The artist who kick-started “the beginning” of Billy Gibbons’ career
It’s easy to forget that ZZ Top frontman Billy Gibbons is actually a bit of a young buck in the rock and roll game.
Born in 1949, the Houstonian boogie guitar player was barely out of high school when opening for Jimi Hendrix in his old Moving Sidewalks band, soaking up some of the psych emitted from fellow Texan jug-rockers The 13th Floor Elevators. Before he was even 30, the beard grew and marked ZZ Top’s defining visual identity, and an embrace of drum machines and glossy synths positioned the hard blues outfit in a weird orbit of the era’s new wave.
The point is, ZZ Top are a funny old band that’s both tethered to an authentic root of rustic Southern rock and young and curious enough to waltz into pop’s contemporary trends to land as unlikely stars of the 1980s MTV landscape. Vintage enough to hold a connection to the old bluesmen while possessed with a budding disregard for purist conventions, pinpointing exactly what led Gibbons to the road of rock isn’t quite as clear-cut as his countercultural peers.
It’s on record that Gibbons harbours just as much love for Jimmy Reed’s electric blues as he does Depeche Mode’s dramatic synthpop. However, just as popular music’s myriad branches can be followed to a unifying big bang, ultimately, Gibbons credits one foundational rock and roll icon with lighting that formative fuse to ZZ Top’s world conquest.
“When I was five, I saw Elvis and I knew I wanted to spank the plank,” Gibbons recalled to Thrasher Magazine. “It just looked like the coolest thing you could possibly do. A few days after my 13th birthday, I got a solid-body electric Gibson. That was the beginning of the beginning.”
It can’t be overstated how seismic the King’s impact was on the 1950s charts.
While complicated by debates around stealing the Black man’s music and his route to fame unobstructed by the racial attitudes of the era, there’s no question that once ‘That’s All Right’ was cut at Sun and the Tennessee clubs were exposed to his sexually-charged on-stage antics, such a gripping alchemy of handsome allure, unabashed physical presence, rebellious spark, and a God-given knack for the blues and R&B all cemented an assured icon of not rock and roll, but the 20th century as a whole.
Gibbons was certainly hooked. It’s never been verified which show he attended with his mother, possibly catching Presley at one of the 15 shows he performed in Houston throughout 1955, but even as a babe of just five years old, the King’s force of nature would have left a formative impression on the young, pre-bearded Texas kid, enamoured with Presley’s visual whirlwind just like any cartoon character or silver screen hero for the new era of pop.
It was settled there and then. Amid the interim between rockabilly and the British Invasion, the teenage Gibbons unwrapped his sunburnt Gibson Melody Maker and Fender Champ in 1962 and sowed the seeds for his future rock stardom, a path paved by the King back when he really was the King.
