| Sometimes you don't even notice the bass—I hate that in a way, but I love that in a way. That means you've filled in everything and it's right for the song, and you're not standing out where you don't need to be. | | | | |  | Sharp dresses axes: ZZ Top's Dusty Hill (left) and Billy Gibbons in Milwaukee, Oct. 31, 1990.
(Paul Natkin/Archive Photos/Getty Images) | | | | | "Sometimes you don't even notice the bass—I hate that in a way, but I love that in a way. That means you've filled in everything and it's right for the song, and you're not standing out where you don't need to be." | | | | Lord Take Me Downtown
"Anything that lasts a hundred years, there's got to be a reason," DUSTY HILL once said of a certain little whorehouse in Texas, which beckoned cowboys, oil field workers, politicians and 13-year-old fledgling blues-rock bass players to the town of La Grange for either 60 or 130 years, depending where you start your clock. As it happens, the Chicken Ranch was forced to shut down only a few months after Hill's band, ZZ TOP, released its famous song about the place. But it had served its purpose for Hill at least twice by that point, including that time when he was 13. Hill and his bandmates—guitarist BILLY GIBBONS and drummer FRANK BEARD—had been playing together for three years and couldn't have imagined the long, hirsute path that lay ahead. Not quite 100 years, but they gave it a run. Their first show was in February 1970. They played their last 51 years later, on July 18, 2021 in Louisville, Ky., after which Hill bowed out of a summer tour because of a bad hip. Gibbons and Beard went on to play a handful of shows with guitar tech ELWOOD FRANCIS in his place. They had one scheduled for Wednesday night but called it off after word came of Hill's death at age 72.
ZZ Top is likely the longest-running unchanged lineup in rock and roll history. And one of the most beloved, too—good luck finding a pop or rock fan between the age of, say, 25 and 70 who doesn't love 'em and doesn't have a memory or three. There's got to be a reason, right? That reason might just have been Hill, the band's steady, unassuming, rock-solid center, who matched Gibbons, the band's frontman, beard-for-beard and choreographed-dance-bit-for-choreographed-dance-bit while playing perfect basslines that melted so completely into the blues-rooted songs, distorted timbres and all, that you might not have noticed. Which was the point. But you could never take your eyes off Hill himself. And not just because of that beard. He provided crucial harmonies onstage, coughed up one or two unpolished lead vocals per album and, when the band successfully collided with MTV and new wave in the early '80s, he was the one playing the keyboards. He was both the roots and the way forward.
Chances are pretty good, too, Hill would be the one singing the final encore at any given show with a blues shuffle whose title had one meaning in Texas and another in Yiddish. Hill meant both. "I don't know how we got it in Dallas," he told Spin about the latter meaning. "All it could have took was one guy moving down from New York." "TUSH" is exactly how Hill and ZZ Top ended things one last time in Louisville a week and a half ago, a sharp-dressed, blues-rocking Texas bass player feeling the joy of Yiddish and looking, as he did most every night, for some bottom end. May he finally have found it. RIP.
Etc Etc Etc
ZZ Top's catalog serves as a particularly egregious example of how unreliable streaming music services can be as libraries of pop history. The band's 1979 breakthrough album, DEGÜELLO, appears to be missing from SPOTIFY and other major services in the US, while its followup, EL LOCO, is weirdly hard to find. Is someone asleep at the wheel, or maybe driving while blind?... Spotify's ad revenues are booming, fueled by podcasts, but its total user base isn't growing as fast as expected, according to the company's Q2 earnings report... OLIVIA RODRIGO is helping to drive revenues at UMG, which reported rosy Q2 numbers as it heads toward a public listing... This summer's heat waves are not good for vinyl... A decent argument against attending LOLLAPALOOZA... A decent argument in favor of the music of SARAH BRAND.
Rest in Peace
Dominican merengue icon JOHNNY VENTURA.
| | | | Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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