The story of ZZ Top

Two Texas scenes, one sound

The story starts with two teenage music scenes three hundred miles apart. In Houston, William Frederick Gibbons, born on the sixteenth of December 1949, grew up the son of Freddie Gibbons, a society orchestra leader and concert pianist. Billy started out on drums and was even sent to New York to study with Tito Puente. On Christmas Day 1962, just after turning thirteen, he got his first electric guitar, a single pickup Gibson Melody Maker with a little Fender Champ amp. He ran to his bedroom, worked out the intro to a Ray Charles song, and then drifted into Jimmy Reed, the bluesman he would play going to sleep at night and again in the morning.[1] [2] [3]

Billy's teenage bands had names like the Saints, Billy G and the Blueflames and the Coachmen, playing parties and school dances while he chased the blues he heard on Houston's black radio station, KCOH. Then came the Moving Sidewalks, formed around 1966 and inspired by the Austin psychedelic band the 13th Floor Elevators. Billy's song 99th Floor was a nod to them. If the Elevators were going up, he joked, he was going further. Released on a small Houston label in 1967, the single went straight to number one in the city and stayed there for weeks, and a New York label picked it up for wider release.[1] [2] [3]

In early 1968 the Moving Sidewalks were hired to open four shows for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Hendrix took a liking to the young Texan. Billy remembered Jimi tiptoeing across a hotel corridor to show him a lick, and he later said Hendrix taught him the bending intro to Foxy Lady. The band also opened for the Doors, but that ended badly. At a show in Dallas the Sidewalks, who loved flash powder, overdid the pyrotechnics and set the Doors' gear on fire. A trip to Los Angeles led nowhere, and after two members were drafted into the army during the Vietnam War, the band played its last show on the fourth of July 1969.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Up in Dallas, meanwhile, Joe Michael Hill, always known as Dusty, was singing for money with his older brother Rocky from the age of eight. When Rocky needed a bass player, thirteen year old Dusty was handed a bass and was playing a bar that same night. He never learned guitar first. Frank Lee Beard, born in Frankston, Texas and raised in Irving, met Dusty when their bands shared a bill in Fort Worth. The two played together in the Warlocks, the Cellar Dwellers and American Blues, a band that dyed its hair blue and got into fights for it. They even toured in a fake version of the English band the Zombies.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

That little ol' band is born

ZZ Top began in 1969 as Billy Gibbons' next move after the Moving Sidewalks, with Sidewalks drummer Dan Mitchell and an organ player named Lanier Greig. The name came from the concert posters covering the walls of their small apartment. Billy noticed how many bluesmen used initials, especially B.B. King and Z.Z. Hill. He toyed with ZZ King, decided it was too close, and reasoned that a king is at the top. That first line up cut one single, Salt Lick, with Miller's Farm on the flip side, and then fell apart almost at once.[1] [2] [3]

The man steering things was Bill Ham, a former singer turned record promoter who had seen the Moving Sidewalks on a Doors bill in Houston in 1968 and gone backstage to praise them. He became manager, producer and image maker, and he would produce every ZZ Top album into the mid nineties. Before 1969 was out, Greig was gone, replaced by bassist Billy Ethridge, and Mitchell was replaced by Frank Beard. When London Records offered a contract, Ethridge would not sign and quit. Frank said he knew just the bass player. Dusty Hill came down from Dallas, and the three of them shuffled in the key of C for hours.[1] [2] [3]

Gibbons later described auditioning bass players at a long gone Houston club called the Catacombs when Dusty strolled up, strapped on an instrument, and played one song with them for about three hours. All three were twenty years old. Their first concert as a trio was on the tenth of February 1970 at a Knights of Columbus hall in Beaumont, Texas, booked by a local radio personality named Al Caldwell. Bill Ham worked them relentlessly. Gibbons remembered playing three hundred and fifty odd nights a year, and Frank recalled Ham booking them as openers for fading headliners, so the young Texans could blow them off the stage and be remembered.[1] [2] [3] [4]

ZZ Top's First Album arrived in January 1971 on London Records, recorded at Robin Hood Brians' studio in Tyler, Texas. Billy said they chose the title so everyone would know there would be more, even though they were not sure they would ever get back in a studio. Frank was credited under his nickname, Rube Beard. The album did not chart, and neither did its single. Rio Grande Mud followed on the fourth of April 1972 and gave them their first charting single, Francine, which reached number sixty nine. The fans who mattered were in the clubs, and the band kept driving between far flung Texas shows in a huge Chrysler station wagon.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tres Hombres and La Grange

The breakthrough came with Tres Hombres, Spanish for three men, released on the twenty sixth of July 1973. It was their first record with engineer Terry Manning at Ardent Studios in Memphis, the start of a long partnership, and Memphis became their second home. The album reached number eight on the Billboard 200 in 1974. The inside of the gatefold showed a huge spread of plates from Leo's Mexican Restaurant in Houston. Critics took a while to catch up. Rolling Stone's first review called them just one of several competent Southern rock bands, but in time the album landed on the magazine's list of the greatest albums of all time.[1] [2] [3]

The song that carried Tres Hombres was La Grange, a two chord boogie built on a John Lee Hooker style groove. It was about the Chicken Ranch, a brothel outside La Grange, Texas that had operated for decades with the quiet tolerance of the local sheriff. In the Depression it had reportedly taken chickens as payment, which is how it got its name. The timing was remarkable. Tres Hombres came out in late July 1973, and on the first of August, after a crusade by Houston television reporter Marvin Zindler, the Chicken Ranch was closed for good. The single reached number forty one on the Hot 100 in June 1974.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Around this time ZZ Top opened for the Rolling Stones in Hawaii. Hill recalled crowds staring at the three Texans with jaws dropped, then screaming for more, while the Stones waited behind them. Bill Ham had imposed a two drink limit, so the band found a bar serving a cocktail called the Chimp in Orbit, so enormous it sat on the floor in a container about three feet tall and was drunk through a long straw. Back home, on the first of September 1974, they played Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin. Fans tore up the new artificial turf, and the stadium did not host another concert until the Eagles in 1995.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Fandango, released on the eighteenth of April 1975, was half live and half studio. The live side came from a show at the Warehouse in New Orleans in April 1974. The studio side held Tush, which Dusty sang. It was cooked up during an afternoon jam in a dirt floor rodeo arena in Florence, Alabama, and the title played on an old Southern word for something deluxe as well as its more obvious meaning. Tush reached number twenty on the Hot 100 in 1975, their first top forty hit. The album also held Heard It on the X, a tribute to the powerful Mexican border radio stations all three had grown up listening to.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Longhorns, buzzards and a long disappearance

In May 1976 ZZ Top launched the Worldwide Texas Tour, one of the strangest spectacles in rock. The stage, designed by artist Bill Narum, was shaped like the state of Texas, tilted toward the crowd and weighed about thirty five tons. On it stood a Texas longhorn steer, a buffalo, two vultures, two rattlesnakes, cactus and yucca, all watched over by a veterinarian. The show played nearly a hundred dates over about a year and a half and sold more than a million tickets. Plans to take it to Europe, Japan and Australia fell through, partly because of quarantine rules for the buffalo. The final show was in Fort Worth on New Year's Eve 1977.[1] [2] [3]

Tejas, recorded during a break in the tour and released in November 1976, was their last album for London Records. It reached number seventeen, but some critics dismissed it as ZZ Top gone country, and neither single cracked the top forty. Gibbons later called it a transitional record, though he admitted he was not sure what they were transitioning from or into. What mattered more was happening offstage. After the tour, the exhausted band vanished for roughly two years, and one reason was that Frank Beard was deep in addiction.[1] [2] [3]

Beard was frank about it later. He said that once the big money arrived around 1977, he spent every bit of his first major paycheck on drugs. His first drug was LSD, pills came from the workload, cocaine followed, and heroin, he admitted, he took simply because he liked it. He sold his original Ludwig drum kit to buy drugs and damaged his relationships. During the break he checked into a Houston treatment program, though getting fully clean took years. When he told Bill Ham he was going into a thirty day program, Ham told him to take as long as he needed. Dusty said that when you love a friend, you do not want to watch him die. You want to see your brother get well.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Dusty spent part of the break working at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, wanting to feel normal and stay grounded. With a work shirt, no hat and no shades, hardly anyone recognized him, and when someone did ask, he would deny it and ask if they thought a rock star would be sitting there. Billy wandered around Europe, soaking up punk, and Frank went to Jamaica. Nobody bothered to shave. When the three met again, Billy and Dusty had grown long beards independently of each other. Frank had a short one, took one look at theirs, and shaved his off, leaving the drummer named Beard as the only one without one.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Beards, Warner Bros. and the first synthesizers

ZZ Top came back in November 1979 with Degüello, their first album for Warner Bros. The title is the name of a bugle call the Mexican army is said to have played at the Alamo, signalling no quarter. It went platinum and gave them Cheap Sunglasses and a cover of Sam and Dave's I Thank You, which Billy recorded after spotting the very clavinet from the original session sitting in a Memphis studio. The band experimented too. After Billy saw a talk show disguise a guest's voice with a pitch shifter, Manning tracked down the device and they used it on songs like Manic Mechanic.[1] [2] [3]

In April 1980 ZZ Top finally reached Europe, filming for German television's Rockpalast and the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test. At the BBC they shared a studio with the English synth band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and Gibbons was taken with them. OMD's jerky moves fed into the band's own stage choreography, and synthesizers began creeping into the music. Billy also saw Devo sound checking at a Houston country bar, a Minimoog figure caught his ear, and it grew into Groovy Little Hippie Pad on El Loco, released in 1981.[1] [2] [3]

El Loco, full of barely disguised double meanings like Tube Snake Boogie and Pearl Necklace, reached number seventeen but sold less than half as well as Degüello. Behind the scenes a new figure had arrived. Linden Hudson, a former radio DJ and engineer, built a studio in Frank Beard's new house outside Houston in lieu of rent and lived there. He introduced Gibbons to drum machines and played synthesizer on El Loco's demos, but he was not credited. Gibbons later called him a gifted songwriter who helped reshape what ZZ Top were doing. From then on the band quietly used taped backing tracks on stage, a secret Ham kept hidden.[1] [2] [3]

Eliminator and the MTV takeover

Gibbons wanted ZZ Top on dance floors. After seeing a club crowd move to the Rolling Stones, he asked why his band never got played there, and Manning began studying club beats. Hudson brought research showing that many hits sat near a hundred and twenty four beats per minute, faster than ZZ Top's usual pace. In Beard's home studio, often while Frank was out playing golf, Gibbons and Hudson built demos with drum machine and synth bass. They wrote Got Me Under Pressure in a single afternoon. Hudson also wrote a song called Thug on his own. The basic tracks were then cut in Memphis in the spring of 1982.[1] [2] [3]

What happened in Memphis became the band's most contentious chapter. According to Manning, Beard's substance problems made studio playing difficult and he was dismissed from the sessions. Manning ended up programming nearly all the drums on an Oberheim drum machine. Hill sang his lead on I Got the Six and went home, and much of his bass was replaced by Gibbons or Manning on bass guitar or synthesizer. Manning took Legs home to his attic studio and rebuilt everything except Billy's guitar and vocal. Years later, Gibbons even took Ministry's Al Jourgensen to dinner, admitting that the band's drum samples had been lifted from Ministry and Revolting Cocks records.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eliminator came out on the twenty third of March 1983, named after a drag racing term and fronted by Billy's red 1933 Ford coupe, a hot rod he had started building in 1976 and which is now on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Warner executive Jeff Ayeroff talked the label into paying for videos, and director Tim Newman made a loose trilogy for Gimme All Your Lovin', Sharp Dressed Man and Legs. Three women in the red car rescue a downtrodden young person, while the band appear and vanish like bearded guardian angels. The spinning white sheepskin guitars, built by Dean Zelinsky, made their debut in Legs.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

MTV made them superstars. Legs reached number eight on the Hot 100, the videos won MTV awards including the first ever Best Group Video, and teenage girls started turning up at ZZ Top shows. Hill joked that the videos had recaptured the sixteen year old girls. Eliminator sold more than ten million copies in the United States and became their only diamond album. The Eliminator tour even featured a staged rigging collapse, with lights and a dummy roadie crashing down during the last song. Not everyone was happy. Old fans heard drum machines, wondered whether Hill and Beard were really on the record, and accused the band of near heresy.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

There was fallout. Linden Hudson moved out of Beard's house, cut ties with the band and sued their management company for a million dollars, arguing that he had copyrighted Thug months before ZZ Top did. The album credited it to Gibbons, Hill and Beard. In December 1986 a judge ruled in Hudson's favor and awarded him six hundred thousand dollars. And on the sixteenth of December 1984, Billy's thirty fifth birthday, Dusty Hill shot himself in the stomach by accident, when a derringer tucked in his boot fell out and went off as his girlfriend pulled the boot off. He drove himself to hospital, went into shock, and made a full recovery.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Afterburner, Recycler and a new label

Afterburner arrived in 1985 with even more sequencers, and without Terry Manning, who was busy elsewhere. It sold fewer copies than Eliminator but peaked higher, at number four, and eventually went five times platinum. Sleeping Bag reached number eight and gave them their first number one on the rock chart, and Stages, Rough Boy and Velcro Fly all made the top forty. The Velcro Fly video had dancers choreographed by Paula Abdul, then still a choreographer rather than a pop star. The Afterburner tour, with its space age stage, was the top grossing and best attended tour of 1986. In 1987 the band remixed their early albums with eighties drums for CD, angering longtime fans.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1990 ZZ Top turned up in Back to the Future Part III, playing an old west version of Doubleback with a fiddle band at a town festival in 1885. Some of the crew saw the beards and took them for costumed extras. Michael J. Fox remembered them jamming blues on acoustic guitars between takes. Doubleback opened Recycler, released in October 1990, which moved back toward guitars while keeping some synths. Doubleback, Concrete and Steel and My Head's in Mississippi all went to number one on the album rock chart, and Recycler went platinum, though it never matched its two predecessors.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tragedy hit the band's inner circle in the summer of 1991. On the second of July, Bill Ham's wife Cecile, forty eight years old, was abducted from a drugstore parking lot in Houston by Spencer Corey Goodman, a twenty two year old repeat offender who had been released on parole the day before. He wanted her car. He killed her and left her body in a field. Five weeks later he was caught in Colorado after crashing her Cadillac at the end of a high speed chase. Goodman was sentenced to death and executed on the eighteenth of January 2000, and Bill Ham was there to witness it.[1] [2]

Two months before that, on the fourth of May 1991, Governor Ann Richards had declared ZZ Top Day in Texas. In 1992 Warner released a Greatest Hits with a new cover of Viva Las Vegas that went top ten in Britain. The band then signed a reported thirty five million dollar deal with RCA Records. Antenna came out in 1994 and sold a million, and its single Pincushion topped the rock chart. Rhythmeen followed in 1996, with Gibbons experimenting with very low tunings after Rick Rubin played him the band Barkmarket. It was the last album produced by Bill Ham. In January 1997 ZZ Top played the Super Bowl halftime show.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

XXX, marking their thirtieth anniversary in 1999, was produced by Gibbons himself with engineer Joe Hardy, and it reached only number one hundred. Then in 2000 Dusty Hill was diagnosed with hepatitis C, and ZZ Top cancelled a European tour while he recovered. He was back at work by 2002, the year Frank Beard needed an emergency appendectomy and drum tech John Douglas filled in. Mescalero, their last RCA album, came out in 2003, recorded at the band's own Foam Box studio in Houston, with Tejano accordion and pedal steel, and a father and son marimba duo from Chiapas the band had met while eating lunch at a Mexican restaurant.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hall of Famers and elder statesmen

In 2004 ZZ Top were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Keith Richards gave the speech, praising a band that knew its blues and knew how to dress it up, and they played La Grange and Tush. Frank Beard's acceptance was one line, telling the crowd that most of his life had been a pleasant surprise and so was this. In 2006 they left RCA, and after nearly four decades they parted ways with Bill Ham. Carl Stubner became their manager. The Hall of Fame noted that after thirty five years they were the longest running band with no personnel changes.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Gibbons became a character in popular culture. He played a fictional version of himself on the television series Bones, as the protective rock star father of Angela, whose middle name in the show was Pearly Gates, the name of his treasured 1959 Les Paul. He had bought that guitar in 1968 for two hundred and fifty dollars, after selling a battered car of the same name. Dusty guest starred on King of the Hill as Hank Hill's cousin and on The Drew Carey Show. Gibbons launched his own hot sauces, and in 2015 released his first solo album, the Afro Cuban flavored Perfectamundo.[1] [2] [3]

La Futura, released in September 2012 and co produced by Rick Rubin, was the band's first studio album in nine years. Its lead single, I Gotsta Get Paid, reworked 25 Lighters, a 1998 Houston rap track by DJ DMD, Lil' Keke and Fat Pat. When Gibbons blurted out the title in the studio, their engineer Gary Moon turned around and said he had engineered the original. A year before, NASA astronaut Mike Fossum, a Texan friend of the band, played an unfinished song, Flyin' High, on board a Soyuz spacecraft as it launched to the International Space Station. La Futura turned out to be the last studio album with the classic trio.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The later years brought health scares. In 2014 Dusty fell on the tour bus, hurt his hip and needed surgery, and in 2017 the Tonnage Tour ended early because of his declining health. In 2016 Bill Ham died at home in Austin at seventy nine. In 2018 Guinness named ZZ Top the longest running active group without a line up change. For their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 came a six night Las Vegas residency and the documentary That Little Ol' Band from Texas, directed by Sam Dunn, which was nominated for a Grammy. Frank quipped in it that with these two guys, he had never wanted to quit and never wanted to get fired.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Losing Dusty

In July 2021, at the start of a new tour, Dusty Hill felt out of sorts after the first show and asked to go home to Texas to see a doctor about his hip. Before he left, he told Gibbons to take guitar tech Elwood Francis out of the tech station, strap him into the bass, and carry on. On the twenty third of July ZZ Top played New Lenox, Illinois with Francis on bass. Days later, on the twenty eighth of July 2021, Dusty Hill died in his sleep at his home in Houston, aged seventy two. His wife later said he had suffered from chronic bursitis. He was buried near Houston on the seventh of August.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Gibbons and Beard called him their compadre and thanked him for providing that monumental bottom to the Top. Billy said Dusty had grabbed his arm and told him to give Elwood the bottom end and take it to the Top. Francis, from Lexington, Kentucky, had worked for the band for about thirty years, after teching for Joe Perry and others, and led his own punk band, the Mighty Skullhead. He had also grown a huge beard during the pandemic. His first show as a member came two days after Dusty's death, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. For the rest of 2021 the band ended their concerts with Tush, sung by a recording of Dusty's last performance.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In July 2022 the band released Raw, a set of old favourites recorded in an afternoon at Gruene Hall in New Braunfels, Texas, during the documentary shoot. The trio did not even know the tape was rolling, and it became Dusty's final release. Late in 2021 they had also sold their publishing and recording royalties to BMG. Gibbons said Frank smiled more than he had in thirty years. Elwood, who still said in 2024 that he did not feel like a full member, went viral with an absurd yellow seventeen string bass he had found on a Chinese website as a joke. Gibbons insisted he keep playing it.[1] [2] [3]

The last man standing

ZZ Top kept up a relentless touring pace, including a joint tour with Lynyrd Skynyrd in 2023 and 2024. But in March 2025 Frank Beard temporarily stepped away for health reasons, with drum tech John Douglas taking over for about two months. Beard came back, then missed most of the August shows, when Michael Monahan filled in, and returned again that September. Gibbons, meanwhile, played more shows than any other classic rock star in 2025, a hundred and seven with ZZ Top and thirty three with his solo band. In 2026 Monahan played most of the dates, and in early August the band cancelled a show at the Hollywood Bowl because of Beard's health.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

On Monday the seventeenth of August 2026, Frank Beard died in hospice care at his ranch in Richmond, Texas, with his family at his side. He was seventy seven, and no cause was given. Gibbons, now the last of the classic trio, called him one of the most naturally innovative drummers and a great and true son of Texas, and said his backbeat was key to keeping ZZ on top. Beard had been in the band for fifty six years. Away from the drums he loved golf, his ranch and motor racing, and in the early nineties he had competed in the Twenty Four Hours of Daytona. He and his wife Debbie raised twin sons along with his daughter from an earlier marriage.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Beard had asked that the band carry on, and it did. After cancelling two dates, ZZ Top played Austin's ACL Live at the Moody Theater on the twenty second of August 2026 with Michael Monahan on drums. Gibbons kept it unsentimental. He told the crowd that Frank had called to say his bass drum foot was getting weak and asked for his man to take over, and when Billy said the new man was doing pretty good, Frank said that was what worried him. Gibbons called the night a celebration and played a new solo song. As of 2026 the band is still touring, with Gibbons the only member left from the start.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around ZZ Top

Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill. For more than fifty years they were rock's great double act, so alike in beard, hat and shades that fans mixed them up, which Dusty quietly disliked. Billy was the showman and main voice. Dusty was the high tenor and the big, distorted bass tone he compared to farting in a trash can. Their stage moves, Dusty said, were low energy, high impact. His last wish was for Billy to hand Elwood the bottom end and carry on.[1] [2] [3]

Billy Gibbons and Frank Beard. Beard was not the first ZZ Top drummer, but Gibbons knew almost instantly he had the chops, saying Frank played fiercely and with determination. Frank remembered their first jam lasting eight hours, fuelled by speed. Billy stood by him through addiction, and when asked if he ever considered another drummer, he said there was only one guy. Fifty six years later, Frank's last request was that the band keep going.[1] [2] [3]

Dusty Hill and Frank Beard. They were a rhythm section before ZZ Top existed, meeting as teenagers in Fort Worth and playing together in the Warlocks, American Blues and even a fake Zombies. When ZZ Top needed a bassist in 1969, Frank brought Dusty in. Dusty watched Frank's addiction with fear and love, saying you just want to see your brother get well. Frank said he was satisfied with Dusty and Billy for life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

ZZ Top and Bill Ham. Ham discovered the Moving Sidewalks on a Doors bill in 1968 and spent nearly forty years as ZZ Top's manager, producer and image maker, building the mystique of three self sufficient Texans. He booked them relentlessly, imposed drink limits, and guarded secrets like their taped backing tracks. He produced every album through Rhythmeen. They parted in 2006, and he died in 2016. Gibbons credited him with keeping three unruly musicians together.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Billy Gibbons and Terry Manning. Manning engineered ZZ Top from Tres Hombres to Recycler, apart from Afterburner, and called Gibbons a true genius. With Bill Ham they jokingly called themselves the Triumvirate, finishing records long after Hill and Beard had gone home. Manning built much of Eliminator alone in his attic studio in Memphis. Gibbons, for his part, said the credit on those records really belonged to the whole Ardent Studios team.[1] [2] [3]

Billy Gibbons and Linden Hudson. Hudson lived in Frank Beard's house, built the band's studio there, and worked side by side with Gibbons on the demos that became Eliminator, introducing him to drum machines. The partnership ended in a lawsuit after Hudson went uncredited, and a court awarded him six hundred thousand dollars for Thug in 1986. Decades later Gibbons still spoke fondly of the hours they spent at a mixing console.[1] [2] [3]

Billy Gibbons and Jimi Hendrix. When the Moving Sidewalks opened four shows for the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1968, the teenage Gibbons struck up a friendship with Hendrix, who showed him licks in hotel rooms and was spotted grinning in the wings while the Sidewalks covered Purple Haze. CBS News reported that Hendrix called Gibbons the best guitarist around. Billy later said Hendrix taught him the intro to Foxy Lady.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dusty Hill and Elwood Francis. Francis tended Hill's instruments for decades as the band's guitar tech. When Dusty's health failed in July 2021, he chose Elwood to replace him, and Francis took over within days. Even years later he said it still felt weird to be standing in Dusty's place and that he did not see himself as an official member. He did, however, grow a matching beard.[1] [2] [3]

ZZ Top and Tim Newman. Director Tim Newman made the Eliminator video trilogy that turned the band into MTV icons. He quit after a hidden beer placement in Sharp Dressed Man got the video held back by MTV, then returned for Legs after striking a deal that paid him every time Eliminator was certified for another quarter of a million sales. That deal made him far more money than he expected.[1] [2] [3]

Billy Gibbons and Al Jourgensen. In 1990 Gibbons picked up the Ministry frontman in a vintage car, wearing a white suit, took him to dinner in Houston and confessed that ZZ Top's comeback drum sounds had been sampled from Ministry and Revolting Cocks records. Jourgensen was delighted rather than angry. About ten years later Gibbons played guitar on two Revolting Cocks songs.[1] [2]

Rare facts about ZZ Top

• Billy Gibbons was sent by his father to New York to study percussion with Tito Puente. Before he ever played guitar, the young Gibbons was a percussionist. His father, a Houston orchestra leader, sent him to New York to study with the Latin jazz great Tito Puente.[1]
• Gibbons' father worked alongside his cousin Cedric Gibbons, the famous MGM art director. Freddie Gibbons, an entertainer and concert pianist, worked for Samuel Goldwyn at MGM alongside his second cousin Cedric Gibbons, the studio's legendary art director.[1]
• The Moving Sidewalks lost a tour with the Doors after setting the Doors' equipment on fire. The Sidewalks loved flash powder. At a show in Dallas they overdid it and set the Doors' gear on fire, which ended their chance at a national tour opening for them.[1]
• Dusty Hill played cello at Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas. Before the bass, Hill played cello in school. He hated school anyway, since by thirteen he was already playing in local bars.[1]
• Frank Beard was credited as Rube Beard on ZZ Top's first album and on Tres Hombres. Beard used the nickname Rube on the debut and on Tres Hombres, then was credited by his real name on later albums.[1] [2]
• ZZ Top's own song called Brown Sugar came out months before the Rolling Stones song of the same name. Brown Sugar opens ZZ Top's First Album, released in January 1971, about three months before the Stones' single. The band still played it in 2026.[1] [2]
• The food in the Tres Hombres gatefold came from Leo's Mexican Restaurant in Houston. The famous inside photo shows two heaping plates from Leo's, a much loved Houston Mexican restaurant that has since closed.[1]
• La Grange's inspiration, the Chicken Ranch, was shut down just days after Tres Hombres came out. Tres Hombres was released on the twenty sixth of July 1973, and the Chicken Ranch was ordered closed on the first of August 1973.[1] [2]
• During the Depression, the Chicken Ranch reportedly accepted live chickens as payment. As customers ran short of money, the madam Miss Jessie Williams began charging one chicken per visit. The chickens multiplied and gave the place its name.[1]
• On Degüello, all three band members played saxophone. The album credits list Gibbons on baritone sax, Hill on tenor and Beard on alto, a horn section made entirely of the trio.[1]
• A talk show inspired the strange vocal sound on Degüello. Gibbons saw a guest's identity disguised with a pitch shifter on a TV talk show. Terry Manning persuaded a reluctant producer to name the device, and they used it on songs like Manic Mechanic.[1]
• The Worldwide Texas Tour could not go overseas partly because of quarantine rules for its buffalo. Shows in Europe, Japan, Australia and Mexico were cancelled because the live buffalo could not clear quarantine restrictions.[1]
• Fans at a 1974 ZZ Top show wrecked the turf at Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin. About eighty thousand people came, the new artificial turf was damaged, and the stadium hosted no more concerts until the Eagles in 1995.[1] [2]
• The live side of Fandango was recorded at the Warehouse in New Orleans on the twelfth of April 1974. Three live tracks from that single night filled the first side of the album, with new studio songs on the other side.[1]
• Heard It on the X celebrates Mexican border radio stations that blasted blues across America. Stations like XERF broadcast with huge power from just across the border. Gibbons said they came in like a police call, with Wolfman Jack among the voices.[1] [2]
• Billy Gibbons bought his famous 1959 Les Paul, Pearly Gates, for two hundred and fifty dollars. He bought it in 1968 from a farmer near Houston and named it after the battered car he sold to raise the money.[1]
• B.B. King talked Gibbons out of heavy guitar strings by asking why he was working so hard. King played Gibbons' guitar, felt the heavy strings and handed it back with that question. Gibbons switched to extremely light gauges and later got his own signature set.[1]
• The spinning fur guitars in the Legs video were covered in sheepskins Gibbons bought in Scotland. Dean Zelinsky built them. The glue on the fur covering the tuning pegs was still drying when the courier arrived to take them to the video shoot.[1] [2]
• A beer company's hidden product placement got the Sharp Dressed Man video held back by MTV. Director Tim Newman said a beer company, likely Schlitz, paid Warner for placement. MTV would not air it until the shots were cut.[1]
• Billy got the title TV Dinners from a woman's jumpsuit in a Memphis bar. She walked past in a white painter's jumpsuit with the words TV Dinners on the back. He went back to his hotel and wrote the song that night.[1]
• Paula Abdul choreographed the dancers in the video for Velcro Fly. The 1986 video, directed by Daniel Kleinman, came before Abdul launched her own career as a pop star.[1]
• Tonya Harding skated to Sleeping Bag, and the song later appeared in the film I, Tonya. The real figure skater used the ZZ Top hit in some of her routines, and the 2017 film recreated one of them.[1]
• Dusty Hill loved Rough Boy so much that he had it played at his wedding. He said so in 2007, calling it a pretty little song. The band had just brought it back into their live set.[1]
• On Back to the Future Part III, crew members first mistook ZZ Top for costumed extras. The beards fit the 1885 setting so well that some crew thought they were extras. The band jammed blues between takes with Michael J. Fox watching.[1]
• Texas governor Ann Richards declared the fourth of May 1991 ZZ Top Day. The Texas House also named them Official Heroes for the State of Texas.[1]
• Gibbons once bought Ministry's Al Jourgensen dinner as thanks for the drum sounds ZZ Top had borrowed. In 1990 he took Jourgensen to dinner in Houston and admitted ZZ Top's drum samples had come from Ministry and Revolting Cocks records.[1]
• A father and son marimba duo the band met at lunch plays on the title track of Mescalero. They were entertaining at a Mexican restaurant, were keen to be on a rock record, and learned that the song only had three chords.[1]
• An unfinished ZZ Top song premiered inside a Soyuz spacecraft in 2011. NASA astronaut Mike Fossum, a friend of the band, played Flyin' High as his crew launched to the space station. He had played Got Me Under Pressure on a shuttle flight in 2008.[1] [2]
• Their engineer Gary Moon had engineered the Houston rap song that became I Gotsta Get Paid. When Gibbons named 25 Lighters in the studio, Moon revealed he had worked on the original 1998 track.[1] [2]
• Gillette offered each member a million dollars to shave on television, and they turned it down. Gibbons confirmed the long rumored offer from the eighties on a podcast, recalling their publicist's warning that none of them might know what was under there.[1] [2]
• Frank Beard briefly grew a short beard in 2013 after decades as the man with no beard. He had shaved off his seventies beard as soon as he saw how long Billy's and Dusty's had grown during their break.[1] [2]
• Frank Beard raced in the Twenty Four Hours of Daytona and the Twelve Hours of Sebring. He took up sports car racing in the early nineties, alongside his lifelong love of golf.[1] [2]
• Dusty Hill's accidental shooting happened on Billy Gibbons' thirty fifth birthday. The derringer fell from his boot on the sixteenth of December 1984. Gibbons was born on the sixteenth of December 1949.[1] [2]
• Gibbons swapped his famous Stetson for a woven cap from a Cameroonian chief. He met the chief of the Bamileke people on a visit to Vienna and traded hats, and has often worn such caps since.[1] [2]
• The band's Raw album was recorded without the trio knowing the tape was running. During the documentary shoot at Gruene Hall, they started jamming while the crew set up. Only later did a technician ask what to do with the recordings.[1]
• Elwood Francis's seventeen string bass is a cheap knockoff he found on a Chinese website as a joke. He sent Gibbons a screenshot, they ordered it, and he first played it on stage with no rehearsal. It went viral, and he has said he hates playing it.[1] [2]
• Frank Beard's first big paycheck from ZZ Top, about seventy two thousand dollars, went entirely on drugs. He said so in the 2019 documentary. He later sold his original Ludwig drum kit for drugs too, and called it all a regret.[1] [2]
• Dusty Hill said he visited the Chicken Ranch when he was thirteen. He told Spin in 1986 that he was annoyed it closed just months after La Grange came out, arguing that anything lasting a hundred years must have a reason.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.