The band Keith Richards called the heart of rock and roll: “These cats know their blues”
There’s no set rulebook for what rock and roll is supposed to be. For a genre that was meant to break the rules of good taste from the minute it started, it’s laughable that people are still trying to find ways to put barriers around what constitutes rock and roll whenever new artists come to the forefront to shape it into something new. Although Keith Richards may have the final say over what is truly rock and roll and what isn’t, he admitted that ZZ Top had found the mathematical formula for what the genre was at the best of times.
Because if you ask any seasoned rocker, it all circles back to the blues. No matter how many times people try shapeshifting the genre into its own unique formation, everyone has that same starting point of hearing a blues riff and soaking it up for as much emotion as they can, be it Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, or even Stevie Ray Vaughan.
When Billy Gibbons started off in the Moving Sidewalks, though, it wasn’t strictly a blues formula for every track. The world was still deep into psychedelia, but when Dusty Hill and Frank Beard joined the fold, they found their Southern-fried version of rock and roll working much better than the massive amounts of reverb on every instrument.
Although they weren’t afraid of putting on a few suits and dancing around in music videos for songs like ‘Legs’, it was never at the expense of the song. These were still kids who knew how to get people riled up, and that normally meant digging deep into their souls whenever they played their solos.
Just take ‘La Grange’, for example. Rock and roll is never going to run short of songs that are based around the bare minimum, but even if all they needed was one chord to get the job done, it hardly mattered as long as they had the swagger in their step whenever kicked the tune off.
While Richards will cheekily admit that he learned a few more chords along the way outside of the basic blues structure, he felt that ZZ Top was proof that you didn’t exactly need to shy away from the formula, recalling at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “These guys are the heartbeat of the entire country, the heartbeat of rock and roll. These cats know their blues, and they know how to dress it up. The first time I saw them, I said, ‘I hope these guys are not on the run because that disguise is not gonna work.’”
That’s not to say that ZZ Top was strictly blues to their core. While every one of their songs had that same solid foundation, hearing them play through songs like ‘Tush’ and ‘Sharp Dressed Man’ was the purest modern update there was for the genre, especially when looking at the way Gibbons used his different effects to make his guitar cry.
And despite Richards inventing new ways of thinking about the guitar, it’s safe to say that even Gibbons has him covered in terms of signature blues prowess. For all of the greats that both of them idolised back in the day, there’s a good chance that Richards and Gibbons have become worthy stand-ins for the likes of Muddy Waters and BB King in recent years.
