Classic rock meets IDM in 1999: The most unexpected sample in ZZ Top’s catalogue
To anyone unfamiliar with ZZ Top’s southern boogie, IDM electronica should exist in a different universe from the trio’s brand of Texan hard rock.
You can’t blame anyone for not immediately pivoting to the frontman, Billy Gibbons, as a leading force of music’s electronic surge. On the face of it, the bearded guitarist is a creature of the South’s roadhouse jam, all dusky ‘La Grange’ Houston ramble and standing alongside the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Allman Brothers as the 1970s’ soundtrack to blue-collar Dixieland.
Such an impression isn’t wrong, but Gibbons hid an infinitely more intrepid and curious musical radar under his chest-length beard. At just 13 years old, the young Gibbons was sent to New York City by his father to study percussion under the tutelage of Latin jazz legend Tito Puente. A few years later, while barely out of high school, the hypnotic garage emitted from fellow Texans The 13th Floor Elevators would cast a lysergic spell on Gibbons when captaining his Moving Sidewalks band, later opening for The Doors and Jimi Hendrix before ZZ Top came calling.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that such a rich and eclectic musical foundation would ward off any purist objections to the synthesiser. Supposedly, it was a chance crossing of paths with the UK’s Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark in 1980 that turned Gibbons on to the possibilities of electronic music, the two groups both recording their sets for the BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test on the same day and setting the stage for ZZ Top’s fascination with sequencers and drum machines.
Over the years, Gibbons would mention his fandom for industrial giants Ministry and reveal to Far Out in an exclusive just what an impact Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration made on him back in 1986.
Synths and new wave polish would colour 1981’s El Loco, before sonically coating the Eliminator follow-up two years later to Billboard explosion, catapulting ZZ Top to the hairy stars of the MTV age with their humorously flashy promo videos.
But IDM? Even much of the electronic dance underground was left cold by the challenging ambient techno pumped out by Sheffield’s Warp Records cohort, but Gibbons merely saw an opportunity to explore where his beloved electronica had permutated into the 1990s. Alongside the scene’s Aphex Twin and Squarepusher heavyweights, Manchester’s Autechre duo stood as one of Warp’s ‘Big Three’, blending digitally crushing dissonance with shards of glacial ambience in their chilly soundscapes.
Gibbons dug it. For 1999’s XXX album, ‘Dreadmonboogaloo’ contained an Autechre sample as its piston percussion backing track, looped throughout much of the cut and flashing ZZ Top’s sonic marriage of old school blues rock with a contemporary flourish. The source? The mechanoid ‘Second Bad Vilbel’ from 1995’s Anvil Vapre EP, a particularly dense wrestle of growling beats in the Autechre canon.
Such curious pilfering is all part of ZZ Top’s many surprises; ‘Dreadmonboogaloo’ is another turn in Gibbons’ aversion to hard rock conventions that’s carried the Texan trio through to their nearly 60-year bluesy juggernaut.
