Please explain: Where’s this clip been all my years of poking around YouTube for holy grails, and what version of Pink Floyd is this anyhow?
I know these questions may expose me as a real rock dummy, but I’ve never seen this before. There’s at least one Syd Barrett-era song, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a coherent live performance by Barrett or the early Barrett-less Floyd playing anything but their proto-space jams. That’s not Barrett on guitar is it, but rather David Gilmour with Syd hair? Maybe what I’m actually getting at at is that I never knew Gilmour wore his hair that way.
Oh, life in the Halls would be so much easier if only our old friend tonyola resurfaced! Here’s looking at you, kid.
If you’re a sucker for the sound of a slide on a National resonator guitar, and you were sitting at a bar havin’ a few beers with Dylan, Robert Johnson, Hendrix, Johnny Winter, Ry Cooder, and Chet Baker, you’d have to scoot over for Chris Whitley.
The Texan born Whitley, once described as looking like “Kate Moss in a wifebeater,” is one of those tragic figures whose death in his prime cemented his legendary status as a bluesman. It’s evident just from the sound of him that he has a hellhound on his trail, and he’s applied that feeling and introspection to several solo recordings as well as work with Arto Lindsay, Daniel Lanois, Cassandra Wilson, Shawn Colvin, Mike Watt, Joe Henry, and Medeski, Martin & Wood.
There’s something confessional about his playing and his singing. When I hear his notes and his whispered croak of a voice, he seems to be finding his way as he goes. It almost seems he’s attacking each chord and note, separating them into distinct entities to mine even the most minute musical potential. His eerie recordings divulge and wrangle with his demons, and his work sounds like hard-won wisdom.
I get a lot of ribbing around these parts for my unabashed love of all things ZZ Top. Like every other right-thinking lover of music, though, in actual fact I categorically reject virtually every track the Zeez laid down between 1981 and… and… well, now.
But before we get to the howcum of my belief that ZZ Top’s new album, La Futura is the band’s best album since 1979’s Deguello, let’s pause for a moment to clamber into the rock and blues way-back machine. I’m going to pilot this thing back — way back, long before ZZ Top came into existence 43 years ago. Let’s head back together to the 1920s, when ZZ Top heroes like Robert Johnson plied their musical trade in sleazy bars and whorehouses across the deep South. Most of these blues OGs packed serious heat, just to make sure they emerged from their latest gig with all their body parts intact. They played for gangsters, they played for hustlers, they played for pimps, bootleggers, and corrupt country preachers — and their music was suitably, dangerously literal. Some of this stuff was downright freaky, it was so violent (didn’t we have a thread about “Stagger Lee” the other day?). No doubt, it celebrated the gangster lifestyle, but it wasn’t bullshit. It was real.
Robert Johnson, keepin' it real
Flash forward to 1973. ZZ Top released Tres Hombres — a celebration of beer drinking, hell raising, fucking, and, yes, redemption. I remember in college, me and my roommates (including a young Townsman Massimo) used to marvel at how terrifying the cast of characters on the inner record sleeve looked: it was a literal rogues’ gallery of rednecks with shotguns, semi-autos, and pistols, leaning against battered pickup trucks and leering at the camera through bloodshot eyes. I mean, it was funny for us East coast college pukes, coasting through school on our parents’ money, safely ensconced in our dorm rooms — these kinds of white trash crackers lived in somebody else’s world… didn’t they? Still, the fact that ZZ Top was writing music for and about them was vicariously thrilling, in the same way that gangsta rap would be for the generation of pampered white folk that would follow us into college a decade later.
So here’s my point: much of this new album is violent and exciting in the same way that Tres Hombres was — and even (sort of) in the same way Robert Johnson’s music was. Virtually every song is about dealing, or getting high, or toting a gun, or suffering the loneliness of the thug life. The album’s opening track, “I Gotsta Get Paid,” is a cover (of sorts) of an underground hip-hop anthem that chronicles a day in a dealer’s life. Typically (if weirdly), the track “Big Shiny Nine,” about a 9mm pistol, opens with the verse:
Big shiny nine, she’s mine all mine
Showin’ down the front of my old blue jeans
Big shiny nine she feel so fine
Waitin’ to impress my hippie queen
[audio:https://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Big-Shiny-Nine.mp3|titles=Big Shiny Nine]
[audio:https://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/I-Gotsta-Get-Paid.mp3|titles=I Gotsta Get Paid]
… to which I say: hey, Quentin Tarantino — two of your characters just wrote themselves. Love songs sing the praises of sleazy chicks who snort coke and smoke weed. In the album’s more reflective moments, Billy wonders aloud whether it’s even worth getting out of bed, or — in an inspired cover of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings‘ “It’s Too Easy Mañana” — just how tempting it is to just sit around the house and get fucked up. It’s inspiring, in a weird way; a singular vision of industry applied toward the hustle, freedom found in a fat bankroll and a cheap high; the love of guns and money.
[audio:https://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Its-Too-Easy.mp3|titles=It’s Too Easy]
Of course, none of this would matter if the music didn’t support the message. I mean, come on: when was the last time sixty-something Billy Gibbons, Board member of the Houston Museum of Modern Art, ever got caught in a ghetto cross-fire? But here’s the miracle of the album: Billy and Rick Rubin didn’t waste our time making a gloriously retro, all-analog, recorded-in-a-country-shack return to the boogie party ZZ Top of old. No, they put a bridle on the explosive power of the Zeez of the 2000s, led it into waist-deep mud, and recorded it struggling to break free. The songs are chock-full of high-art, tape-spliced cuts and jabs. Guitars fade and rise, appear and vanish in an instant, like the Marfa lights. Arrangements are twisted, jarring, often strange. Much of the album is slow, the guitars are distorted to the point of disintegration, the drums sound like they were recorded in a box canyon… and the bass. Holy shit, the bass will crush your damn skull. God bless you, Rick Rubin, for finally shining a spotlight on Dusty Hill. He’s the miracle of this album.
So where are we at here, people? Well, look, the album isn’t a masterpiece from one end to the other. It’s got some moments where one’s patience for blues scales gets a bit frayed. But that’s true of all of the Zeez output. Even Tres Hombres has some needle-lifters. On the whole, though, this is the most focused, most relevant, most interesting, best written and best produced ZZ Top album in decades. I for one can’t stop listening to it.
HVB
p.s.: speaking of listening to it — do yourself a favor and make sure you listen to the samples I’ve provided through some decent speakers or headphones. They’ll be necessary to really capture a lot of what makes this album so good.
In 2001—man, it doesn’t seem that long ago—Nixon’s Head, the band I’ve played in with old friends for nearly ever, was invited to contribute to a Muscle Shoals tribute album, Burlap Palace. The only requirements were that the song had to originally be recorded at Muscle Shoals and our version had to be recorded at a then-newly opened studio that was trying to make its name in town. As usual, we jumped at the chance to record and release a new song. As big soul music fans with a history of having covered plenty of soul chestnuts we figured we’d have no problem choosing a track. Then, as usual, we over thought the offer and spent 2 weeks sending each other detailed lists and frequently heated reasons why every song under consideration wasn’t quite right.
As much as we loved soul music and, Yankees that we were, thought all those southern scenes overlapped, we learned that we were not exactly connoisseurs of the Muscle Shoals Sound. They often seemed to drag the sweet soul music of Stax/Volt recordings into the unwashed early ’70s. The choice wasn’t going to be as easy as we imagined. The songs that first jumped out at us were quickly wiped off the boards. For instance, we had no hope of doing anything worthwhile with titanic Muscle Shoals recordings like “Brown Sugar” or “I’ll Take You There.” Had we still had my original guitar partner, Mike (aka John Quincy Nixon) in the band, the guy I taught how to play our nascent Head songs and punk rock favorites while he slaved away at learning every Lynyrd Skynyrd lick, we would have latched onto “That Smell” from Street Survivors. Mike had long ago moved across the country. We wisely avoided falling prey to our slave-to-humor tendencies and taking a crack at Bob Seger‘s “Night Moves.”
One poppy song that fit our core interests kept coming to mind: R. B. Greaves‘ “Take a Letter, Maria.” I grew up loving that song, and I knew our singer, my old friend Andy (Townsman andyr in these parts), did too. Hell, I’d spent a day with him in 5th grade crouched under a covered card table, spinning 45s for a nickle as The Human Jukebox at a school fair. We talked about it outside rehearsals, outside the e-mail chains with the rest of the band, as we often did (and, sadly, still do) when we feel the need to build a coalition behind what may be an unpopular position. We were always the AM radio guys in our band. Our guitarist-bassist, Mike (aka Chickenfrank), grew up as much a British Invasion and punk fan as we were, but he was a tougher sell on the kind of bubblegum stuff we dug (unless a Monkees cover was on the table). Our drummer, Seth (aka Sethro in these parts), was an easier sell for an AM radio staple. Andy and I planned to lobby Seth first. Our bassist at the time, John, was easygoing. Keyboardist/singer Dorothy may have had the best ’60s singles collection among us. We figured she’d be on board with this choice.
Growing up I really loved “Take a Letter, Maria.” It had a chooglin’ rhythm, like a CCR song, which I’d been a sucker for as long as I’d remembered. It had the “bullfighting” horns I’d first dug on my Mom’s Herb Alpert records. It told a story, a skill which in itself dazzled me as far back as my earliest record-spinning years spent rocking away and time traveling to The Band‘s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” As I got into my teens and the realities of my Mom’s pain and loneliness over her divorce sunk irreparably into my own world, the song took on further meaning.
You may have noticed a little High Fives icon/counter that now appears at the bottom of our participants’ comments. It’s not enough to simply Like a comment posted for our community.
This new feature, brought to you by The Back Office, is meant to encourage camaraderie and enable low-level, low-commitment, anonymous participation in the Halls of Rock. Try it out next time you read a comment that makes you smile or nod in approval. No matter how strong our posts are—and lord knows we’re providing more meat for discussion on a daily basis than any of the popular rock blogs reporting upcoming Mumford & Sons tour dates—the real strength of the Hall rests on our comments. When you feel like taking an anonymous opportunity to validate the comment of a fellow Townsperson, here’s your tool. For some of you, we hope the toe you first dip into our flow of rock smack talk through a High Five! will lead to full submersion with comments of your own.
