Mojo - The Music Magazine

ZZ Top, the US cover artists of this month's MOJO magazine, celebrate their 43rd year as an ongoing entity with their gnarliest album in donkey's. Released earlier this month, La Futura does everything you'd expect of a ZZ Top album - riffing, boogiefying... er, more riffing and boogiefying - with an élan that's prompted MOJO to count the ways we're glad they're still around.

And yet the story Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard tell - the acid, the heroin, the electropop reinventions - is way weirder and more woolly than their reputation for dependable, heads-down, no-nonsense boogie might suggest. And that's on top of the searing music and visual larks we felicitate below...

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1. Moving Sidewalks - 99th Floor (1967)

Billy Gibbons' prehistory as Houston psych voyager in thrall to Roky Erickson's acid-munching jug rockers, 13th Floor Elevators.

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2. ZZ Top - Salt Lick

Psych becomes blues, but with added keyboard riffing as original 'Top lineup of Gibbons, Lanier Greig and Dan Mitchell map out a new direction. The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach owns this 7-inch!

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3. Chevrolet (1976)

ZZ Top - now established as Gibbons, Hill and Beard - rip into one of the best tracks from 1972's Rio Grande Mud album as their Worldwide Texas Tour hits DC suburb Largo.

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4. Arrested While Driving While Blind (1977)

Not a bad way to ring out the old and ring in the new. Note lengthening beards.

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5. I Thank You (1979)

Killer performance of Sam & Dave's groove of gratitude, as revamped on ZZ Top's breakthrough 1979 album, Degüello.

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6. Cheap Sunglasses (1980)

The fateful Old Grey Whistle Test where Gibbons was knocked out by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. Little sign of his electropop conversion in Degüello's insouciant trash-anthem, although there is a triggered syn-drum in there somewhere.

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7. Jailhouse Rock/Tush, 1980

Nasty-as-you-like ode to rear-end admiration. Rockpalast's grooving Germans go verrückt.

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8. Gimme All Your Lovin' (1983)

WATCH VIDEO

First of Tim Newman's era-defining ZZ Top videos that primed the trio for unlikely superstardom in the MTV era.

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9. Sharp Dressed Man (1983)

WATCH VIDEO

Newman continued the theme for the Eliminator album's second single: the car, the girls, the Top as dusty-hatted onlookers holding the keys to a sexually active future for our valet-parking "hero".

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10. TV Dinners (1983)

Eliminator's visual odd-man-out, with a somewhat shonky horror theme and monster straight out of Morph. Pretty good tune, though.

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11. Legs (1984)

WATCH VIDEO

Newman was rehired to deliver a promo for what became ZZ Top's biggie: a US Number 8 single; Top 20 in the UK. Eliminator was now a phenomenon.

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12. Interview (mid-'80s)

Whistle Test's Andy Kershaw goes in search of the Texan trio. Cue: multiple use of that hand movement. Can this be 1987? We reckon, surely 1984 or 1985?

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13. Two-Headed Dog (2011)

We spin back almost to the beginning, with Gibbons joining his hero Roky Erickson onstage at SXSW's Ice Cream Social.

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14. I Gotsta Get Paid, 2012

The evil-riffing high-point of the current La Futura album, albeit co-opted to sell alcopops, US-style. And, for A/B testing, here's the lyric in its original format: Texan hip hop artist DJ DMD's 25 Lighters.