Now entering their 25th year together, standing as one of the top-grossing touring headline acts in rock history and still selling out concerts (and making a reported $30 million album deal with RCA this year), Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard - ZZ Top - bring their "Antenna World Tour" to Salt Lake City this weekend.
When the members of "that little ol' band from Texas" storm into town, they let people know they've arrived. In their 1970 "Worldwide Texas Tour," ZZ Top took Texas to the people with live animals onstage, including longhorn steer, buffalo and Texas rattlesnakes. In the 1980 "Eliminator" tour, the stage was a gigantic replica of the dashboard of their classy red roadster, the Eliminator. In their most recent "Recycler" tour, they brought along an actual junkyard and recycled themselves on stage.This year's "Antenna World Tour," named for the band's latest album and coming to the Delta Center Saturday, Sept. 10, features eye-popping lasers, a moving sidewalk, huge radio-themed props, fur-covered guitars and dancing girls.
The dizzying visual party, though, isn't designed to cover up something lacking in the music. Rolling Stone reports that the heart and soul of the "Antenna" concert can be detected "simply by shutting your eyes and listening to Billy Gibbons play guitar."
Gibbons drives his guitar hard. He bends strings. He sometimes restrains himself before suddenly pouring a dramatic extended solo into the middle of a song. Whether it is blues, slow boogie or heavy rock, Gibbons generates masterful guitar performances. But he keeps it simple.
"ZZ Top is doing what we do best, and that's not learning a fourth chord," says Gibbons.
The "Antenna World Tour" was inspired by the band's memories of late-night tuning in to radio broadcasts to hear the greats of long ago, like B.B. King, Lightnin' Hopkins and "the blues and early rock bands that drove our parents crazy," says Gibbons.
The veteran band continues to ride the crest of success by sticking to simple three-chord, bad-boy guitar and percussion-based music, keeping the lyrics focused on cars and girls, and promoting themselves.
Pushing a "gritty, no-nonsense approach" commends the band to such divergent musical groups as Billy Ray Cyrus, Tina Turner and the Meat Puppets, all of whom name ZZ Top as among their inspirations.
"We weren't out to create an image," says Dusty Hill. "The Eliminator was already built. We didn't build it for the video. We built it for ourselves, and we decided, hey, we like cars, let's use it." And growing out those trademark beards was never a conscious decision. But now, "I'm so used to it," says Hill, "I don't have any desire to shave it off, and, frankly, I don't know what's under there."
It's because he doesn't wear a beard in a band that's famous for wearing them that Frank Beard can walk through malls unmolested. But for Hill and Gibbons, there's no candid mall walking. Even in Santa suits, those peculiar men in long, long beards stand out.
Their promotions - including appearances on "Late Night with David Letterman," MTV, "The Tonight Show" and in Time and Newsweek, and even sending the souped-up car featured on an MTV video out on its own tour of car shows - don't hold a candle to the success of ZZ Top in concert.
Also performing Saturday night is the Ian Moore Band. Moore was brought up on classical violin, accidentally tore the tendons in his hand and so picked up the guitar instead. He never let it go. With music born in the blues and driven by rock, Moore is promoting a self-titled debut album.