1960s found young British musicians devouring American blues and selling it back to the States louder. Hill and Beard logged time with Freddie King and Lightnin’ Hopkins.
“We were strongly influenced by the blues, especially from Texas and Memphis,” Hill says. “But we also loved Cream. And that was part of the inspiration. We knew the original stuff that inspired them. And I remember thinking it was (expletive) that Americans weren’t doing anything with that same power and the fresh approach.
“What we did was never traditional blues. But it is blues. It’s more rock than blues. But those English blues cats did us a huge favor. They got a whole new audience into the blues.”
Even when they sang the blues, as on the slow-moving intro to “Brown Sugar,” the song eventually sprang toward a fuller sound. The content was fairly basic: songs of experience, though the experience was mostly limited to good times.
“Billy and I were talking about separate experiences we’d had in Mexico,” Hill says. “I don’t know if it’s appropriate anymore to talk about that. But it doesn’t bother me. Times have changed, but we did what we did. You’d go down there and meet a girl … A lot of our songs are that simple. Just simple stories.”
Gibbons’ line about the same three guys, the same three chords: It is pretty remarkable when you consider how few band lineups remain intact so long. Beard, years ago, told me “separate tour buses. That was the secret. Each of us had our place to go. It kept the music in its own space.”
ZZ Top lined up a 50th-anniversary tour that touched on its first single, before the classic trio lineup was set. Dates last year were nixed because of the pandemic.
“The whole 50 years has been a gas,” Hill says. “But that first album, it was the beginning. So it feels like a pretty special gas because we were learning to do this. I tell you, I can’t even remember why we called it that. We talked about what to name the thing. It does imply we thought we’d make another record. We lucked out and did. But nobody knew who we were. Sometimes it’s easier when people don’t expect things.”
“There were times they seemed to be trying to morph into something different,” Brians says. “The way the Beatles morphed from one thing into another. But I knew when they came into the studio, I had a feeling they were going to do something. They were going to be something big.”