The blues guitarist Billy Gibbons said was out of everyone’s league
Sometimes, a pocket of music is the best place to be lost. Just ask Billy Gibbons about the blues.
It’s all well and good having complicated music that boggles the mind. The number of times we listen to prog rock bands and wonder what road you take to get to such a finished product, we have well and truly lost count. However, that doesn’t mean that this is the only kind of music that can stir some kind of emotional reaction. In fact, some of the most emotive music out there is made up of very few chords.
I’m talking, of course, about the blues, a genre which was built on sadness. Never before has a sound been able to channel the negative feelings that can come with heartbreak, lost potential, and, in the instance of a lot of early blues musicians, racism. This is emotive artistry at its very best, and the relatability of as much is why the blues continues to be relevant to this day.
Despite being a genre capable of developing such a significant emotional reaction in a lot of its listeners, the actual way that the blues is put together is relatively simple, and it’s all about creating singular pockets of music and then allowing artists to move around in them, which means a lot of the time, when you hear blues musicians play, they’re only playing over three or four different chords.
While some people might get bored with this kind of approach to music, Billy Gibbons was always a big fan. After all, a lot of ZZ Top’s music is steeped in the blues, so it’s not too hard to believe that he isn’t a big fan of the style, and you can really hear it in the way he approaches different songs. “Well, the blues may only be three chords, but the complexity is fascinating,” he said. “I’ve listened to those old blues records forever. And I can still learn something from these guys. These giants.”
He certainly did learn something from the blues, as many people consider Gibbons one of the better blues-adjacent artists in more recent decades. Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash was a huge admirer of the work that Gibbons did and was always happy complementing his style of musicianship.
“Billy is somebody I know,” he said. “But first and foremost, way, way before I ever actually met him, he was one of the tastiest sort of rhythm, blues, and electric-blues guitarists who I ever heard.”
Of course, while I’m sure Gibbons is flattered by this, he would take the approach that he is merely standing on the shoulders of giants. ZZ Top would never have been able to explore those pockets of music that they did were it not for the people who originally put those pockets there. We talk, of course, of your original blues players, the people who first championed the genre and then hit the road so that they could show it to the masses. One of the biggest of these artists was Muddy Waters, someone who Gibbons continues to attest is one of the best to ever do it, and subsequently out of everyone else’s league.
“Nobody can do what Muddy did, but his energy is still fueling that fire,” Gibbons concluded. “You can hear his enthusiasm in bands like the White Stripes or the Black Keys. I’d recommend his first album, The Best of Muddy Waters, with the early Chess singles, to anyone. Every track is worthy. The albums Johnny Winter produced in the late Seventies, Hard Again and I’m Ready, are also terrific.”
