The Rolling Stones album that changed Billy Gibbons’ life
Billy Gibbons, the legendary guitarist and founding member of ZZ Top, is perhaps first recognised by his trip-hazard beard and dark shades. However, beneath this iconic facade is a legacy of explorative and explosive blues rock that serves as a sonic ambassador for Texas, consumed voraciously in all corners of the world.
For over five decades, Gibbons and his ZZ Top bandmates rooted themselves snugly in a hard rock sound but traversed the genres to keep the sound fresh. Notably, in the 1980s, the band incorporated synthesisers and drum machines into their sound and welcomed influences of the burgeoning post-punk wave.
It comes with little surprise, then, that Gibbons’ music taste stretches far and wide across a healthy variety of genres. In 2017, Gibbons joined Classic Rock to discuss the ten records that changed his life. Accompanying roots blues selections by Muddy Waters and BB King was a touch of soul from Otis Redding and even some dark synth-pop from Depeche Mode.
Selecting Depeche Mode’s 1984 album, Some Great Reward, as a personal favourite, it isn’t difficult to see who gave ZZ Top their electronic itch in the 1980s. “It’s the home of ‘Master and Servant’ and ‘People are People’. I am constantly impressed with how they meld a bleak worldview with synch and turn it all into great pop music. That’s alchemy!”
Taking up the majority of Gibbons’ selections, however, was a selection of psychedelic-rock classics, including Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced and Cream’s Fresh Cream. Surprisingly, he also showed some love for The Rolling Stones’ 1967 psychedelic tangent, Their Satanic Majesties Request.
The album is broadly panned as an ill-conceived and trite response to The Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released earlier in ’67. The album was even retrospectively dismissed by the Stones themselves. All the same, a small contingent of fans deem it one of the band’s finest moments; Gibbons is part of this brigade.
“This is a crazy, spacey album that some say was the Stones’ answer to Sgt. Pepper’s, but what was the question?” Gibbons commented on his selection. “It’s a sonic tour de force that, 50 years later, underscores what masters of the studio they are. ‘2000 Light Years From Home’ is a whole sci-fi film that just begs for a few visuals. It’s a door-opener.”
To the album’s credit, it stands alone as an experimental, transitional album for The Rolling Stones and contains several extremely listenable tracks. Appraising the album as mediocre, Brian Jones once explained that the chaotic nature of the album stemmed from the fact that it was the Stones’ first self-produced effort.
“It’s really like sort of got-together chaos,” Jones said. “Because we all panicked a little, even as soon as a month before the release date that we had planned, we really hadn’t got anything put together. We had all these great things that we’d done, but we couldn’t possibly put it out as an album. And so we just got them together and did a little bit of editing here and there.”
Listen to ‘2000 Light Years From Home’ below.
