ZZ Top Montreaux 2013

RocknRollDave

https://youtu.be/9oSG8dNrS3c?si=079f9GiYw7u88UdQ

I like the scuzzy vibe of this, and the Mexican influence.

ToneControl

boogieman said:

Philly_Q said:

I think they went from a great band with no image, to a great band with a cool image, to a cool image with not much left to back it up...  The early to mid period albums are great but I rarely want to listen to them nowadays.

Now I've started... I find Billy's hats and sunglasses and cryptic way of speaking pretty tedious, I wish he's just drop the facade sometimes.  And I'll probably get flak for saying this, but I thought it was a little distasteful the way they just upped and carried on about 48 hours after Dusty died.

I do wonder about the band’s finances. They didn’t even have a record deal for a long while and I can’t imagine they’ve made much money out of record sales since the Eliminator/Afterburner days. No idea how the royalties are sorted between them. Maybe Billy and Frank just needed to keep the band running for financial reasons? Agreed though, it seemed a very hasty decision to keep going straight after Dusty died. Tbh I thought Billy would wind the band up at that point. 

"net worth" websites say BFG is worth $70m, and Frank Beard $50m
I was surprised at the latter, then remembered they credit all songs to all 3 of them.

ElectricXII

CaseOfAce said:

I'm gonna go against the grain on here but I like the 80s top more than I do the early stuff (even though some of it is great).

In all honesty (brace yourselves) I never get tired of hearing Gimme All Your Lovin' or Sharp Dressed Man. That production and song writing is insane whilst Gibbon's blues licks still shine thru.

I love how they took the blues (and they say in the Netflix doc that doing shuffle's in C wasn't gonna cut it anymore) and mangled it with Moog synths, drum machines, sequencers and came up with something fresh (in the same kind of way Stevie Wonder ditched Motown and teamed up with the Tonto Expanding Head Band in the 70s).

But then I'm weird that way - for me the greatest blues music of the last few decades hasn't been made by the Dumble, strat, Klon brigade but by Moby, Jack White or even the Black Keys where it's been taken somewhere different.

I totally agree. I hate "modern" rehashed white man/woman "blues". For me, peak ZZ Top was Eliminator.