ZZ Top
Adelaide Entertainment Centre
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
After fifteen years, Texas blues funk trio, ZZ Top are back in the country. On tour before headlining at The East Coast Blues Festival they are among the more curious fixtures in the curious world of rock and roll. Delivering basic refried John Lee Hooker riffs, garnished with whatever studio production accessories are currently in the mode, ZZ Top have, with a lot of guile and apparently none at all, always managed to give the folks just what they hadn’t realised they wanted .
Formed in 1969 they have had a couple of serious bursts of fame and substantial fortune. Their Worldwide Texas Tour in 1976, it was said, sold more tickets than Presley, played to bigger crowds than Led Zeppelin and sold more records than the Rolling Stones. Then, seven years later, their album Eliminator mixed a blues base with pop and dance beat influences and found them a whole new audience- thanks also to a series of leery and self mocking videos featuring highly buffed hot-rod cars and deeply tanned Californian pulchritude.
Still on the road and performing their new album XXX – a sly reference to their thirty year career with the same line-up – guitarist Billy Gibbons, bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard are working the same old motherlode. On stage at the Entertainment Centre, Gibbons and Hill front the occasion with their trademark dark glasses and weird wispy ginger beards. Dressed in tailored black leather frock coats with rhinestone vests, Hill sports a black beret while Gibbons has his African sombrero, a woollen beanie bulging with coiled up hair.
They open with Got Me Under Pressure and the troops are happy. Up in the nosebleed seats – Section 13, Row N, seat 189- I am getting the Entertainment Centre blues. The sound is all bass and muddy drum thud and Billy Gibbons’ vocal and guitar is oddly under-driven. I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide, an old fave from Deguello, is a welcome choice but those contrapuntal gear changes are not as energised as they used to be. Gibbons plays a great faux harmonica feed on his guitar but the boys don’t seem particularly bad or nationwide .
Pincushion, bristling with double entendre, is also vintage Top but, when the guitarists take up position either side of Beard’s drum kit and start pacing on treadmills going nowhere, I have the uneasy feeling that I am looking at unintended metaphor. Gibbons greets the crowd with a friendly if somewhat weary Texan drawl and introduces a cluster of songs from the new album. Fearless Boogie is likeable but hardly brave new territory. 36-22-36 is a bit of rock and roll viagra and Poke Chop Sandwich is a sound bite from the lewd old dirty dozens. More interesting is the re-working, sung in a Dusty Hill baritone, of the Elvis Presley hit, Teddy Bear.
I’m hoping for some old stuff like A Fool For Your Stockings. So Cheap Sunglasses hits the mark, especially as Gibbons and Hill range about like a couple of extraterrestrials in their own black goggles. Gimme All Your Loving and Sharp Dressed Man gets the fans bopping and, pausing to strap on fluffy z-shaped guitars, Billy and Dusty close the set with Legs.
Returning for an encore in black sequinned stetsons, it is greatest hits time. Tube Snake Boogie, with its Hooker/Canned Heat riff is accompanied by synchronised duckwalking and then the house lights come up to egg on the front rows for Tush. I been bad, I been good. Dallas Texas Hollywood. The ZZ Top Triple X tour has plenty of bells and whistles, the trio even has some interesting augmentation from the desk, but at ninety six minutes when the show comes to a business like halt, it all seems rather unsatisfactory.
What with the murky sound and the unspontaneous grind through the setlist I feel these jokers were not ZZ Top world tour best practice tonight. I need to go home and listen to the CDs that made me like this band despite their hotrods and their wacko beards. A few tracks of their catchy guitar rock at its best- and maybe I’ll be a fool for their stockings once again.
Commissioned for The Adelaide Review May 2000 but not published.