ZZ caught up

Yelling about music is reserved for Jeph Jacques and his music blog. His comic strip isn’t bad either, and by “not bad” I mean “when I decided to start at the beginning to catch up it consumed my soul until I was fully caught up”. I was going to split this blog into two, which tied into the first sentence more (I left it because I dig QC). First we’ll have the ZZ Top part, then the non-ZZ Top part in a day or so.

I’m almost caught up on my ZZ Top. A while back I got my hands on all of the post-Afterburner ZZ Top albums, and while some I’d listened to and blown off, I had a desire to now go back and check out what one of my favorite bands in high school has been doing since…well, since I was in High School (although Recycler came out during that time, I’ve never owned a copy).

The previously mentioned Recycler was up first, and while I still didn’t care for it, I didn’t find it as derivative as I remembered it being. True, “My Head’s in Mississippi” is still a heavier “La Grange”, but none of the other songs struck me as carbon copies of other ZZ Top songs. Antenna was a lot more fun to listen to than I remembered. “Fuzzbox Voodoo”, “Girl in a T-Shirt”, “World of Swirl” and “Pincushion” were big standouts, and the album only seemed a bit lacking near the end. My memories of driving seventy miles to get Antenna probably didn’t help, as I’m sure I listened to Eliminator the whole way. I heard it then as another letdown, where as now I hear it for what it is. It’s a decent album and a nice pick up from Recycler’s post-syth thud.

Then there’s Rhythmeen. I still remember seeing ZZ Top had a new album coming out, and I was pretty excited because all the buzz I was hearing was good. Too bad all the buzz was from magazines I was reading while working at Q98 in Fargo. Radio trades that push songs never go out of their way to say bad things. In fact, they go above and beyond the call of duty to accentuate any positive they can find (or they make one up) to get a station to jump on a track. One of them tracked airplay and gave PD opinions, and most PDs were liking the new single. We were playing it, and it wasn’t horrible (the song “What’s Up With That”). Then, one fateful day before I hit the road for Veblen, I bought Rhythmeen on cassette (I took longer in switching to CD, okay) and the title track almost made me tear up, no joke. It was that good. I was convinced ZZ Top was back and just like I remembered. The rest of the CD took that great start and dialed in the rest, with the exception of “She’s Just Killing Me”. Listening to it today, the feeling of them phoning it in wasn’t dashed, but there were a few tracks I liked more now than then.

XXX was something I picked up used the year after it came out, as I was still a bit turned off by Rhythmeen. I listened to it once, and not since. I remember it being just bad, but now I realize some of those feelings are leftover from Rhythmeen. XXX is a work that a lot of bands that have been around a long time make. I can’t think of anything bad to say about it, but I also am at a loss to say what was good about it. It is what it is, and it is just there.

Right now I’m listening to the one ZZ Top album I’ve never heard before, Mescalero. The song on as I type is “Piece” which was the first single, and a song that instantly turned me off from even looking for the album used. The other songs on the album (so far) are not only better, but give me some hope for the Rick Rubin-produced album we might hear this year. Mescalero sounds like ZZ Top went into the studio to do an album like they used to in spirit, but sounding like they have for the last few decades because it’s how their sound has evolved to at this point. Can Rick strip away all that ZZ Top has added and get them back to the sound that made them favorites back in that shack outside “La Grange”?

Ask me again this fall (hopefully). In the meantime, I think I’ll keep these later-career ZZ Top albums around. My iPod isn’t taxed for space…yet.

A ZZ Top blog? More like a Zzzzzzzzzz top blog

I’ve been trying to write a blog about ZZ Top for a few days now, but it never looks or sounds right.  Here’s the last one I tried, and rather than delete it, I thought I’d share what I still had.

What happened to ZZ Top?

First off, nothing I know of is technically “wrong” with the band.  It’s the same three guys, they’re still relatively healthy and on tour every year.  What I’m wondering is what happened to their studio output?

Their Texas-boogie-blues sound made them arena favorites in the 70s.  MTV and a synth’d up approach shot their popularity through the roof in the 80s.  Then, came Recycler.  My friend Joe, the biggest ZZ Top fan I’ve ever known, was rather so-so on the album.  The album’s most memorable song was basically a beefed up “La Grange”.  His beef was that every track on Recycler sounded like a previous ZZ Top song, just redone a bit.  Antenna came next, and while a bit better, it never connected with me.  The same goes for Rhythmeen and XXX.  By the time Mescalero came out, I was done.  Now, comes word that Rick Rubin is on board to produce the next ZZ Top album.  Mr. Rubin has a pretty solid track record, and if anyone can pull one more great album out of Billy,

I had more ideas and more thinks to hit on, but I just couldn’t find a way to make it sound interesting, nor could I put it together in a way I was happy with.  Another topic would have been whether or not the 1980s were the best or worst decade for ZZ Top (I actually think it was both).  My curiosity about revisiting Recycler and Antenna have been awakened slightly by thinking about this.  Yes, I have time to think about how I feel about ZZ Top.  The question is, does anybody else?  ZZ Top was huge for a few years, but in the last 10-15 years does anybody talk about/care about ZZ Top?  They did get in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a few years ago, and Billy Gibbons pops up on the odd TV show now and then.  Nobody I talk to on line or offline seems to care one way or another about ZZ Top.  Heck, I didn’t even care enough to get this blog right. 

Then there’s the worry about whether or not my musical moods/tastes have moved in a direction that doesn’t have room for a band I once counted as one of my favorites, but that’s a whole other blog.

ZZ Top lovers and/or haters are encouraged to point me in a direction.