ZZ Top - Eliminator
I'm not interested in the pre ZZ Top story about Dusty Hill and Frank Beard pretending to be The Zombies. I'm not interested in their first 7 "boogie-woogie" albums, as critics like to call them. I'm interested in Billy Gibbons's drum-machine/bass-synth experiment that turned them from a solid and popular blues band into the iconic cultural megastars of the 1980s. You know the hot-rodded '33 Ford, you know the Legs, it's Eliminator.
I'm not making light of feminism, equal rights, or misogyny, and neither is Billy Gibbons. I've always been fascinated by how ZZ Top got away with it. On paper, they are dirty old men who sing songs about sex. Sex, sex, sex (and sometimes cars and drugs). They aren't beating around the bush either, the heart of their songs IS the euphamism. How do they do it? Is it because they are generally humorous and their videos and fuzzy guitars made it obvious they were really goofballs? Is it because we're mansplaining away some inherently insidious sexism?
Nope. It's because they are the outsiders. These blues guys with 3-foot hermit beards and sunglasses don't actually belong to that world. They are chasing women who know exactly what they are doing (making the guys from ZZ Top want to have sex with them). That's the trick. The women are fast, but the boys are just trying to catch up. All of their songs (not just on this album) place the women in control of the situation. Even Dirty Dog (read "bitch") starts from the perspective that she led him on in the first place. It's fascinating.
And now we have to come back to the sound. It really is a drum machine, a bass synthesizer, and 3 Billy Gibbons overdubs. Dusty and Frank spent like 12 combined minutes in the studio adding finishing touches. You don't notice it so much because Billy's guitar sounds like it's about to spontaneously combust in his hands and engulf all of Memphis in its fiery inferno. I believe they might say it was "difficult to control" and "prone to feedback." It's f-ing amazing is what it is.
We all tend to bash the "general public" when it comes to popular music trends, but this wasn't a fluke. Everyone took notice and bought 4 copies of this album to give to their friends who already gave their own 4 copies away. With a budget that amounts to a ham & cheese sandwich, 10 million sold in the states alone and they stopped bothering to count. Critics had already written this off as "just another ZZ Top album" and then peed their pants when they realized they didn't have a clue. It wasn't their "8th album," it was the album that made us ashamed we didn't know about the previous 7 and demand as many more as they could possibly make forever (and we're still going to their shows 36 years later).
But, damnit if there isn't that "contested credits" problem again. Look, i'm not saying it's fair, and i'm not saying it's right, and i'm definitely not saying that it should happen at all in the first place, but if you aren't listed as a band member, Warner Bothers isn't gonna hand you any extra money. They don't even want to hand ZZ Top any more money than they have to, and that's why our friend Greg Graffin reminds us that "handshakes are nothing but a subtle f-you, and contracts determine the best friendships." Billy Gibbons and his imaginary electronic friends made a bad-ass ZZ Top album that somehow made dirty electric blues completely normal on 80s pop radio.
Sometimes truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
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