kevin statham photo
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT, SEPT. 9, 1994
By Steve Newton
“Those babes gotta go,” said my pal Lindy as our gang of ZZ Top fans strolled from the Coliseum to the PNE beer garden last Saturday (September 3), the sonic blast of Billy Gibbons’s down ‘n’ dirty guitar still ricocheting inside our heads. “Those babes are outta here!,” she said more vehemently, punctuating the phrase with a quick lash of her arm, thumb extended, like a baseball umpire.
That’s when I realized that Lindy has been more than a little perturbed by the sexism the little ol ‘ band from Texas had shown during its two-hour-plus show, having near-naked women do the bump and grind on four separate occasions. And I had to agree that ZZ Top did overdo it in the sleaze department; it was almost as if they were worried that their music and elaborate staging wouldn’t be enough to please their primarily male audience.
But I guess that sort of macho approach can be expected from a band with song titles like “Tush”, “Legs”, and the rarely heard, never-released “Knockers”.
The suggestive show started when a curtain inscribed with their fantasy-radio-station motto, Tone, Taste, Tenacity, was dragged away to reveal a stage flanked by antenna towers, with power lines reaching down to a huge model of an old-fashioned radio that had illuminated dials and tubes and something most old radios never featured: stairs for band members to climb on.
After opening with “World of Swirl”, one of the finer tunes on the group’s latest release, Antenna, guitarist Billy GIbbons and bassist Dusty Hill made their way down from the monster transmitter and greeted the crowd in their matching finery: black leather jackets, black ZZ Top baseball caps, black shades, black jeans, and black Doc Martens–not to mention black custom-made guitars.
They carried on with two more new tunes, the mid-tempo single “Pincushion” and the slinky, slow “Breakaway”, but the mostly male crowd was surprisingly quiet until the silhouetted forms of three shapely females playing various percussion instruments were shown in spotlights behind drummer Frank Beard.
That little bit of titillation caused the first of many enthusiastic hoots and hollers during the concert; it was just kinda sad–especially considering Gibbons’s immense guitar talents–that most of the night’s applause had more to do with babe appreciation than with music appreciation.
The fancy staging that ZZ top is noted for came into play during a new tune, “Antenna Head”, when Hill and Gibbons were drawn–via green lasers–into a humming “transformer” that then overloaded and exploded amid showering sparks and the type of sizzling, burning-out electrical noise you hope you never hear at home. The band–which had obviously exited the big steel box via a trapdoor–then materialized inside glowing “power tubes” at the back of the stage.
Not exactly David Copperfield–but then, have you ever seen him play “La Grange”?
Fuzzy white guitars signaled the arrival of ZZ Top’s huge mid-’80s hit, “Legs”, and yet another floor show by the long-limbed ladies, this routine even more provocative than the previous ones. Still, since there were some underage kids in the mostly 30-and-over crowd, the show stopped short of becoming ZZ Topless–even during the encore of “Viva Las Vegas”, when the dancers’ skimpy showgirl outfits must have caused a flurry of last-minute rentals at the binoculars booths.
Although ZZ Top’s headlining performance definitely catered to male fantasies, handsome opener Ian Moore gave the females in the crowd something to gawk at as well. The slender, blonde-haired, 26-year-old guitar sensation from Austin, Texas, has looks that kill, not to mention a promising behind-the-scenes career as a session player should he ever wake up ugly.
His soaring, Hendrix-inspired guitar work powered rock-solid versions of his funky and soulful “Deliver Me” and the Freddie King blues showcase “Me and My Guitar”. I was actually a bit surprised that ZZ Top didn’t invite the potential superstar up to jam on a tune or two. Maybe they thought that his boyish good looks would clash too much with their famous Rip Van Winkle rip-offs.
To hear the full 27-minute audio of my interview with Billy Gibbons from 1994 subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 300 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with:
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