Billy would set a sheet of paper in the middle of the floor and write out lyrics on the hoof.” “The three of us would bash around till we got tired, sometimes by five pm, others we’d go on to midnight. “We knew the direction we were going in so weren’t flying blind,” Beard says. According to the drummer, for the next several weeks Gibbons and Hill would arrive at his home for one pm and they would then go down in his basement studio to drill the raw materials into shape. It was to there at the start of ’82 that Manning shipped a portable recording studio.įrom there, the action moved to Beard’s new house on the outskirts of Houston. Certainly, work started at Gibbons’s house on South Padre Island, a fingertip of land jutting into the ocean from off the Texan Gulf Coast. In the respective tales of Gibbons, Hill and Beard, Eliminator was forged during months of close-knit jam sessions, the band bolt-holed first in Texas and then at their preferred studio in Memphis. And if on the surface it appeared an entirely cohesive musical statement, there lurks a more convoluted, contentious truth behind the story of its making which continues to keep secrets and ferment bad blood. “But then if we didn’t play those songs we’d likely get strung up by our heels,” Frank Beard notes sanguinely. Yet it has endured to such an extent that, 33 years on, it supplied more than a third of the tracks on Live Greatest Hits From Around The World, the band’s then live album. Eliminator was such a significant departure that it incited blues purists to accuse the band of an act of near-heresy. In total, it sounded the work of an altogether new band, but then again timeless. The eventual first fruit of their labours was Eliminator, which became by far ZZ Top’s most successful and also controversial album. So I came up with some ideas we could implement to make a very different album.” The market had changed quite a bit from blues-based rock’n roll. I started going to clubs and studying beats. He started to analyse why ZZ didn’t get played in dance clubs, and concluded that they were not up to the required rhythmic capabilities. He’s extremely philosophical, a deep thinker and musically very aware. “And not only musically, but also as a human being, if there is such a definition. “To me Billy is a true genius,” offers Terry Manning, who engineered ZZ’s records from Tres Hombres to 1990’s Recycler. Gibbons’s elders by a half a decade and more, the Stones had just then recast themselves as fresh, vibrant, even sonic explorers, as his own band had got stuck in a rut of their own making. Hauling their unloved album around Europe later that same year, Gibbons happened into a club late one night and was struck by the spectacle of a throng of people dancing to the Rolling Stones’ elastic-limbed funk-a-thon Emotional Rescue. That was a very primitive version of what we went on to do.”Įl Loco, though, proved to be too jarring for ZZ’s heartland audience and sold less than half as much as its predecessor. “Very early on, I walked into the studio one time and found Billy on the floor, pumping the pedals of an organ with his hands, just shadowing a bass part of mine. “But we’d always done that kind of thing,” insists Hill, the cadence of his Texan drawl a beat quicker that Gibbons’s mellifluous burr. I was just pushing buttons and found something that sounded kind of trashy.” “The intrigue of these new-found contraptions was by then just starting to catch on, but we didn’t have a teacher or guide, we didn’t even have an instruction manual. “Without question there’s some crazy, interesting-sounding stuff on that record,” Gibbons says today, from his perch on ZZ’s tour bus as it winds its way around the European festival circuit. Tres hombres hit the road to worldwide success
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