ALBUM: Tres Hombres (1973)
MVC Rating: 4.5/$$$$
Well, if you had to guess what would be the last album on MyVinylCountdown list of vinyl records, as organized alphabetically, this would be a good guess.
It’s pretty hard not to be at the bottom of an alphabetical list when your name begins with not only the last letter of the alphabet, but with two of the last letter.
The bearded ones provide a solid bit of closure to this part of my journey living with Lewy body dementia. It is the 678th album, the final album, in my countdown to beat this disease.
I have only one ZZ Top album, Tres Hombres. When La Grange came on the radio, I turned it up. It was like nothing else, a crunching ear worm of a guitar riff and the ‘haw haw haw’ vocal knocked me out. Little did I know at the time that the song with few words was written about a brothel in La Grange, Texas, the inspiration for the Dolly Parton movie, ‘The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.’
I was also quite smitten with the bluesy one-two punch leading off the album: “Waitin’ for the Bus,’ and ‘Jesus Just Left Chicago.’ Heavy chorded blues riffs.
My parents are from Texas and I lived there when I was young. ZZ Top is thoroughly Texan so that’s where part of my affinity for the band lies. In my critiques, I tend to go a little lighter on Texas bands: Stevie Ray Vaughn, Buddy Holly, Freddie Fender, Nanci Griffith, Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett and PJ Proby, just to name a few. (PJ Proby? Are you kidding me!!)
What the heck am I saying? Go lighter, go easier? These artists are amazing and need not be graded on a curve. Just coincidentally two of the band members, Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill, sported chest-length beards. The other in the trio had no beard but his name is Frank Beard.
They never did anything better than Tres Hombres and La Grange in my mind, although they went on to widespread commercial success, fixtures on MTV. Tres Hombres was their third album, and it was the one that broke through to major success, as they cranked out such crowd pleasers as Cheap Sunglasses, Sharp Dressed Man, and Tush.
Maybe out there somewhere is a group in the genre of sleep music who will put out ZZZ as an album name just to beat ZZ Top’s status as last album in Mike Oliver’s collection. But until then, ZZ Top finishes off my five-year quest to write and post ‘reviews’ of my 678 records before I die of a fatal brain disease. I am doing it to raise awareness of a disease that is relatively common but has no cure nor name recognition.
As a writer I didn’t know of a better way for me to spend my final days writing. The blog has kept me occupied as this insidious disease slowly takes my brain. But I am going to continue to post writings even after this countdown has ended. So stay tuned … like Billy Gibbon’s guitar.
Aw, haw, haw, haw, haw.