Billy Gibbons

The maestro of crunch for seasoned veterans ZZ Top
takes his strangest shot- with, of all things, synths.
"It's gotta have crunch."

Musician, circa 1983 page 78
"Texas Six String Shootout"
By J.D. Considine, photo by Paul Natkin

Someone asked me the other day, 'Why are there so many blues players from Texas?' Texas is real macho country, where it's still. 'There's only room for one of us in this town- draw your gun!' "Well, the six-shooter has been replaced by the six-string." - Billy Gibbons

With his baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons appears to be little more than beard and sunglasses, just as you'd expect. Nor is there anything surprising about the dry, twanging grumble he says hello in- after listening to him mutter through endless replays of "La Grange," the Lightnin' Hopkins cop that put ZZ Top on the map, anything less would have been a disappointment.

What was unexpected was that the first thing Gibbons wanted to talk about as we sat down in the Atlanta Hilton was synthesizers. And drum machines. And sequencers, programming tricks, digital drum sounds and electronic percussion.

Synthesizers?

"It's all valid," he explains. "In rock 'n' roll, it's all valid, and what's particularly acceptable is the tact that manufacturers have made obscene tones available. I mean, the early synthesizers had the little dripping sounds and tweets; now, they've put in some real beefcake settings. It can get vicious when you want it to, and that's what rock 'n' roll still remains. In my book, you gotta excite 'em, gotta have that crunch."

Which is why you're as likely to hear the sawtooth buzz of a Memory Moog in the rhythm tracks of ZZ Top's current Warner Brothers album Eliminator as the overdriven roar of Gibbons' Gibson or Dean. It's a long way from A Flock Of Seagulls or the polished sheen of the synthpop sound; as Gibbons admits, "We program everything ourselves, and, not being experts in the field, a lot of times we'll have to settle for what we can create on the spot and sneak into the control room, past the producer's ear." But it's not that far removed from the band's boogie heritage. In tact, strip the electronics off songs like "TV Dinners," "Sharp Dressed Man," "Bad Girl" or even "Thug" and you could fit them onto an oldie like Tres Hombres without anyone being the wiser.

"The nucleus of our music is the way we approach playing a song physically," shrugs ZZ bassist Dusty Hill. "Whatever guitar or electronic device we use, we still play it the same. So I'm not really sure that bluesiness could be washed out, even if we wanted to."

"I think we're fortunate to have stayed together until the return of simple, three-chord, let's-get-it songwriting," says Gibbons. "'Cause that's what we've always done, and probably always will do. It's okay to use the latest and greatest technology, but you've gotta be true to the way you feel inside. You're right- trade the place of the synth with a guitar and it's back to Tres Hombres. But it's also fun to sneak in a few new sounds and see how- if- you can make it work.

"ZZ Top goes garage band in the 80s? We're out there, not knowing a thing about what we're doing, but saying, 'This sounds good."' He laughs, then adds, lest the wrong impression be given, "I don't think there are a whole lot of ZZ Top followers who want to come see us behind a bank of keyboards one day. It would probably take banks for us to do it."

If all this seems either too unlikely or suspiciously trendy, perhaps a bit of context is in order. Despite their reputation as Coliseum Circuit Kings in the 70s, ZZ Top has always kept well within the limits of the three-minute-hero approach on vinyl. Short, punchy and blues-saturated, the typical Top tune was lean, mean and to the point- no overblown elegies here. In part, this may be the heritage of Gibbons' cays with the Moving Sidewalks, the legendary Texas psychedelic punk outfit whose few records present them as sort of grittier cousins to the Yard-birds. But mostly it seems a reflection of Gibbons' sensibility, his understanding of what the blues means and how they feel, regardless of technological trappings.

"We're treated fairly by new wavers," he says, addressing the seeming disparity between his group's ambition and its audience. As he sees it, "They feel it's valid to come and see ZZ Top because we like playing blues licks, but we're not up there showing 'em off.

"When white people started to embrace the blues, when it started showing up outside the chitlin' circuit, I don't know if they truly understood it. They did a lot of speed stuff that, you know, got messy. When they got into string bending in the early 60s, there were a lot of records that had guitar playing that stretched a little too far, that went a little bit sharp, and it was unsettling. Because, in an attempt to recreate the soulful expression of a B.B. King passage, they lost it due to a failure to stop bending the note upwards at the right place.

"There's a lot to be said for perfecting a technique that you feel, so that when you start spankin' that plank, gettin' funky with it, it comes out naturally. You've spent enough time rehearsing and working it out to where it becomes a soulful expression, not 'Well, I'm going to copy this record.' Then, when you get comfortable with that, you can jazz it up a little bit."

For Gibbons, it has become a matter of using his blues grounding as a sort of springboard to bounce off contemporary sounds. As an example, he cites "Heaven, Hell Or Houston" from the band's El Loco album. "That started out as an exercise for warming up before the engineer got in there. We came back to it and thought that it was so crazy that we could actually turn it into a useable piece. But we had to lengthen it, because it was a little short. So we added the solo section in the middle.

"Now, imagine you're sitting in the control room, waiting for the guitar break to roll by so that you can unleash. You're not thinking about it, but there has been about a minute's worth of this weirdness blowing by you, and you could be thinking Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry as hard as you could, but you can't ignore what's just blown by. It's going to affect the way you'll play Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry.

"So in that respect, I was trying to do blues licks, but they were coming out affected. It was kind of like blues gone wacko."

Nor are all ZZ Top influences so simple. "Party On The Patio,"from the same album, was inspired by the B-52's. "We had been at a club outside of Palm Springs- Rancho Mirage, California. The DJ there was sponsoring two contests. One of them was a 'Cheap Sunglasses' contest- of course, they didn't know that we had our beards tucked in and were hiding in the corner. Then he played the B-52's and had a 'Rock Lobster' contest. He had a little rubber lobster, and was throwing it out of his DJ booth onto the dance floor, and he'd stop the music and whoever was closest to it had to leave. Sort of like musical lobsters.

"I was diggin' that B-52's thing, and also later on, when 'Party Out Of Bounds' was playing. The next day we flew back to Texas, and there was a big party in Austin, so we all went to it. It was an actual series of events during that evening that the lyrics of 'Party On The Patio' are describing- a true event steeped in a B-52's feeling."

No wonder that Gibbons is so enthusiastic about other attempts to put the blues in a modern setting. David Bowie's Let's Dance, for instance, has Gibbons exclaiming, "What a fine sound! It legitimizes new music to couple it up like that, plus it's fun to listen to. And Stevie Ray Vaughan. he's a tremendous player, and very economical on that Bowie LP.

You don't hear a note out of place." Which brings us to a key word in the

Gibbons vocabulary: economy. The most striking characteristic of Gibbons' playing is his ability to say so much with so little. He credits this aspect of his playing to the records he grew up with, in particular those by Jimmy Reed. "In terms of sheer economy, Jimmy Reed had to be the greatest. His records are still really fun to listen to- in fact, they're magic. I'll slap a Jimmy Reed cassette into the box and put a pair of Walkman earphones around my shoes before I leave in the morning, lust to give them a good vibe."

The vibes for the current ZZ Top tour have not been so hot, though. Although the band is playing as well as ever, they've been beleaguered by all sorts of snafus. They were late getting into Atlanta the day I interviewed Gibbons because the plane that the group had been on had one of its engines quit. and was sent back to the airport.

But that was nothing compared to the theft of one of the group's semis after the second date of the tour, As Gibbons explained, "Somebody followed us back into town and absconded with the 40-footer. They found the truck the next day, and some of the production items that had been manufactured over a period of months were so big and bulky that they left them. But they did rifle the cases for guitars, drums, the lasers....

Gibbons is no stranger to having his equipment ripped off- a few years back, thieves broke into the ZZ Top warehouse and stole, among other things, the pink Stratocaster Jimi Hendrix had given Gibbons back in his Moving Sidewalks days. That guitar he was lucky enough to recover: "It appeared in a nightclub, and a guy who knew of the instrument saw it," he says. "We were in Memphis, and he called me up and said, 'Hey, I'm in Houston, I'm at this club and I think you ought to get down here- there's a guy playing your Jimi Hendrix axe. So I came down the next day and went over there. Sure enough, the guy had it and was grooving on it. It was a friend of mine, so I said, 'Hey, man, I think you're playing my guitar' He said, 'Yeah, I should have known- this thing played too good and cost too little."'

While the gear stolen this time included some valued guitars, including Dusty Hill's favorite Charvel bass, the biggest loss was six of the band's ten Rio Grande amps, which were custom built for the band and have defined their sound from the beginning.

"They're tube amps, constructed in the tradition of Marshalls and Hi-Watts, about 135 watts, and they had a really rich tube sound, tube pre-amp and power-amp stage. There was a guy down in Texas called Jake Stack who made those for us," Gibbons says.

"Tell him the name of the place, though," urges drummer Frank Beard. "That's the cool part."

"Jake's Bait and Music." Laughter erupts around the table. "Jake Stack is about six feet four itches, and he's all the time wearing khaki safari clothing and dark glasses. The place sits right on the water in Rio Grande City, Texas, and you can get either professional music gear or professional fishing gear, the finest of each."

"Just play or cut bait, y'know?" adds Hill.

The Guitars, the Amps, the Lasers

The guitars you'll find in Billy Gibbons' tackle box these days are custom-built Deans, part of a project between Dean Zelinsky and ZZ Top that will find ZZ Top guitars on the market sometime late this year.

His amps are still Rio Grandes, assuming they don't lose any more, and his effects include a Roland flanger with stereo chorus; an Ibanez analog delay; Bobby Blue Braden's Bisarktone, which is "a variation on that original Harold Boda modulator" that can be heard on "Cheap Sunglasses" from Deguello; two MXR pitch transposers; and four 15-band graphic equalizers.