I said, Lord, take me downtown

Posted on by brucehhackett

Back in 1970, the two most popular brands of rolling papers were Zig-Zag and Top. When a gritty little blues band out of Texas named ZZ Top released their debut album, stoners assumed the name was a winking reference to those two brands.

Billy Gibbons, the group’s superb guitarist and de facto leader, chuckles when he hears this and replies, “No, I’m afraid not. We had a bunch of posters of great blues players in our apartment back then, people like B.B. King and Arzell Hill, who went by Z.Z. Hill, and we thought we’d combine them into ZZ King, but that was too similar to B.B. King’s name, so we figured, ‘The king is at the top,” so we went with ZZ Top. That’s the true story.”

Hmmm. Well, okay. I can live with that, although I think the first version makes for a more enticing tale. In either case, ZZ Top is certainly a better name than Gibbons’ first band, The Moving Sidewalks. Ultimately, what matters in this group’s story is the music and the remarkable long-term chemistry between the three guys who comprised ZZ Top for all these years. They’ve set a record (51 years) for the rock band with the most years without a change in the band’s lineup.

Dusty Hill, circa 1975

Sadly, though, that has come to an end with the death last week of Dusty Hill, the extraordinary bass player behind ZZ Top’s unique sound. He had suffered from bursitis, a hip replacement and even an accidental gunshot wound in the past, but still, his passing at age 72 was unexpected.

Fans will be pleased to hear that ZZ Top plans to continue touring with Elwood Francis, the band’s long-time guitar tech, on bass. According to Gibbons, “Dusty emphatically grabbed my arm a little while back and said, ‘Give Elwood the bottom end, and take it to the Top.’ That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

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Note: There’s a Spotify playlist at the end of this post that I’ve compiled of ZZ Top’s most noteworthy tunes, if you care to listen along while reading!

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Time for a disclaimer: I’ve never bought a ZZ Top album, and frankly, after listening intently to much of their catalog over the past week, I’m not sure why. Their music — hard-driving, blues-based, boogie rock — is right up my alley. Of course, I knew their radio hits, but I just wasn’t sufficiently motivated to take the time to get to know their albums more fully. My mistake. As of this writing, I have become more of a fan, and I have developed a respect for their work and their achievements in the music business.

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Hill and eventual ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard were both from Dallas, becoming bandmates in a local group called American Blues, which also included Hill’s guitarist brother Rocky. In 1968, Dusty Hill and Beard wanted to broaden their horizons to do more than just straight blues, so they relocated to Houston, where the scene offered more musical options.

Dusty Hill, Billy Gibbons, Frank Beard in 1975

Houston-born Gibbons had built some notoriety there as a hot lead guitarist, singer and songwriter with his band, The Moving Sidewalks, and they even got the chance to be the warmup act for his idol, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, once in Houston. “We had the audacity to play ‘Foxy Lady’ and ‘Purple Haze’ in our set, and when we looked offstage, he was standing there, watching and grinning. Afterwards he said, ‘I dig you guys. You’ve got guts.'”

The drummer for The Moving Sidewalks wasn’t working out, so Beard made his move and became the new drummer. The band released a single and was poised to sign a deal with London Records, the American affiliate of British-based Decca Records, but their bass player wouldn’t sign. He was ousted and replaced by Hill at Beard’s recommendation, and the deal with London was inked just as they changed their name to ZZ Top.

Their debut album in 1971 was appropriately titled “ZZ Top’s First Album” because “we wanted everyone to know there would be more,” noted Gibbons. Based on its chart performance, it should’ve also been their last — it went absolutely nowhere, missing the Top 200 album chart and yielding no singles. But when I listened to it last week, I was impressed by the way they took their blues influences and merged them with rock elements to create their own approach. As Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys said last week, “They were a blues band with their own sound, and that’s hard to do.” The tracks weren’t polished, nor was Gibbons’ gruff voice, but there’s solid blues rock there, especially “Brown Sugar” (no relation to the Rolling Stones tune), “Neighbor, Neighbor” and “Backdoor Love Affair.”

Their 1972 follow-up LP, “Rio Grande Mud,” at least reached #104 and spawned the single “Francine,” though it stalled at #69. Gibbons continued to hone his blues-rock songwriting, adding dashes of suggestive humor, innuendo and some taboo subjects here and there into the lyrics just for grins.

By 1973, he came up with a tune that still gets classic rock radio airplay nearly 50 years later: “La Grange,” which uses an infectious riff you may have heard in other blues tunes (“Refried Boogie” by Canned Heat, for example). It’s a tale about a notorious brothel called the Chicken Shack, which became “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” on stage and screen in the ’80s. The album it came from, “Tres Hombres,” recorded in Memphis, peaked at #8, putting ZZ Top on the map in a big way.

My friend Tracie, an Albuquerque native who went to college in Dallas, remembers first seeing and hearing ZZ Top at a free concert on the quad her first week on campus. “ZZ Top will always have a special place in my heart! At that concert, the Texas folk knew who they were, but this ‘little girl from the small mining town in the west’ never heard of them! I knew instantly that if this band was typical of Texas rock, I was gonna love college!” My friend Carl, a native Texan, recalled, “They were a wild-times, rowdy, fun, crank-it-up party band. We memorized every note, every word of tracks like ‘Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers’ until the grooves on the vinyl were gone!”

Hot on its heels in 1975 came “Fandango!,’ a half-live, half-studio release that went Top Ten and included “Tush,” featuring another indelible riff that reached #20 on the singles charts. By this point, the three-piece band was touring virtually non-stop, at first warming up for acts like The Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd but usually as the headliner. Whereas their earlier shows didn’t offer much visually, ZZ Top mounted a mammoth, 300-date tour from mid-1976 to mid-1977 they called the Worldwide Texas Tour, where they used elaborate staging and costumes designed to showcase their Texas roots.

That tour made them one of the nation’s top draws during that period, but it also took its toll. Frank Beard had developed a serious alcohol and drug problem that required rehabilitation, so instead of finding a replacement, the band chose to go on hiatus for a couple of years. For us, there was no other drummer but Frank,” said Hill. “We were tired and needed a break, and we were willing to wait for him to get better.”

Their return to active recording and touring in 1979 was marked by several changes. Gibbons had been paying attention to technological developments and the New Wave music trends, both of which showed up on their albums “Deguello” and “El Loco,” and singles like “Cheap Sunglasses” and the double-entendre classic “Pearl Necklace.” The group made their first appearances in England and the European continent, and time spent in the studio with the British band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark introduced them to how drum machines and synthesizers could became prominent tools in the ZZ Top arsenal. Some of their original fans were none too pleased by this development, but for every old fan they lost, they gained three new ones.

Coincidentally, both Gibbons and Hill, independently and without each other’s knowledge, had grown chest-length beards which, when combined with sunglasses worn more or less permanently, gave them a cartoonish appearance that became part of ZZ Top’s new self-deprecating sense of humor.

The timing of all this was perfect, as Music Television, soon known far and wide as MTV, made its debut and changed the face of pop music. Bands became overnight sensations based just as much (or more) on what their video looked like than what their music sounded like. ZZ Top enlisted videographer Tim Newman, who was keen on shooting “mini-movies” instead of standard concert video. Because Gibbons, Hill and Beard felt they didn’t exactly have matinee movie star looks, they agreed it would be fun to appear only as background observers, watching the gorgeous women and high-octane cars on music videos like “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Legs.” Said Gibbons, “We knew we weren’t prima donna rock stars, so why not be the guys watching from the background, rooting for the underdog and the misfit?”

How ironic that a trio of unfashionable Texas rockers would end up as superstars in the very fashion-conscious MTV era. “We found it all kind of silly, but it was a fun time,” said Beard. And profitable as hell, too — sales of their 1983 LP “Eliminator” topped 15 million and put them in the Top Ten in the US, UK, Australia and several other European countries. The ZZ Top gravy train continued throughout the ’80s, with 1985’s “Afterburner” and 1990’s “Recycler” also achieving huge chart rankings and sales numbers, thanks in large part to MTV exposure for “Rough Boy,” “Doubleback” and “My Head’s in Mississippi.”

1994’s “Antenna” and its hit single “Pincushion” turned out to be ZZ Top’s last fling with superstardom. After that, the band still made a few LPs and toured periodically, but MTV stopped running music videos and their following dwindled. Through it all, the band was like a sturdy three-legged stool — all three legs were of equal importance to the band’s continued lifespan.

Hill, who started playing bass at age 12 because his older brother insisted on it, said he learned a lot about the instrument and what it could do by listening to virtuosos like Cream’s Jack Bruce and jazz greats like Stanley Clarke and Charles Mingus. “I used to try to come up with all these complex bass lines, kind of showing off, I guess,” he said in a 2014 interview. “But it didn’t take me long to figure out I needed to play to the song. Sometimes you shouldn’t even notice the bass, and I hate that in a way, but I also love that in a way. To not be noticed is a compliment. It means you’ve filled in everything just right for the song, and you’re not standing out where you don’t need to be.”

Gibbons, Hill, Beard (without a beard)

That kind of unassuming, humble approach to their fame has served the group well. “We’re the same three guys playing the same three chords,” said Gibbons in the highly watchable 2019 documentary film, “ZZ Top: That Little Ol’ Band From Texas.” If you have even a passing interest in this group, I recommend you check it out. It’s on Amazon now.

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We’re gonna find out what it’s all about

Posted on by brucehhackett

Since we first heard songs on the radio as kids, we would enjoy them without knowing what the lyrics were about. Sometimes we’d even sing along but be clueless as to what the words really meant.

Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes, pop music used nonsense words that meant nothing (“Whomp bomp a loo bomp, a -whomp bam boom!” “Sham-a-lang-a ding dong,” “Be-bop-a-lula”). Sometimes you couldn’t really make out the words because of deliberate slurring of words or muddled production/mixing, but that didn’t stop us from just making up words based on what we thought we heard.

But then there were times we heard every word they were singing but still weren’t sure what the lyrics were about.

Some of these were songs that have become such an integral part of the pop culture that we might want to finally learn what the author (lyricist) intended. Whereas many songwriters preferred to stay tight-lipped and let the songs speak for themselves, others have no qualms about discussing the words, particularly many years after the fact.

Here are eight songs you always wondered about — songs that were huge hits on the US Top 40 charts which had lyrics that are, at the very least, open to interpretation. Through interviews, biographies and magazine articles, I have researched the meaning behind these songs. I hope you find my findings enlightening.

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The Animals in 1964 (L-R): Hilton Valentine, Eric Burdon, John Steel, Chas Chandler, Alan Price

“The House of the Rising Sun,” The Animals, 1964

Historians have studied this classic for nearly a hundred years. Its melody is a traditional English ballad that morphed into an African-American folk song recorded as early as the 1920s by a guy named Texas Alexander. It was later recorded by other greats like Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan (on his debut LP) and Nina Simone in 1962 before it became the #1 hit with a rock arrangement by The Animals in 1964. Ah, but what is “the House of the Rising Sun”? While there is no definitive answer, there are two prominent theories. The first says it was a brothel in New Orleans in the 1860-70s, run by Madame Marianne LeSoleil Levant (French for “rising sun”). The second maintains it was the Orleans Parish Prison, which had an entrance gate adorned with rising-sun artwork. The line about “wearing that ball and chain” could be literal, in a prison, or metaphorical, in which the narrator has become a prisoner to the lifestyle of prostitution, gambling and alcoholism. In either case, the song is clearly a cautionary tale in which the narrator advises the listener not to “spend your life in sin and misery” as he has done.

The Eagles in 1977: Randy Meisner, Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Don Felder, Joe Walsh

“Hotel California,” The Eagles, 1976

The most popular, most overplayed, most brilliant song in The Eagles’ catalog has been the subject of speculation from the day it was released in December 1976. “Is it a real place?” “Whose mind was ‘Tiffany-twisted’?” Guitarist Joe Walsh, who had just joined the band before the album’s release, had this to say: “The funny thing was, nobody in The Eagles was from California. Everyone was from Ohio, or Michigan, or Texas. California at the time was like this big hotel, a big melting pot of musicians with talent, trying to fit in. That’s what we meant by Hotel California.'” Musically, the song was born from chord changes conceived by guitarist Don Felder, who submitted them to chief songwriters Don Henley and Glenn Frey, whose reaction was, “I like it. It’s kind of a Mexican reggae vibe.” Lyrically, it’s one of Henley’s finest moments, writing cryptically about the hedonistic life that California offered, and how it ended up being a trap for a lot of people: “We are all just prisoners here of our own device… Last thing I remember, I was running for the door… You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave..“

The Stones in 1971: Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Mick Jagger, Billy Wyman, Mick Taylor

“Brown Sugar,” The Rolling Stones, 1971

It was classic rock and roll, and it was radio-friendly accessible pop as well. Mick Jagger was singing and strutting at his very best at this point, and Keith Richards laid the foundation with another of his uncannily catchy riffs. With a killer sax solo by the great session man Bobby Keys, it all adds up to a big #1 single for The Stones. Ah, but have you ever listened, really listened, to the lyrics? Good Lord, it’s amazing that this song got anywhere near Top 40 playlists, but because Jagger mumbles the words just enough, you’re not entirely sure what he’s singing about. Well, here’s the scoop: They’re singing about a grab bag of scandalous topics, including slavery, rape, interracial sex, sadomasochism, oral sex and hard drug use, all pretty much taboo on pop radio in 1971. Consider the opening stanza: “Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields, sold in a market down in New Orleans, scarred old slaver knows he’s doing all right, hear him whip the women just around midnight…” And then there’s the title, which some thought meant heroin but instead refers to a black woman’s private parts and how good they taste. Wow. Just wow.

The duo behind Steely Dan, 1977: Walter Becker and Donald Fagen

“Deacon Blues,” Steely Dan, 1977

By 1976, after five solid albums had brought fame and fortune to Steely Dan, the songwriting duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were chilling at a Malibu beach house writing songs for their next LP. Fagen had been amused when he heard the nickname “Crimson Tide” for the University of Alabama football team, which he thought very flamboyant and arrogant, and he came up with “Deacon Blues” as the flip-side of that coin (“They got a name for the winners in the world, I want a name when I lose…”). Fagen told Rolling Stone, “Walter heard that and said, ”You mean it’s like, ‘They call these cracker assholes this grandiose name like the Crimson Tide, and I’m this broken man living a broken life with broken dreams, so they call me this other grandiose name, Deacon Blues? Cool!’ So we made the protagonist a wanna-be musician who hopes to play the sax but is just a hopeless drunk.” He’s full of “crazy schemes” that go nowhere: “My back to the wall, a victim of laughing chance, /This is for me, the essence of true romance, /Sharing the things we know and love with those of my kind, /Libations, sensations that stagger the mind…”

Joni Mitchell with David Geffen, 1974

“Free Man in Paris,” Joni Mitchell, 1974

I remember when I first heard this tune from Mitchell’s “Court and Spark” album, I assumed it was an autobiographical look at the consequences of her fame, in which she describes herself (using the masculine gender) as wanting to escape “and wander down the Champs-Élysées, going café to cabaret.” Turns out I was only partially right. Mitchell did indeed feel uncomfortable with the scrutiny and stress of fame, but that served to put her in a position to accurately understand what her friend and manager David Geffen was feeling. The two of them rose up the ranks simultaneously, she as a songwriter and performing artist and he as an agent, businessman, manager and label founder. Geffen had confided in her that he felt most comfortable as “a free man in Paris,” unencumbered by the pressure of people hounding him with demands. Mitchell implies, though, that maybe he needs to bring his ego down a few notches because what he does isn’t really all that important (“the work I’ve taken on, stoking the starmaker machinery behind the popular song…”).

David Bowie in concert in Berlin, 1977

“Heroes,” David Bowie, 1977

Bowie was living in a one-room apartment in Berlin in the late ’70s when he came up with this hopeful piece about a German couple who would meet on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall every day to share a moment together. “We’re lovers, and that is a fact, /Yes, we’re lovers, and that is that, /Though nothing will keep us together, we could steal time just for one day, /We can be heroes forever and ever, what d’you say?…” In truth, Bowie was alluding to a specific couple: his producer Tony Visconti, who was in a disintegrating marriage at the time, and singer Antonia Maass, with whom he had fallen in love. He would see them from the studio window when they would secretly kiss by the Berlin Wall. “I didn’t discuss it publicly at the time,” he said in 2003, “but I can now. It was so sweet, this desperate love they had.” Thanks to Visconti, co-songwriter Brian Eno, and guitarist Robert Fripp of King Crimson, “Heroes” has established itself as one of Bowie’s most iconic tracks, a glorious celebration of “love conquers all,” sung by Bowie with almost overwhelming emotion.

David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, 1969

“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” Crosby, Stills and Nash, 1969

The song that kicked off this supergroup trio’s career is in fact a tour de force showcasing the musical genius of Stephen Stills on multiple guitars, keyboards, bass and lead vocals. David Crosby and Graham Nash provide the other voices that formed the thrilling three-part harmonies which were their signature sound, but Stills deserves about 85% of the credit for how this track turned out. Most important, he found a way to merge three musical song fragments into a cohesive whole, which explains why the song’s title is “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” not “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes,” as many incorrectly assume. Judy is, of course, songstress Judy Collins, who was Stills’ paramour during the previous year, and the lyrics explore his feelings about the end of that relationship. Alternately heartbreaking and philosophical, Stills admits his shortcomings and tells her how he feels, and how he thinks he’s going to feel going forward: “It’s getting to the point where I’m no fun anymore, I am sorry…” “Will you come see me Thursdays and Saturdays? What have you got to lose?”

Procol Harum, 1967 (L-R): Ray Royer, Keith Reid, Matthew Fisher, David Knights, Gary Brooker

“A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Procol Harum, 1967

Keith Reid, a poet friend of Procol Harum founder/keyboardist/singer Gary Brooker, was enlisted to write lyrics for the new band’s music, and he got off to a memorable start with “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” their debut single and one of the most enduring songs of its era. Reid recalls, “I was at a party and I overheard someone to say to a woman, ‘You’ve turned a whiter shade of pale.’ The phrase stuck in my mind.” He went on to write four very literary verses that tell the evocative story of a man who pursues a young woman for a sexual encounter. The limitations of pop music in 1967 meant the song was edited down to just two verses, but if you read all four, “the truth is plain to see” — the couple danced, talked, had drinks, and “crash-dived straightaway quickly and attacked the ocean bed.” The hit single version, which includes verses 1 and 3, is more enigmatic and open to interpretation. Is the line “The room was humming harder as the ceiling flew away” a reference to psychedelic drugs? Maybe…but Reid has said, “It’s really just a song influenced by literature. It’s about a relationship. There’s characters, there’s a location, and there’s a journey.”

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The accompanying Spotify playlist includes, where applicable, additional demo versions, alternate takes or live tracks of the song in question. Interesting to compare them…