When MTV started to take off in the early 1980s, if someone had taken a poll on which prominent 70’s rock bands would thrive on the platform, ZZ Top probably wouldn’t have ranked very high. As it turned out, the band ended up rising to their highest levels of popularity by using their videos as a springboard.
Videos by American Songwriter
How did it happen? Well, the band deserves credit for both embracing the medium and understanding, with the help of a wise director, how they could best be utilized within it. Add to that an era-friendly shift in sound, and ZZ Top ruled the MTV airwaves in a way that most rock contemporaries could only envy.
A Band Willing to Change
Throughout the ’70s, ZZ Top established their own niche in the rock world. The trio of Texans (Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, and Frank Beard) developed a gritty, blues/boogie hybrid, one that occasionally vaulted them into the pop charts with songs like “Tush.”
For the most part, however, their airplay remained largely confined to rock radio as the ’80s dawned. Around that time, Gibbons found himself in a European nightclub while on tour one night when he heard “Emotional Rescue” by The Rolling Stones playing on the sound system. He wondered how ZZ Top could make that leap.
Thus it was that the 1983 ZZ Top album Eliminator offered a dance-floor friendly sound via locomotive rhythms, even as the band still brought the hard-rocking thunder. The album was named after a flashy vintage automobile owned by Gibbons, and the car would soon play a large part in the next segment of the band’s transformation—one that would take them into the world of video.
The Bearded Blitz
ZZ Top were nothing if not distinctive in terms of their look, with Gibbons and Hill each sporting lengthy beards (with Frank Beard, ironically enough, sticking with just a mustache). They weren’t skilled as actors, nor were they all that comfortable in emoting their songs. Luckily, they found a director who knew how to play their strengths.
Tim Newman, brother of singer/songwriter legend Randy Newman, got the gig to direct “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” the relentless lead single off Afterburner. In the video, the band appear as fairy godfathers of sorts, the fancy red car in tow, to help a hapless gas station attendant. They even came up with their own quasi-dance move to seal the deal.
Subsequent videos “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Legs” continued in very much the same vein. The band would materialize, with a coterie of somewhat scantily clad girls in tow, to assist a character who was down on their luck and/or mistreated by some obnoxious folks. The Eliminator vehicle made a major impact each time as well.
Top Triumphs
MTV simply ate up the videos that ZZ Top delivered from the Eliminator album. And that helped the band as it crossed over to pop radio like never before. “Gimme All Your Lovin’” barely scraped the Top 40, and “Sharp Dressed Man” just missed. But the video created anticipation for the next clips down the pike. Since those clips were all connected, fans felt like they were following a story.
It all paid off with “Legs.” From their eighth album, a dozen years into their recording career, the band scored their first-ever Top-10 pop hit with the song. And even though they didn’t sustain the theme of the trilogy in subsequent videos, the commercial momentum carried over to Afterburner, the band’s 1985 album that produced four more Top-40 singles.
ZZ Top proved with these videos that a little effort and a lot of open-mindedness can pay off in big ways. In much the same ways as they would come to the rescue of the characters in those clips, the videos helped prop up their flagging commercial prospects and instilled them as one of the most successful acts of the decade.
Photo by Aaron Rapoport/Corbis via Getty Images
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