The knock-on effect of ZZ Top’s breakthrough 1973 album, Tres Hombres, was a huge popularity spike. They were no longer just that little ol’ band from Texas. Already invested in a relentless touring cycle, they suddenly found themselves playing to sold-out venues across the States. By September 1974, with the album having gone gold and lead single La Grange a hit, the band were headlining ZZ Top’s First Annual Texas-Size Rompin’ Stompin’ Barndance & Bar B.Q., attracting some 80,000 punters.
The festival was held at the Memorial Stadium at the University of Texas in Austin. Also on the bill were Joe Cocker, Santana and Bad Company, the latter featuring a guest turn from Jimmy Page. ZZ Top eclipsed them all, fetching up in sequined jumpsuits and indulging in pyrotechnics and goofy stage routines. They returned for two encores. The concert brought in the equivalent of $4 million in today’s money.
The preceding tour also directly informed the trio’s next move. At the Warehouse in New Orleans that April, manager Bill Ham arranged for the show to be recorded. The Record Plant Mobile Truck was duly commissioned to capture ZZ Top in all their live vigour. A month later, jamming backstage at a rodeo arena gig in Florence, Alabama, Billy Gibbons hit on a dirty boogie riff that wouldn’t let up. Dusty Hill improvised a vocal over the top. Three minutes later they had a new song, Tush. Gibbons borrowed the title from Tush Hog, a 1966 instrumental by fellow Texans The Roy Head Trio.
Selected live recordings from New Orleans would constitute side one of Fandango!, ZZ Top’s next album. Initially released by Dallas rock’n’rollers The Nightcaps in 1960, Thunderbird is a lively enough opener. And while a souped-up version of Jailhouse Rock feels pretty superfluous, it’s the near-10-minute Backdoor Medley that reconnects the band to their blues roots.
The medley segues between Gibbons/Ham co-write Backdoor Love Affair (from ZZ Top’s First Album) to Willie Dixon’s Mellow Down Easy and John Lee Hooker’s Long Distance Boogie. It’s all “captured as it came down – hot, spontaneous and presented to you honestly, without the assistance of studio gimmicks,” as the sleeve blurb puts it.
Side two, by contrast, is purely new studio recordings. “We had enough live material to make up one side of the disc, so we decided to go with the unusual move of making the album half live, half studio,” Gibbons later reasoned to Music Radar. “It turned out to be a winning combination for us.”
The biggest winner is the aforementioned Tush. Despite its less-than-taxing verses (“I said, Lord, take me downtown / I’m just lookin’ for some tush”) it proved an instant classic, giving ZZ Top their first Top 20 hit in the U.S.
“As for the lyrics, it’s not exactly Bob Dylan,” conceded Gibbons. “[But] Tush felt good from a musician standpoint. You can never tell what’s going to be a hit or not. We were enjoying the recording experience, figuring out how to grab a moment and making it repeatable.”
Fandango!’s other great moment is the breakneck Heard
It On The X. Paying homage to the ‘border blaster’ radio stations of their youth, which pumped out music from the Mexican city of Juárez via stations in El Paso, the song finds both Gibbons and Hill in full voice, testifying to the sheer power of the experience: “Do you remember / Back in 1966? / Country Jesus, hillbilly blues / Where I got my licks / From coast to coast and line to line / In every county there / I’m talkin’ ’bout that outlaw X / He’s cuttin’ through the air.”
Released in April ’75, Fandango! mirrored the success of Tres Hombres by going Top 10 on Billboard. It was also the first ZZ Top album to trouble the UK charts, albeit at a modest No.60. By the end of the year, according to Newsweek, Fandango! was still shifting 50,000 units per week. The magazine also noted that the band had outdrawn Elvis Presley in Nashville and broken Led Zeppelin’s attendance record for New Orleans. Ever the droll commentator, Gibbons accounted for ZZ Top’s appeal as “honest ignorance”.
People tend to go big in Texas. On the back of Fandango!’s success, and no doubt fortified by the Memorial Stadium event, ZZ Top cooked up the Worldwide Texas Tour. Kicking off in May 1976 in North Carolina, the tour lasted more than a year and a half, covering more than 100 shows in five separate bursts.
It wasn’t just the time frame that was ambitious. In an attempt to “bring Texas to the people”, the band appeared on a 35-ton stage that resembled their home state. The backdrop was a giant hand-painted desert panorama with elaborate lighting effects. Amidst a variety of native fauna – cacti, yucca, agave – ZZ Top also shared the space with a bunch of live animals. On any given night you were liable to encounter buzzards, a black buffalo, tarantula spiders, a Texas Longhorn steer and a plexiglass pyramid crawling with diamondback rattlesnakes.
“They were actually treated better than we were!” Gibbons recalled to NME in 1994. “That tour was handled by a guy who was a specialist in animal handling. It was well done, a lotta fun. In Pittsburgh, the buffalo gets loose and he’s chargin’ around the arena, didn’t know where to go, things like that. But we just kept on playin’.”
Things got off to an ominous start. Opening night at Groves Stadium in Winston-Salem was preceded by hailstorms, tornado scares and a heavy four-day downpour. Plans to visit Europe, Japan and Australia were cancelled due to animal quarantine restrictions.
ZZ Top pushed on regardless, building up further dates in arenas and auditoriums across the US, variously supported by Lynyrd Skynyrd, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Blue Öyster Cult and REO Speedwagon, to name but a few. By the time they finally signed off in Amarillo on New Year’s Day 1978, ZZ Top had played to more than 1.2 million fans, and America had a new favourite band.
A longer version of this feature appears in Classic Rock Presents ZZ Top, a brand new magazine dedicated to the Little Ol’ Band From Texas. Order it online and have it delivered straight to your door.
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