Billy Gibbons picks his all-time fantasy band: “We’d need the Jimmys on guitar”
There’s no such thing as a dream rock band by any stretch of the imagination. There are certainly artists who have managed to capture magic among their peers and make classic albums, but when putting together a supergroup, you’re just as likely to get a bit of a mess as you are brilliance. If Billy Gibbons had his way, though, we would have been in for the blues jam of the century with his supergroup.
When looking at Gibbons’s track record in rock and roll, it all circles back to the blues. Even when he was playing the kind of down-and-dirty rock with ZZ Top or going psychedelic in his early band, The Moving Sidewalks, many of his signature licks were from the school of Albert King and Robert Johnson every time he took a lead.
All good bands start with a solid groove, and Gibbons thought that Doyle Bramhall would make a great pulse for the group. Bramhall already had the chops as one of the best drummers in Texas, but his success as a songwriter working on songs by Stevie Ray Vaughan made him the perfect all-around musician to have as the centrepiece.
Although Gibbons stuck with jazz organists like Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff, he admitted that all the Jimmys needed to be accounted for playing guitar, telling Elmore, “We’d need the Jimmys on guitar: that would be Jimmy Reed, Jimmie Vaughan, and Jimi Hendrix.” Apparently, three guitarists aren’t quite enough, either, with Gibbons motioning for Eddie Taylor to play the low end of the guitar instead of the bass.
While most would assume that Gibbons would want to take the lead on the songs, he figured that there would also be a round-robin of guest musicians on vocals, saying, “Me, Jagger and Keith Richards as singers, and—this will make a rather amusing addition—Jeff Beck as a singer.” Hearing Jeff Beck sing might be considered a novelty, but it doesn’t sound out of the question once you break it down.
Beck always made his guitar sound like a human voice, so even if he was just speaking through his guitar, he could cut through any of the bluesy legends that he bounced off of. This is already looking like a ‘We Are the World’ for blues rock, but is there a chance that they would actually make great music together?
While it’s hard to judge, considering a handful of them aren’t with us anymore, it’s easy to see how some of them would fill in the gaps for the others. Although it’s hard to improve on a Hendrix guitar solo or a Bramhall shuffle, there’s a good chance that everyone in the band could see what their bandmates are doing and try to bring something new to the table.
Let’s not forget that the biggest part of being in a group is being able to listen to one another, and if every member of this dream band managed not to step on each other’s toes, we would be in for one of the greatest supergroups of all time when they actually came together. It wouldn’t be easy to bring together, but many years from now, that supergroup on the other side is bound to sound like blues rock angels.
