ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons names his “greatest accomplishment as a guitarist”
When Billy Gibbons was a young, barely bearded blues guitarist out of Texas in the early 1970s, he eventually met one of his ultimate heroes, the great BB King, and got to jam with him a bit.
At one point, according to legend, King asked to see Billy’s guitar and played a few licks before commenting, “Why are you working so hard?”, referring to the thickness of his guitar strings, “Don’t work so hard”.
This is the kind of basic, off-the-cuff advice that would be instantly forgotten if your guitar tech said it to you on a tour bus. But when BB King says it, it feels like the salmon of knowledge has personally bestowed a nugget of deep wisdom upon you, and indeed, Gibbons made a point of making things a bit easier on himself, leading to a very long career of consistent success.
It needn’t be stated that his most important musical collaborator was the late Dusty Hill, with whom he toured the world for 50 years as ZZ Top. When asked recently by Goldmine about a specific achievement he was most proud of as a guitar player, however, Gibbons’ mind immediately went beyond the confines of his own band and outward to the wider community of blues rock and beyond.
“My greatest accomplishment as a guitarist is joining in and being accepted by those who have long inspired us,” he said, “All the way back, from country bluesmen to the likes of Jimmy Reed, Eddie Taylor, and Hound Dog Taylor. And then on to Steve Cropper, Jeff Beck, BB King, Freddie King, Albert King, Jimmie Vaughan, and post-modern rave favourites like Eric Johnson, the Black Keys, Guthrie Trapp, and so many others.”
Gibbons nearly concluded his highly diplomatic if somewhat disappointingly broad declaration, but then added a quick addendum, “With Jimi Hendrix being the crowning collaboration, when all is said and done”.
Yes, even for the guitarist who has played with literally anyone who was anyone from the late 1960s onward, there was no one who captured Gibbons’ imagination quite like Jimi Hendrix. For one thing, he was still a teenager when he met Hendrix, making it one of the foundational experiences (pun intended) of his early career as a musician. Beyond a mere brief encounter, though, he also got to tour with the legend when his pre-ZZ Top band, Moving Sidewalks, were booked as an opening act for the Experience on some dates in 1969. Famously, Hendrix took a liking to the young Texan, supposedly calling Gibbons one of his favourite new guitarists.
Gibbons, in turn, was left feeling minted for the rest of his life. No matter how many gold records he’d manage with ZZ Top, or what awards and inductions into various halls of fame would come his way, nothing could top being there shoulder to shoulder with the greatest guitar player who ever lived.
“We all found Jimi to be as warm a guy as you could possibly imagine,” Gibbons told the Huntsville Times in 2012, before recalling an after-show impromptu experience that captured Hendrix’s essence: “We found some black-lights hanging above the stage, whereupon Jimi motioned to grab a couple of the many Stratocasters on hand, pointed to [his roadie] Nigel, who tied a couple of sponges onto the headstocks which were recklessly dunked into some buckets of day-glo paint, turned up the volume for feedback’s sake, and proceed to slosh the back wall into a totally psychedelic mess. That was Jimi.”
