Blues shuffle in c by zz top3/2/2023 ![]() ![]() ZZ Top is still the same three musicians of First Album, most recognizable since the early ’80s, after two of them had grown their beards out fully: the singer and guitarist Billy Gibbons, the bassist Dusty Hill and the drummer Frank Beard. The record jacket doesn’t look trippy, either. The marathon jamming of that first rehearsal has been radically sweated down and delimited some new concision and straight-faced weirdness are going on here. ![]() That entails a lot of baggage, but the sound of ZZ Top’s first album is cool and airy and steady also simple, funky, dry as a bone, almost sedated. It’s also kind of knowingly absurd white blues-rock is absurd. Zoom out and you may see a tradition of people fascinated by an energy or a language they couldn’t claim as their birthright, using mad ambition and desire to live within it nevertheless people fluent in the mechanics of privilege, creative and social mobility, street culture, rapid youth crazes, camp, public relations and humor people who classicize vernacular art, spending long hours of rigorous study to make their gift seem as easy as leaning against a car and picking their teeth. Ībout three-quarters of its aesthetic arrives at once on that record’s first track, “(Somebody Else Been) Shaking Your Tree.” It is a medium-tempo blues stomp fattened in the intro by a loud and polite steel guitar: The blues band is signaling you up front about its proximity to country music. Then you hear a young man’s effortfully croaked vocals, singing lyrics at a slight ironic distance to the jealous-lover tradition a single-chorus guitar solo almost stoic in tone and precision another chorus with no guitar or bass, just drums and shaker and an abrupt ending with the steel and maracas: an aural illustration of the line “shakes your tree.” The band played its first gig a month later, in Beaumont, Texas recorded its first album later that year and in January 1971, 50 years ago, released ZZ Top’s First Album. ZZ Top first rehearsed in January 1970, working out on a blues shuffle in C for three hours. ![]() The Art of Kinda Fittin’ In: ZZ Top Begins ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |