The best beards in rock are still on a roll
ZZ Top: Live — Greatest Hits From Around The World (Suretone) Verdict: Texan hombres salute the blues ★★★✩✩ Crosby & Nash: Wind On The Water (Invisible Hands) Verdict: Return of a Californian classic ★★★★✩
PROMOTINg themselves as The Little Ol’ Band From Texas, ZZ Top paid their dues in honky-tonk bars before staging one of the most over-the-top rock shows ever seen, with their Worldwide Texas Tour featuring live buzzards, rattlesnakes and a two-ton buffalo.
With the same line-up — not to mention the same beards (and shades) — as in the late Seventies, the American power trio are a dyed-in-the-wool gigging outfit.
They proved as much in June, when they ‘whipped wire and pounded skin’ on the Pyramid Stage to the delight of a muddy but merry glastonbury.
So the arrival of this live effort is long overdue. Putting aside recordings linked to video releases, it is their first proper live album. Out today on CD and vinyl, it revisits the pop success of hits such as gimme All Your Lovin’ but also takes the Texans back to their blues roots.
Drawn from gigs on three different continents, it reiterates their harddriving credentials. got Me Under Pressure, recorded in New York, shows why guitarist Billy gibbons was hailed as one of America’s best young musicians by Jimi Hendrix when the two of them shared a stage — his playing is simple but potent.
There are also two gutsy collaborations with Jeff Beck: the ballad Rough Boy and a cover of the seasoned Kentucky mining song Sixteen Tons.
The band were at their commercial peak in the Eighties. It was then that they augmented their deep-fried, Southern boogie with trendy synthesiser grooves, and the hits from 1983’s Eliminator are prominent. Legs, from Sao Paolo, features a series of solos that extend the song to five minutes.
There’s a warm-hearted humour at the core of (almost) everything ZZ Top do. The band are the butt of many of their own jokes, and their description of this record as an exercise in ‘abstract surrealism’ shows a self-awareness lacking in many of their peers.
And it is when they delve into the blues that gibbons, bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard (ironically the only member without one) show their true colours. The trio’s breakthrough album, Tres Hombres, is now more than 40 years old, but they still play its signature songs Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers and La grange with real zeal. ZZ Top are still in their element onstage — with or without the wildlife.
TODAY’S vinyl-only reissue of David Crosby and graham Nash’s excellent second album Wind On The Water is one for true collectors, but its recreation of the authentic 1975 listening experience is still worthwhile. A West Coast classic, it reinforces the pair’s distinctive harmonies and features a stellar backing band.
Made in the aftermath of a 1974 stadium tour by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, it veers between acoustic songs such as Cowboy Of Dreams and muscular band workouts. Carole King, James Taylor and Jackson Browne all help out.
Carry Me finds Crosby lamenting the death of his mother, while Mama Lion is Nash’s tribute to his lover Joni Mitchell. On a sour note, Take The Money And Run takes a jaded view of CSN&Y and the bickering of the previous year’s tour. Beneath the bitterness, though, this is an unsung gem.