ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band From Texas

This is your good neighbour along the way,

broadcasting across the land from XERF

in Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, Mexico.

I've known these guys for a long time.

If you look around

the whole spectrum of the rock 'n' roll world,

there's only one of them.

They're unique, they're eccentric.

Okay, guys, tell me.

ZZ Top, how did you come up with a name like that?

We will tell three stories about it.

But none of them will be true.

When you'd see them on stage, it was like,

"Wow, there they are."

It was like seeing Bugs Bunny in person.

I think the mystique of the band

is what brought me to them.

The look of a beard like that.

What's the rest of your face like?

All these videos, all the stuff,

it only added to the mystery.

'Eliminator', where the car is everywhere.

You don't see who's inside.

These choreographed moves,

it all keeps you from really knowing who they really are.

Even their sound had a mysterious quality to it.

I don't think you can put your finger on what it is.

It's easy to say it's based on the blues

and all that kind of thing,

but I think it's got something else in it.

But they may not even have an explanation for it.

Really if you wanna know where everything came from,

you have to go back to the beginning.

I'm a huge Elvis fan, always have been.

This is actually like a blanket-type thing.

So, I have Elvis things all over the house and all over.

I used to carry so much on the road

that I started getting a separate dressing room

and it started becoming a little strange.

When I was a kid, my mother was a waitress.

And Elvis used to come into where she worked.

He was not that well known outside of Memphis at that time.

Anyway, he had a record that was on the jukebox.

She brought it back with her when we moved back to Dallas.

And I used to sing to it.

The first time I got money for singing a song, I was 8.

My brother, Rocky, two and a half years older,

he and I sang a song one time

and there was a table right here beside me

and people started throwing change on that table,

at least quarters.

So, we were singing,

the guitar player was playing the guitar lead.

I leaned down to my mother, I said, "What is that?"

She went, "That's for you."

So, I stopped singing and started raking the money in.

I don't know what Compton's like,

I don't know what Harlem's like, I've never lived there.

But I can remember walking down the street

where I lived in Dallas,

I was singing cos I didn't wanna really look at the surroundings

and I didn't want to smell the air.

I didn't want to hear what was going on, so I would sing.

You had to know how to work your way around that neighbourhood.

You did and didn't do certain things,

so you don't walk around singing or dancing.

You're liable to limp out,

and playing in a rock band gives you instant cred.

Anyway, I don't really remember how exactly it happened,

we were still playing this one beer joint,

and my brother played guitar and I sang.

We decided, "We need a bass, this is stupid."

I went, "OK, well..."

I thought he was talking about hiring somebody

but he went, "No, you're it."

This is a group called Lady Wilde and the Warlocks.

This is about '64, so I guess I was about 15.

That's my brother, Rocky. That's me.

The girl was actually from England.

She'd married a soldier.

And that was Lady Wilde.

And in '64 in Dallas,

if you had someone from England in your band,

that was it, you got bookings.

But this was a club, the Disc a Gogo

and we were the entertainment,

but our drummer, at the time, was quitting the business.

So, my brother came up to me and pointed at Frank

who was playing with another group, they were on stage.

He went, "He's going to be our new drummer."

And I went...

I looked at him, he had on loafers and white socks

and I went, "I don't think so."

He went, "No, you don't understand. I'm not asking you.

That's going to be our drummer."

I was 15, and had a high school band,

played some frat parties, did this, that, and the other.

And finally, we got a job

playing at The Cellar club on Friday night and Saturday night,

in Fort Worth, Texas.

We were going to play from 8 till 12,

and then, the headline act was going to come in at 12.

So, we went out, and we played and when we were through,

The Warlocks came in.

Dusty and Rocky had on matching blue sharkskin suits,

and Banlon socks like the blues players wear,

and I noticed that Dusty's fingernails were manicured.

My God, these guys are right one step below the Beatles.

I mean, they were just...

I only owned white socks at the time,

I was a complete Rube.

Anyway, I watched The Warlocks that night,

came back for the Saturday night show,

and they walked up and offered me a job, playing with them.

That's when I met Dusty.

I enjoyed playing with Frank the second we hit a note,

it was just really cool.

When we played together, we had a way of interacting

that had an identifiable sound to it.

And him and I, we locked so in on that

and that was a great step forward for us.

When Frank joined the band, all this music was going on.

And now there's a lot of bands circulating,

so a lot of competition.

So, we wanted to come up with something different.

People started to get long hair,

which was dangerous in Texas at the time, but still...

So we went, "You know,

let's dye it blue and call ourselves American Blues.

So, I not only have long hair, in the 60's in Texas,

I've got long blue hair.

I think people thought I was nuts.

Anyway, the American Blues lasted quite a while

but, eventually, it was like

we played ourselves out of the market.

Everybody in town had heard us.

And I thought, "I can't just keep just doing this.

I'm just going round and round and round."

And I just went, "You know what? I've had enough."

I lost track of Dusty,

and then my girlfriend got pregnant

and I had to get married.

So I'm married and got a baby and living in my parents' house.

I was selling a little pot, too, to make ends meet.

Plus, I started taking acid.

So, my life was changing.

I packed up my drums, my wife and my baby, and left home.

It was a Norman Rockwell scene.

I mean, Mum's crying, Dad's pissed off,

and I'm loading shit in the car, you know.

I mean, it was a sitcom.

Anyway, we drove down to Houston.

They had an entirely different scene in Houston

than they did in Dallas.

One of the big bands of Houston were Moving Sidewalks.

And when we came down,

that's when I started hearing about a guy named Billy Gibbons.

I'd also heard his song on the radio,

so I knew who he was.

And I just had to meet this guy

because, man, what a guitar player.

I mean, he tore up guitar strings.

He was wonderful.

I mean, he could really, really play.

I grew up in Houston,

and Houston was always a hotbed of musical talent

from the blues perspective.

But, by the mid-60's,

as the times began to change, so did the music.

All of a sudden, there was a group that showed up

called The 13th Floor Elevators.

The 13th Floor Elevators embraced the term psychedelic

to describe what they were doing.

They had a message, they had a mission,

and it was runaway insane.

No one had seen anything like it.

This one guy even played this crock jug

which made this gurgling, bubbling sound.

They called it the electric jug.

So, The 13th Floor Elevators were having an impact

on the whole Texas music scene.

And as our way of acknowledging the impact,

I said, "Gee whiz, let's see.

Elevators go up, we should be the Moving Sidewalks

'cause that goes forward."

So, it was forward and up.

We'd written this song, the '99th Floor'

which became a well-received single

and it put us on the map.

We got signed, we toured with Eric Burdon and the Animals,

The Jeff Beck Group.

And we even landed some dates

with Jim Morrison and the Doors.

And there was this promoter at the time, who said,

"There's this act that wants you to join the tour.

It's a guy by the name of Jimi Hendrix,

he's got this band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience."

And I said, "Yeah, Jimi Hendrix, that's crazy."

They wanted us to play 40 minutes of material,

and the only way we could do 40 minutes