ZZ Top “La Futura”
In the early 1980s, I was under the mistaken impression that ZZ Top was a novelty band, produced by the state of Texas, as a sort of souvenir for the rest of us. I didn’t know what “marketing” was at the time but I assumed that ZZ Top was “marketing..” The beards. The cars. The trick guitars. The video starlets, straight from an adult film spoof of “Dallas.” All of it. To be clear, my emerging masculinity kind of liked the funny/sexy videos that they played on MTV. But I never much considered ZZ Top’s music. As a kid from the Northeast, I figured it was likely just a joke that I didn’t quite understand -- that it was for guys in their thirties, who drank Budweiser and were more physically able than I.
Just a couple of years later, in the sunrise of Classic Rock radio, I heard “La Grange” for the first time. That song, I knew immediately, was clearly not a joke. It sounded like somebody had poured gasoline on a John Deere lawn tractor and set it on fire. I was briefly astounded to learn that it was the same band who made those funny songs for MTV. My curiosity piqued, I spent nine dollars at Music Merchant for a cassette copy of “Tres Hombres.” I knew nothing of the Blues. I knew little more about Texas and its culture. But there was something in that album, something hot and deep and groovy but also really simple, clean and chill that my entire body responded to. Still very much subject to the playlists of Pop radio and MTV and a couple years away from discovering Punk and Indie, I felt like I had unearthed some buried treasure.
On the cusp of adolescence, I was too young, restless and insecure to fully commit to The Blues, in general, or ZZ Top, in particular. But my purchase of “Tres Hombres” in 1985 unlocked a new musical independence and curiosity in me. I wondered: “What else was I not hearing? What else was radio not telling me? What else did my friends not know about?” Those questions led me far away from the last band listed in The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, but I knew I would eventually have to return.
In 1983, buried under the planetary weight of “Thriller,” “Synchronicity,” and “1999,” ZZ Top scored four massive radio hits and sold ten million copies of “Eliminator” in the United States alone. By 1986, they were the most successful touring band in America. With the help of seven year old beards, amped up synthesizers, extra guitar fuzz and some robots in the beat, Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard reached an unimaginable peak. None of it happened overnight. In an almost workmanlike fashion, the band had released a couple dozen modest to serious hit singles since 1969. They toured incessantly. They remained immovably loyal to the Blues and to Texas. They simply worked and worked and went deeper and deeper into what, at its core, was an elemental sound. It was a sound made by three relatively slight, middle aged men, hidden by Stetson hats, sunglasses and yards of facial hair. As it happened, one of those three men -- Billy Gibbons -- was once also, according to Jimi Hendrix, America’s best young guitar player.
Five years passed between “Afterburner,” ZZ Top’s last “event” album from 1985 and “Recycler,” their unfortunately named follow-up from 1990. Not only was the latter rightly accused of uninspired repetition, but it also arrived at the height of Hair Metal and the beginning of the golden age of Hip Hop. In comparison, ZZ Top sounded not just older and more tired, but less exciting and relevant.
ZZ Top’s 1990s and 2000s were marked by relative creative consistency, but also a marked decline in their mainstream popularity. They got older. Their bodies broke down a bit. They flirted a bit more with Country and Tejano music. But, also, they mostly stayed the same. The same guys. The same clothes. The same beards. And, meanwhile, The White Stripes and, particularly, The Black Keys, found success with formulas greatly indebted to ZZ Top. The history of white men updating The Blues for greater success than their Black heroes and antecedents is both long and terribly complicated. What is not complicated, though, is the formula. Talented white guitarist takes the Blues, injects some new ingredient -- be it Metal, Psychedelia, Punk or New Wave -- and is heralded as a revelation. Many artists, namely Eric Clapton and his various guises, did this before Billy Gibbons and ZZ Top. But none did it for as long or as well as ZZ Top. As great as The White Stripes were and as good as The Black Keys can be, neither has twenty plus songs that will endure like the music of ZZ Top. It’s not hyperbole to suggest that neither of those bands exist without ZZ Top.
Following their gradual popular decline and the Garage Rock revival that owed more than a little to the band, it only made sense that ZZ Top would be ripe for reclamation in the 2000s. What made even more sense, in fact so much sense that it seems too obvious, was that the man behind the reclamation project would be Rick Rubin. Having succeeded with Johnny Cash and tried his darndest with AC/DC, Rubin offered the beard and the adoration required for the job. A genuine devotee of ZZ Top, Rubin knew the singular genius of the band. In many ways, ZZ Top is the inverted twin of AC/DC, Rubin’s favorite band of all time. Both AC/DC are born from an old, smoldering Blues mine. Both take hammers to well-worn Blues hooks and then reconstruct songs from the parts. Both bands like to play loud and fast. But, in essential ways, the two bands diverge. Alphabetically, AC/DC first. ZZ Top is last. AC/DC achieves maximum treble and volume, evoking the startling shriek of Robert Johnson’s voice. ZZ Top digs deep into the bass and groove, finding the bottom of the swamp. AC/DC run almost white hot while ZZ Top is a cooler, blue flame. You feel AC/DC is your ears and your balls. ZZ Top plays to the hips and legs. They were clearly born to the same mother, but from different fathers.
While I am articulating this comparison for the first time here and now, it seems likely that Rick Rubin considered it for years. He did not succeed with AC/DC’s “Ballbreaker” from 1995. Perhaps his love was too great and, in looking for the perfect sound, he lost sight of the songs. But he wouldn’t make the same mistake again. In 2003, he began working with ZZ Top on “La Futura.” It would be nearly a decade before the album saw the light of day. Other than their few, but ardent, loyalists, nobody was really waiting for “La Futura.” So, Rubin just let Billy, Dusty and Frank live with the songs. They wrote dozens. They recorded them. And they recorded them again. Then they’d go and sit in Malibu with Rubin and look at the ocean and consider at all. Rick Rubin often talks about his job as producer as one wherein he works to get the very best version of that song from that band at that moment. All of it -- the pondering, the waiting, the thinking -- sounds tiresome. But in there is also a great deal of listening. And, say what you will, but Rick Rubin is an elite listener. His albums have effect of forcing the audience to listen to every note from every instrument in every song. He cannot make the songs great if they are not great. But he can open the band and the listener alike to what a great song should sound like.
When it finally was released, “La Futura” was surprisingly succinct. Ten songs. Less than forty minutes. Very little in the way of jams. It sounds, oddly, almost uncannily, like The Black Keys fronted by Billy Gibbons. This is not a criticism. Most Black Keys’ albums sound great. But they also can sound derivative. Derivative, in fact, of ZZ Top. So, there is an uncanniness in hearing ZZ Top sound like an imitation of itself. Generally speaking, though, “La Futura” is professional, tight, fun and Texan. It rarely misses but rarely kills. In many ways, it sounds a lot like the idea of ZZ Top, produced with the knowledge of Hip Hop and The White Stripes. It sounds like a well made, deeply researched product more than it sounds like the band that made “Tres Hombres” and “Eliminator.” In the same way that Subway sandwiches taste like Subway and not like sandwiches, Rick Rubin albums can sound like Rick Rubin albums and not like the music that the band makes in their natural state.
“La Futura” opens with a cover of DJ DMD’s “25 Lighters,” reconceived here as a hitchy, bluesy number called “I Gotsta Get Paid.” Given his history with Rock and Rap, it seemed logical that this single originated with Rubin, but that is not the case. DJ DMD was a Houston artist and Billy Gibbons, Texan to his core, loved the track when it was first released and had been trying for some time to find a Blues hook to wrap around the unforgettable chorus. The result is a fun, light and schticky track that sounds a great deal like The Black Keys with Gibbons taking vocals. As the first single the band released in nearly a decade and a flare for the rest of “La Futura” it portends well. It sounds decidedly contemporary, even as Gibbons’ rasp sounds beat up to the point of resembling twenty-first century Tom Waits.
Whereas “I Gotsta Get Paid” is all hook and bass drum, the second track, “Chartreuse” sounds like a full band. Dusty’s bass helps them find the boogie and Billy’s vocal sound fuller here. Whereas the opener felt like a gimmick, “Chartreuse” sounds like a timeless ZZ Top song. It has some purr and some snarl. It’s a great name for a big boned stripper. And it rhymes with “caboose” and “juice.” Check. Check. Check.
Throughout the album, Gibbons’ guitar sounds terrific and is featured most prominently. There is some piano and Hammond, but the synthesizers are spared and the guitar never hides in the fuzz. As with all Rick Rubin albums, you get to hear each instrument as they are at their best. To the producer’s discredit, however, many of the songs feature the “on / off” trick wherein Rubin will pull out an instrument suddenly and then drop it back in a few moments later. The first time you hear it, the effect is halting, like a record scratch. Used over and over again, it becomes distracting to the point of annoying. It gets the listener’s attention but briefly kills the groove.
All of the hooks on “La Futura” are familiar, to the point of occasionally sounding derivative. The truth is, they are. However, Gibbons is such a good guitarist and the band is so expert in their style that even the less compelling songs sound vaguely “classic.” Additionally, ZZ Top is so consistent that it can be hard to distinguish the pretty good from the great. In the middle of their pack, as on “Flyin’ High” and “Big Shiny Nine,” they can sound like they are making first rate music for a NASCAR commercial or for a basic cable show about Texas bikers. And when they slow down too much, as on “It’s Too Easy Manana,” you can feel like it’s 2am and you are on a bad high with the last call crew with no better place to be.
But, Fucking A when they find that heavy, Texas boogie. “I Don’t Want to Lose, Lose, Lose You” and “Have a Little Mercy” just cook. When they start with The Blues, lock in a groove and then heat it up, I don’t care whether they are talking about women, guns, cars or drugs. I don’t care about The White Stripes. I don’t care about the producer. All I can hear then is this massive something, digging and growling until it finds it. There’s still humor in the music, but where AC/DC screams it out, ZZ Top just sound like grown men, working on it. The “it” is the same. But the “where” is a world apart. It’s the distance between an Australian garage in the early 1970s and a Texas garage in the late 1960s.
In the mid 1980s, when ZZ Top was at the height of their popularity, I was too young and not Texan enough to appreciate most of it. In the ensuing decades, I didn’t consider the band much at all. If anything, I dismissed them as a relic of Classic Rock radio and Southern Rock, a notch above Edgar Winter but below Skynyrd and The Allman Brothers. I was wrong. ZZ Top was leagues better than those bands, especially in their unadorned, 1970s form. “La Futura” helped me hear that fact if only in that it pointed me back in the right direction. I suspect that I won’t listen to “La Futura” ever again and almost certainly not in its entirety. Nothing against the album. I like it just fine and, at least in 2012, critics really liked it. But, to me, it has the sound of music made more for Rick Rubin or as a denouement for a story that I mostly believe but which is also mostly a projection. As it happens, I now live in Texas so I am more familiar with the hard working, competent, overt, come-and-get-it masculinity that birthed “La Grange,” “Tush,” “Legs,” and “Cheap Sunglasses.” So, if I am ever going to return to ZZ Top, I figure I’ll stay there, before the MTV videos and the stadium tours and the white glove production. Back to three men being tres hombres.