Billy Gibbons

Art lover, musical explorer, friends in unexpected places, slipper salesman… Behind the beard and sunglasses there’s a very different Billy Gibbons from the one most people think they know.

Art lover, musical explorer, friends in unexpected places, slipper salesman… Behind the beard and sunglasses there’s a different Billy Gibbons from the one most people think they know.

Some time back in the early 70s, when ZZ Top were just starting out, Billy Gibbons met blues great BB King. Gibbons was a 20-something guitar hotshot from Texas who’d got a papal blessing from Jimi Hendrix himself a few years earlier. He had every right to be cocky, but he was enough of a class act even then to shut up and listen when BB King spoke.

At some point during their conversation, BB picked up Billy’s guitar and strummed it. He looked quizzical, then handed it back to Billy. “Why you working so hard?” asked BB. “Don’t work so hard.”

BB was talking about the thick, heavy guitar strings Gibbons used to get ZZ Top’s thick, heavy guitar sound, but he might as well have been talking about life. “Don’t work so hard.”

Taking the veteran’s advice, Gibbons ditched his thick strings for slinkier, lighter ones right away and never looked back. King’s credo has stuck with him down all these years, in life as well as in music. Few people can make not working so hard look so damn easy as The Reverend Billy F Gibbons.

“I would like to believe that,” says Gibbons.

“As the old saying goes, we’re fortunate in that we get to do what we like getting to do, so why mess with it?”

It’s 11am Las Vegas time when Gibbons calls to talk about his new solo album, Hardware. Even via Zoom, his innate Billy Gibbons-ness fills the room: foot-long gingery beard, pink-rimmed glasses, bobbled beanie hat (acquired when he swapped it for a Stetson with a Cameroonian tribal chief years ago, if myth is to be believed).

I can’t see him from the waist down, but there’s every chance he’s wearing pyjama bottoms.

“The only difference between Billy on stage and off stage is that off stage he’s always in pyjamas,” says Matt Sorum, former drummer with Guns N’ Roses and latterly one of Gibbons’s chief collaborators outside of ZZ Top. “If you watch the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame when he played with Jeff Beck, he went on stage in pyjamas with a leather jacket on top.”

Pyjamas or not, Gibbons is a solid-gold character, albeit less the cartoon figure the public knows from videos and shows, more curious cultural lightning rod. Few other rock’n’roll veterans of his vintage are as comfortable discussing surrealist art and 80s industrial music as they are jawing about the blues and sun-baked boogie rock.

Yet for all that, he’s proof that while you can take the boy out of Texas, you can’t take Texas out of the boy even after all this time. His stories are as rambling as a Lone Star trail and shaggier than the beard on his chin. He’s got a catchphrase: ‘Long story longer’ – a promise he delivers on every time he says it. Attempting to keep him on track is like gluing water to a balloon: fun trying but ultimately impossible. The only thing you can do is sit back and listen while Gibbons talks. In the words of BB King: don’t work so hard.

They say you can judge a person by the company they keep. Which makes Gibbons the most interesting man in the world. In fact that’s exactly what his friend Al Jourgensen, ringleader of industrial-metal hellraisers Ministry, calls him: The Most Interesting Man In The World. It’s a reference to the guy from the Don Equis beer ads: the one with the deep tan and the great beard, who ended up on a thousand ‘I don’t often…’ memes. “That is Billy Gibbons,” says Jourgensen. “He has no dark side. He’s just suave as hell. The Most Interesting Man In The World.”

Other people have other takes. Matt Sorum, who co-wrote the song Vagabond Man on Hardware, describes him as an old-school entertainer. “He’s a vaudevillian character in a way, except he’s like that all the time.”

Dave Gahan, the singer with Depeche Mode, and a man with whom Gibbons forged an unlikely friendship decades ago, speaks no less highly of him. “He’s a very polite, very kind, very genuine southern gent,” Gahan tells Classic Rock. “I think he just enjoys being around other musicians and seeing how their world works.”

Vaudevillian, Southern gent, The Most Interesting Man In The World. All of them are accurate. Today you can add ‘hot sauce pitchman’ to the list. “I got plenty here,” he says, holding up a bottle of his own Whisker Bomb pepper sauce. “This is the original. If you want to step it up I’ve got the Have Mercy one,” he adds.

But we’re not here to talk about condiments. We’re here to talk about his new album, Hardware, and maybe a little about who Billy Gibbons really is.

The former is easiest. Hardware (named in tribute to Gibbons’s late friend and engineer Joe Hardy)

“We’re fortunate in that we get to do what we like getting to do, so why mess with it?” Billy Gibbons