Concertwire.com

ZZ Top began as a rough-and-ready blues-rock power trio from Texas that became a huge mid-'70s concert attraction. Their real commercial peak didn't come, however, until the '80s, when the "Little Ol' Band from Texas" became MTV superstars and sold multiple millions of albums. ZZ Top was built around guitarist Billy Gibbons, whose career began with the popular Southwestern band Moving Sidewalks. They opened one night for Jimi Hendrix, and he later mentioned Gibbons on The Tonight Show as one of America’s best young guitarists. After Moving Sidewalks broke up, Gibbons and manager/producer Bill Ham recruited Frank Beard and Dusty Hill from a Dallas band, American Blues. Beginning with the release of First Album in 1970, ZZ Top has toured constantly, building a national following that has made all the band’s albums gold or platinum. A yearlong tour in 1976 was one of the largest-grossing road trips in rock at the time. Onstage with the band were snakes, longhorn cattle, buffalo, cactus, and other Southwestern paraphernalia. The group sold over a million tickets. They didn’t record for the next three years, until 1979’s Deguello. Though ZZ Top’s only major hit singles had been Tres Hombres’ “La Grange” and Fandango!’s “Tush,” their albums consistently made the Top 40. With 1983’s Eliminator, ZZ Top made a quantum leap from best-kept secret to massive stardom. Thanks to smartly directed video clips for such songs as “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” “Legs,” and “TV Dinners,” Gibbons and Hill, with their long beards (ironically Frank Beard usually wore only a mustache), became MTV icons, as did the cherry red 1933 Ford coupe that gave the album its name, and which the band drove in the videos. Thanks to this exposure, a whole new audience began buying the band’s albums, and Eliminator eventually sold some 10 million copies, remaining on the chart for over three and a half years. “Legs” introduced a pulsating synthesizer beat into ZZ Top’s crunching blues-rock riffs.