The guitarist so good he scared Billy Gibbons: “Absolutely terrifying”
There are few guitarists in rock that straddle a realm of organic rootsiness as well as a keen embracer of technology quite like ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons.
Ever since ZZ Top’s Texas founding in 1969, the Southern blues trio charted an unerring course chasing the mystical boogie, the holy elixir clamoured after by every band unfussed by psychedelic expanses and gunning straight for the hard rock dive bar.
It was a blue-collar sound perfected by the band, cutting one of the Lone Star State’s most immortal anthems on Tres Hombres’ driving ‘La Grange’ in 1973.
ZZ Top were no ossified purists, however. Keenly keeping an ear to the ground for music’s rapid changes, ZZ Top coasted through the new wave era with an updated sound but the all-important boogie nucleus and wry Texan humour fully intact. The beards got longer, the suits got flashier, and the welcome pop gloss that synthed up their sound found an unlikely catapult to 1980s MTV stardom, helped in no small part by their ostentatious promo videos enjoying heavy rotation.
Yet, beneath ZZ Top’s commercial peaks and flirtations with celebrity, Gibbons was always the same Texan guitarist as he was even in the days of his former band, The Moving Sidewalks. Such confounding marriages of taste and creative appreciation are likely what fuelled the effusive praise for another Texan guitarist whom Gibbons had been paying attention to for years when considering the musicians he’s inspired by.
“Eric [Johnson] is an absolutely terrifying player,” he confessed to MusicRadar in 2022. “He has a great tone that he once called his own attempt to become a 100-pound violin, which I think is brilliant. I remember reading that and absolutely loving the idea behind it.”
Never quite achieving fame in his own bands, Johnson would forge a career as a sought-after session player, cutting guitar tracks for the likes of Cat Stevens, Carole King, and Christopher Cross. It wouldn’t be til the late 1980s that most had heard of him, standing as one of the key guitarists of his day in the vein of Joe Satriani or Steve Vai.
It’s easy to see why Gibbons is in such awe of Johnson. Hailing from a similar background in country and blues, Johnson’s novel use of the latest gear no doubt further piqued Gibbons’ interest. Johnson’s celebrated violin sound is an artful master of various amps, delays, and reverb effects. “I would definitely say he’s someone who has tamed the twang of his Strat,” Gibbons furthered. “There’s not as much high-end in there. He’s a very schooled player. There’s a lot to be learned from him.”
The feeling’s mutual. When promoting 2022’s The Book of Making / Yesterday Meets Today, a chance remark from an interview on some of the numbers’ resemblance to ZZ Top’s “grind” prompted a compliment to the Texan blues rockers. “Sure, I’ll take that,” he concluded to Guitar World. “I think that sounds about right. I love Billy Gibbons’ use of his blues-rock thing. He’s such a great player. What tone, you know?”
