The one jam session Billy Gibbons will never forget: “This is for me!”
There are different ways to approach music; you can overcomplicate it, which is fine and can lead to some pretty mindblowing songs, or you can take a much more relaxed approach, and Billy Gibbons has always been a fan of the latter.
There is something beautiful about the jam, and I’m not talking about the band. This is what happens when a load of like-minded musicians all find themselves in the same room and decide to use their time in there to deliver some improvised, free-flowing music. This is the fastest way to work out whether you’re compatible with other musicians, wherein Led Zeppelin famously had their first jam in Chinatown, and instantly knew that they had come across something special.
“We first played together in a small room on Gerrard Street, a basement room, which is now Chinatown,” recalled John Paul Jones, “There was just wall-to-wall amplifiers, and a space for the door, and that was it. Literally, it was everyone looking at each other, ‘What shall we play?’ Me doing more sessions, didn’t know anything at all […] There was an old Yardbirds tune called ‘Train Kept a Rollin’… The whole room just exploded.”
While Led Zeppelin might have stumbled upon their iconic sound during a jam, there are some bands whose entire discography relies on the idea of improvisation, for instance, blues musicians, who are able to play a few chords and then build a song around them in the heat of the moment, and it’s this relaxed, free-flowing sort of music that Gibbons loved.
“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”.
A lot of the music that Gibbons wound up making with ZZ Top was centred on this blues ideology: he managed to tap into a sound which took that element of simplicity but then layer it with something more complex and exciting. He didn’t come to this realisation on his own, though, and while there was one iconic artist whose performance he loved and which informed him what he wanted to do, there was one specific jam session he saw that led him to work out the kind of music they wanted to make.
Unsurprisingly, Gibbons once watched Elvis perform, and he loved the show, which inspired him to be a musician. A lot of people were inspired by Elvis, given when he took to the stage, it was the first time they had seen a semblance of a rockstar in the mainstream, however, the former was still confused as to what kind of music he would wind up making, which is a revelation that came shortly after, when his dad put him in the car and drove him to a jam session.
“My dad was an entertainer. When I was seven years old, he said, ‘Listen, hop in the car. I wanna take you with me. I’ve got business to take care of at the recording studio’,” recalled Gibbons, “We went into the studio, he parked me in a chair and said, ‘You’ll probably like this, they’re recording a band. I’ll be in the office if you need me…’ It turned out to be a BB King recording session.”
Gibbons continued, “So, between seeing Elvis Presley and BB King, I thought, ‘Man, this is it. This is for me!’”
