This long-distance dedication goes out to Jon Grayson, host of Overnight America, friend of Tha ‘Dose, and all-around cool guy and decent human being. Last time I represented this fine publication on Jon’s show, we engaged in a bit of banter about the power ballad arts, and he singled out one particular song as being the nadir of both the band that created the song, and of the genre in general.
His exact words, more or less, were, “I still point to a lot of those power ballads as ‘Songs that Any Given Band Should Never Have Recorded,’ and my favorite example of that is ZZ Top’s ‘Rough Boy.’” To bolster his point, Jon revealed that he comes from the “Jesus Just Left Chicago” school of ZZ Top fandom, hinting that something as ballady as “Rough Boy” is anathema to such a fan.
I concede that listeners who fly the flag for the band’s early blues/boogie/livestock-on-the-stage work may have a problem with the synthy slow burn of “Rough Boy.” Their vision of ZZ Top was a vision of blues-bustin’ rodeo escapees, chugging around the dusty back roads of Texas’ roadhouse circuit, soaked in mezcal, tuned in to border radio, and exhaling barbeque smoke. Their band is the one that started their recording career with a song called “Somebody Else Been Shakin’ Your Tree” (still my favorite Top track) and loaded albums like Deguello, El Loco, and Tres Hombres with odes to cheap sunglasses, tube snakes, tushes, and ejaculating on prostitutes. (more…)
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(1992)![zztopbw7[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/zztopbw71.jpg "zztopbw7[1]")
Every day for two weeks, I had heard the song rise from what must have been a pair of seriously powered speakers, floating out over the hills of Hollywood like some sweetly-scented audio pollen. The music had to be screaming from those distant monitors because Billy’s guitar scuttled the birds in the trees and the vocals came down from the heavens like the very voice of God himself — if the Lord had spoken in a southern dialect and had a preoccupation with modified racecars. Precisely at 11 A.M., ZZ Top’s “Manic Mechanic” was spit out into the ether, signaling to the inhabitants of Laurel Canyon that it was time to start the day — and what better way to greet it than with those tres little hombres from Texas? Today, in another hour, I’d be doing just that, driving to Beverly Hills to meet up with Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, and Frank Beard. And as the world’s greatest alarm clock woke up every other late sleeper in the gently sloping foothills, the song’s third verse took on even more serendipitous significance: