112 PLANET ROCK
Captivating portrait of the world’s most
hirsute and best-loved blues-boogie ‘boys’.DETERMINED TO cultivate an air of mystique
around his charges, ZZ Top’s manager Bill Ham
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to perform on television or conduct press interviews.
“The less they know about you better,” he reasoned.
So successful was this policy that, following the
release of their 1971 debut album, unfussily titled ZZ
Top’s First Album, one night the band found themselves
playing to an audience of just one in Alvin, Texas. Said
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decades on.
Four years on from their mentor’s passing, Billy Gibbons, Dusty
Hill and Frank Beard are hardly disrespecting Ham’s sage advice by
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Dunn and Scot McFayden have a superb track record in chronicling
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one wishing to get dirt on the ‘real’ ZZ Top beyond
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this salute to what Gibbons cheerfully hails as “an
oddball band playing oddball
music” short on genuine
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say that it’s not highly enterĥ
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practice session, which feaĥ
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three musicians were determined to break the
mould, and play up to the fact that, as their
former publicist Howard Bloom acknowledges,
to many Americans, Texas remains “a foreign
country”. Not everyone recognised the value of
WKHLUTXLUN\6RXWKHUQĥIULHGURDGKRXVHEOXHVĦBY PAUL BRANNIGANZZ TOP
That Little Ol’ Band
From Texas
EAGLE VISION++++
“
The Village Voice compared
their sound to hammered shit...
”
Days in the
sun: ZZ Top.GETTY,ICONICPIX