who is the blonde girl on zz top greatest hits album cover

The thing about a bus is who you have to sit beside. “You can meet some very unique people on a bus and in a bus station,” Hill told Spin in 1985. The Homeric track that opened their iconic Tres Hombres album starts with a thin, precise bluesy guitar lick and a tight, sighing drum line that foreshadows the band’s electro-blues era, setting up Gibbons and Hill to plead for compassion in concert: “Have mercy!” Gibbons goes on to explain they’ve been waiting for the bus all day, with a bottle of booze and some leftover scratch, but, horror of horrors, when the bus arrives, it’s “packed up tight.” Blues harp virtuoso James Harman takes a solo, and by the time the song finishes up, the ZZ guys are dreaming of getting a Cadillac someday (fast forward to Eliminator ). Poor ZZ Top, they just wanted to get home.

“It was a whorehouse, but anything that lasts a hundred years, there’s got to be a reason.” -B.H. “I went there when I was 13,” Dusty Hill told Spin in 1986, noting that he was irked that the establishment shut down just months after ZZ Top’s song came out. “La Grange” (1973)Ī deliciously juiced-up John Lee Hooker–derived rhythm-guitar lick drives this classic “two-minute wonder” (in Billy Gibbons’ words), which paid tribute to the Chicken Ranch, the same long-standing real-life brothel in La Grange, Texas, that inspired the book and movie T he Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Here we look back at 10 of the band’s defining tracks. The lasciviousness of their lyrics always came with a wink, as did their Reagan-era transformation: The electronics of Eliminator and its follow-ups somehow only brought out more of the band’s inimitable essence. “We all woke up to the reality of an almost telepathic way to communicate,” Gibbons once said of an early rehearsal.

After Cream and Jimi Hendrix warped electric blues into psychedelia, ZZ Top pulled it back to the dusty ground of Texas, but they weren’t as straight-ahead as they seemed: The rhythm section of drummer Frank Beard and late bassist (and sometime vocalist) Dusty Hill could groove so uncannily hard that a song like “Jesus Just Left Chicago” could feel otherworldly - and then the interdimensional squall of Billy Gibbons’ lead guitar would arrive. Even before they revved themselves up into synth-boosted MTV hitmakers in the Eighties, ZZ Top were never an ordinary blues-rock band.

Who is the blonde girl on zz top greatest hits album cover