![]() Tres Hombres is a top sirloin steak of an album, lean yet beefy, not a trace of gristle to be had on 10 songs that clock in just over 33 minutes. Working with engineer Terry Manning (the start of a relationship between band and engineer that would stretch into the ’90s), ZZ Top finally put the band’s deceptively simple tone down to tape. But thanks to bigger shows and higher placement on the marquee, ZZ Top’s notorious manager Bill Ham afforded them the luxury of traveling to Memphis to record in a real studio, the legendary Ardent, where Isaac Hayes cut Hot Buttered Soul, Led Zeppelin mixed III, and Big Star recorded their star-crossed albums. Had the band simply returned to a cinder block studio in Tyler, Texas, where they cut their first two albums, that sort of tone might have never been clarified. But, as Blayney recalled, an early gig with the Allman Brothers Band was the real catalyst: “ Allman’s guitar technique seriously influenced Billy Gibbons…he slowed down a touch, became more precise in his fretting, played fewer but tastier notes.” Quarter, peso, or regular pick in his palm, Gibbons’s right hand grew ascendant. They shared bills with Uriah Heep, King Crimson, Brian Auguer’s Oblivion Express, Earth Wind & Fire, and African funk band Osibisa, as well as Cheech & Chong. No, the answer can be found on their third album, 1973’s Tres Hombres.Įarly ZZ Top shows had them performing to exactly an audience of one (as in 1970, when they played the National Guard Armory in Alvin, Texas, and Gibbons bought the guy there a Coke at intermission to make sure he stuck around the for the second set), but a relentless touring schedule put them before plenty of ears in the early part of the ’70s. ![]() How does a band that rose to success along with Southern rock and the urban cowboy archetype outlast the trends and become a paradigm of cool for the likes of hardcore punks Steve Albini and Black Flag, Chicagoans Kevin Drumm and Tortoise, a group referenced by avant-guitar weirdoes and wankers alike? How did that self-proclaimed “little ol’ band from Texas” break concert attendance records and come to signify the cosmos? It sure wouldn’t have happened based on ZZ Top’s first two records, which are full of muddy production, slapdash songs (outside of a few highlights), and licks by turns stinging and sloppy, as if summoned from a late ‘60s British blues-rock power-trio hangover. Or as their longtime roadie David Blayney’s put it in his 1994 book Sharp-Dressed Men- “the band with the midnight shades, the Father Time beards and the pile-driver counterpoint…to many lovers of rock, it’s like they have always been there.” Such elusiveness has served the band well, allowed a late-’60s blues-rock dinosaur to survive and thrive well into the 1970s and then on into the MTV decade, so that their contemporaries went from Jimi Hendrix to Michael Jackson, from Molly Hatchet to Madonna. Hill) or else a “green” heritage (combining two brands of rolling papers) the story remains slippery, eons later. Take the band name itself: the trio of guitarist Gibbons, bassist Dusty Hill, and drummer Frank Beard either pays homage to their Southern blues heritage (combining B.B. This is a band that splashed around in a bayou near Houston’s upscale Tanglewood subdivision on their second album and called it Rio Grande Mud-from the start, they mastered image and mystique. ![]() But when it comes to testimony from the lanky ZZ Top frontman himself, the truth always comes with a side of Texas Tall Tale. You can also find message boards arguing whether Gibbons actually uses a peso for a pick instead. “ Billy Gibbons’ guitar sound isn’t the way it is because he uses a quarter as a pick or anything as simple as that it’s because he’s in touch with a different sector of the cosmos that we know nothing about.” So said experimental noise musician Kevin Drumm, in a 2003 interview with Pitchfork.
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