His mother introduced him to blues records, to the surprise of some of their white neighbours. Joseph Michael Hill was born in Dallas on. Usually, though, it’s a little lick or a vocal line or something, not a whole damn song!” “We always tape our soundchecks for that very reason. “It was hot as hell, and with the exception of a very few words the song you hear on the record is what we wrote that day,” he said. He and the band wrote “Tush” during a soundcheck in Alabama “in about six or eight minutes”, he told Guitar World in 2008. But he was originally a singer – as he told it, his older brother, a guitarist, made him learn the bass at age 13 because they needed a bassist in their band – and occasionally sang for ZZ Top, demonstrating his upper-register abilities on songs such as “Tush”. Hill was a seasoned blues musician by the time he joined ZZ Top, having played bass with performers including Freddie King and Lightnin’ Hopkins. People say jazz is real music because it’s very intricate. “It had an implication of being overly simplistic … A lot of people make the mistake of thinking the blues is very simple music.
“A lot of people lump us in with southern boogie, whatever that means,” King told music journalist Michael Hann in a 2012 interview. One of their most enduring hits, the FM radio staple “La Grange”, was a 1973 ode to a small-town brothel, later immortalised by author and playwright Larry L King as The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
It was also thoroughly Texan, with albums such as Rio Grande Mud (1972), Tres Hombres (1973), Tejas (1976) and Deguello (1979), a reference to the bugle call that the Mexican army played during the siege of the Alamo. While the band adapted to pop music trends, incorporating synthesisers and drum machines in response to the rise of new wave, their music remained essentially blues rock. Robby Steinhardt: Musician who gave Kansas their distinctive sound.In the video for their 1984 single “Legs” – it was one of their two Top 10 hits, along with the 1985 single “Sleeping Bag” – Hill and Beard spun a pair of custom fur-covered guitars. Hill was joined onstage by lead singer and guitarist Billy Gibbons, whose boogie-style blues riffs established him as one of his generation’s finest rock guitarists, and drummer Frank Beard, who despite his name was the only band member not to have a foot-long beard that rivalled Rip Van Winkle’s.Īlthough they called themselves “that little ol’ band from Texas”, ZZ Top grew into an international sensation by the early 1980s, launched to fame in part by extravagant tours and MTV music videos filled with hot rods and strutting young women. Dusty Hill, the bearded, understated bassist who helped make ZZ Top one of the biggest rock acts of the late 1970s and Eighties, anchoring songs including the shuffle boogie “La Grange” and showcasing his singing on the sultry Top 40 hit “Tush”, has died aged 72.įormed in Houston in 1969, ZZ Top were one of rock’s most durable bands, with a line-up that remained the same for more than 50 years.