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Beer Drinkers
and Pig Racers:
ZZ Top at the Orange County Fair. What can I say? There seem to be several ways to start this review. There's the Fair, there's the Top, there's the complimentary relationship between the concert and the larger event. I need to talk about all of that, so at this point let me just say that ZZ Top is exactly the right kind of band to see at a county fair, their rootsy boogie every bit as authentic and earthy as the livestock and agriculture on display therein.
I grew up in Columbus, where the Ohio State Fair was an annual event that I both looked forward to and took for granted at the same time. You have to admit that there is something special about a place where you can spend the day looking at livestock, riding rides and eating Dumbo ears as a prelude to rocking out after dark with artists like Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and Cheap Trick. In fact, though I was too young at the time to remember much about it now, the first concert I ever saw was at the Ohio State Fair when my parents took me to see no less legendary of an act than the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. So when I read the press release announcing ZZ Top's summer tour and saw that they were going to play the Orange County Fair, there was no question that I was going, come Heaven, Hell or Houston. My ladyfriend Christy and I got to the fairgrounds a couple of hours before showtime in order to take in the sights, sounds and, yes, smells. The Orange County Fair is a nice event; small enough that you can see everything that there is to see in a few hours and big enough to make that time worthwhile. Checking out the goats and the hens, eating the barbecued corn and funnel cakes, I realized how much I missed this stuff. It'd been a decade since I went to a fair; how could that've happened? About an hour before showtime we stumbled upon the Alaskan Racing Pigs. This event held an almost primal appeal, combining a livestock display with the irresistible allure of competitive sports. Racing fans that we are, we couldn't help but handicap the races between these porcine athletes. Christy's pigs invariably came in, meaning I had to buy drinks.
As much as I enjoyed all of that, though, it was really an appetizer for the main event: ZZ Top at the Pacific Amphitheater in the Orange County Fairgrounds. The Amphitheater is very much that in reality and not just in name, a classical Greek theater style bowl that holds about 8,000 people. On this night, it was packed from the first row to the last. There is a little section of grass at the very top of the theater; the organizers could've probably sold another 200 or so tickets there and had no trouble finding takers. In the twenty minutes or so we spent waiting to get our tickets while the guest list was being sorted out, we must've seen at least thirty people inquiring about tickets for the show and being told that it was sold out. As early as three hours before showtime a line of people was forming outside the box office in case any tickets might be released.
ZZ Top took the stage a fashionable fifteen minutes late, kicking things off with "Got Me Under Pressure." The band looked great, dressed in black Nudie-style suits, Billy Gibbons wearing a funky skull cap and playing a unique guitar that could only have been given to him by Bo Diddley, his body, guitar and beard swaying in time with those of Dusty Hill. Drummer Frank Beard and bassist Hill were locked in all night, while Gibbons' guitar and vocals tended a little loose in a ragged-but-right way. During "Jesus Just Left Chicago," Gibbons seemed to be extemporizing in a way that is truly remarkable for a musician playing a song that must have been a part of virtually every performance he's done in the past thirty years.
I think an appreciation of ZZ Top is in order here. Part of this year's induction class into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, ZZ Top is celebrating 35 years together. As Billy Gibbons explained to the crowd, "The Little Old Band from Texas" is still at it with "The same three guys...the same three chords." That has to be some kind of record, that much time, all those great records and no turnover in the band. And I think that the band is really underappreciated. You think of their image with the beards, the funny, salty lyrics and straightforward riffs and don't necessarily consider it too deeply. But I think there's a good case to be made for the Top as the finest blues rock band of the last four decades. Hill and Gibbons are both good singers, they are all three wonderful musicians that share a great musical synergy. Billy Gibbons is a unique stylist on the guitar, arguably the finest blues player to pick up the instrument since Jimi Hendrix. His method of using the fingers of his picking hand to create false harmonics is uniquely his own, related to some of the things Hubert Sumlin did with Howlin' Wolf, but taken to another level. And Gibbons is being modest when he talks about those three chords. It's true that the band bases their music on the tried and true rock and blues templates, but one of things that separates them from the mass of bar bands is the way they subtly tweak the conventions with chord substitutions and extensions that are clever without losing the essential rawness of rock. Their songwriting is really underrated; their best tunes..."La Grange," "Jesus Just Left Chicago," "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide," "Sharp-Dressed Man"...are among the most perfect blues songs of their era. "You don't have to worry/'Cause taking care of business is His name" is funny because it's actually theologically sound from a certain perspective; if you were to create a jive translation of the New Testament like the kiddie versions of the bible that you sometimes see, you could actually use that to describe Christ. And I've always felt that the imagery of the lyrics to "Nationwide" were worthy of Chuck Berry. When you hear the lines "With my two tone brim and my gold tooth displayed/Nobody gives me trouble cause they know I've got it made," can't you just see the protagonist sitting behind the wheel of a late seventies Cadillac?
ZZ Top's music isn't straight-ahead blues for the most part, but a hard rocking hybrid that leaves the blues roots out in the open. But they can play straight blues as well as anybody, a facility they displayed on songs like "I Loved a Woman" and the texas blues classic "Going Down." Dusty Hill did a great Elvis on the band's cover of "Viva Las Vegas." Gibbons played some wicked bottleneck slide on "Tush," while "La Grange" is still as effective of a variation on John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillun" as anyone has ever written. It's embarrassing to admit, but I guess I'd either forgotten or simply never completely realized that the song was about a whorehouse until I heard it in person. ZZ Top knows how to put on a show.
Their hour and forty minute or so performance was heavy on the
songs that made them famous; if anything, I wouldn't have minded
hearing more songs from their last couple of albums. When was
the last time you felt that way at a big rock concert? Though
the band has the chops to improvise like the Allman Brothers or
the Dead, they showed admirable restraint in stretching songs
like "Cheap Sunglasses" out past the recorded
versions, but nowhere near the breaking point. When you are talking
about a band that has been around as long as they have, you can
always find something they didn't play that you would like to
have heard but I was satisfied as a fan with their set list. If
only Sourdough Jack could've taken Harry Porker in the third race,
the day would've been perfect.
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