“There really isn’t a whole lot to do around here other than pick up a guitar and make music,” said Billy Gibbons when asked about the place that ZZ Top call home.

Known all around the world as “that little ol’ band from Texas”, ZZ Top formed in Houston way back in 1969, with Gibbons on guitar and vocals, Dusty Hill on bass and vocals, and Frank Beard on drums.

Speaking to Classic Rock in 2014, Gibbons said of the Lone Star State: “It’s kind of challenging to try to nail it down and define what is so valuable about Texas as a place. There’s still a little of that gunslinger mentality in the air. There’s a competitive attitude: I can play a guitar better than you! But there’s also a real robust camaraderie between musicians in Texas.

“Musically, it’s very diverse. It makes for a great atmosphere to work in. There’s a freedom of exchange between musicians. We share knowledge. There’s something quite attractive in calling Texas a place to be from.”

Gibbons also spoke of the affinity between ZZ Top and Southern rock heroes Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Allman Brothers Band.

He recalled: “There was a good blend between those groups, an identifiable quality within their work. We definitely related to that.

“On an early tour we went out with the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. You had Texans and Southerners – that was pretty interesting! But we all got on pretty good.

“There was a common thread between all of us – a blues styling, blues phrasing in our music. We all had an admiration for a peculiar art form called the blues. And that trace element was the key to an understanding between those bands.”

He said of the Allmans’ blues credentials: “They certainly were serious! And they also had the bonus of finding in Gregg Allman a great singing voice.”

Few rock bands have played blues as authentically and soulfully as ZZ Top, as illustrated by the classic songs Sure Got Cold After The Rain Fell (from 1972 album Rio Grande Mud), Jesus Just Left Chicago (from 1973’s Tres Hombres), Blue Jean Blues (from 1975’s Fandango!) and A Fool For Your Stockings (from 1979’s Degüello).

“In one sense, for a guitarist such as myself, it’s easy to play the blues,” Gibbons said. “You put your fingers in the right place on your guitar and the instrument does the rest. But when you can sing the blues and sing it with real honesty… that’s something special right there.”

He added: “It’s important to understand that the blues is a very sophisticated form of expression. One of our favourite artists is [late Mississippi bluesman] Jimmy Reed. On the surface his music seems so easy, so simple. But on closer inspection, it’s very complex, in the things that Jimmy plays with his second guitarist Eddie Taylor. The notion that the blues is an overly simple kind of music is inaccurate to say the least.”

Gibbons also discussed the eccentricity in ZZ Top – the weirdness at the heart of songs such as Manic Mechanic, Ten Foot Pole and Heaven, Hell Or Houston.

He explained: “When ZZ Top got together we discovered pretty early on that we were not going to be able to succeed by trying to emulate the likes of Bob Dylan. We were different. There are some very strange things on ZZ Top records.”

Arguably the strangest of all is Heaven, Hell Or Houston, from 1980 album El Loco, in which Gibbons’ bizarre lead vocal is rendered as a long and rather sinister phone call.

“It’s certainly true that Heaven, Hell Or Houston comes out of a very strange place,” Gibbons said. “That element of ‘weird’ is a resonant theme within this band, and it’s one of the things that keeps this band together, that keeps us going after so many years.

“Maintaining somewhat of a sense of humour and a sense of ‘weird’ is one of the things we like the most. And Heaven, Hell Or Houston – as oddball as it is – is still one of the band’s favourites.”

The song Ten Foot Pole – also from El Loco – is another strange one. The chorus – “I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole!” – is intelligible, but what Gibbons sings in the verses is utterly incomprehensible.

He admitted: “I’m sort of mumbling on that one! We actually had the musical arrangement intact when we came to record it, but we had no words for this particular musical composition. We had a working title but nothing else.

“So the engineer told me, ‘Just go and mumble a few things until the words are ready’. But once the tape was rolling and I started mumbling, we all thought, ‘This is working!’ It was a message coming through the grass… it works. So we didn’t ignore it.”

It was after the madness of El Loco that ZZ Top had their greatest commercial success with the 1983 album Eliminator, on which the trio’s gritty sound was cleverly updated and enhanced with synthesizers and sequencers.

In addition, a series of comical videos for the hit singles Gimme All Your Lovin’, Sharp Dressed Man and Legs made ZZ Top famous and instantly recognisable as the band with the funny beards (sported by Gibbons and Hill, but not, of course, Beard himself) and the flashy red hot-rod as featured on the album’s cover.

As Billy Gibbons told Classic Rock, the success of Eliminator changed his life.

“Without a doubt!” he said. “That record was certainly a different kind of offering from our end. We decided to concentrate on good tempo, good timing. And the big thing was that we had all these exotic new gizmos to make music with.

“Of course, the saving grace of going in that direction was that we decided to throw the manual out the window. We just tried whatever sounded good – just to see what makes sense sonically.

“The essence of ZZ Top was maintained: that record was still created with a guitar band in mind, with elements of the blues form. But the major difference was that this was ZZ Top doing pop music.”

When ZZ Top hit the stage on The Elevation Tour you will see Billy Gibbons sporting all kinds of custom-made electric guitars. But he’s got a new one for this run of dates that is particularly worthy of note – because this one is the latest to have been designed and built by Gibson president and CEO Cesar Gueikian.

This is CEO#11, and it is an off-menu Explorer (the designation CEO#11 is found on the truss rod cover) with a stunning two-piece figured maple top, all finished in a Vintage Cherry Sunburst. The full spec hasn’t been shared for this one yet, but this is the boss man’s guitar, we can well imagine that maple being AAAAA grade. Even from Gueikian’s Instagram post, you can see the three-dimensionality.

If you’ve been following Gueikian’s builds, the most famous of which, the “Ghost Burst” CEO#4 SG that famously ended up in the hands of Kirk Hammett of Metallica at Back To The Beginning, you might recognise some of his signature flourishes.

This custom Explorer, officially on loan to Gibbons, and which will, like its predecessors, be auctioned off at a later date to support the Gibson Gives charitable foundation, bears all the hallmarks of Gueikian’s design proclivities.

Note the Custom livery, the pearl block inlays on what looks like an ebony fingerboard, the multi-ply binding applied to the body’s top and headstock, and the pickups, left uncovered to reveal the “double white” or double cream bobbins.

The only thing missing is the diamond split block inlay on the headstock but there’s no room for that with the Explorer’s six-in-line profile. Other details we particularly like are the slimmed down controls, with just a single volume and tone, plus three-way selector switch serving both pickups. There’s the Tune-O-Matic bridge and that’s all we can tell from this distance.

Gibbons is presently taking the Texas trio’s hot blues-rock shuffle across its home state, and the lineup sees John Douglas sitting in for Frank Beard, who is temporarily out of commission owing to a medical issue. Elwood Francis is on bass guitar. Have no fears about Douglas; he should know the set down pat. A) he’s from Texas, which helps, but B) more importantly, he’s been Beard’s tech since forever.

“Always a pleasure to host BFG in my office, and even better when he decides to take one of my CEO builds on tour!” wrote Gueikian on Instagram. “Stay tuned for more info…should we auction it off for Gibson Gives when the tour is done?”

Gibson Brand Ambassador and Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash signalled his approval in the comments. As did Adam Jones of Tool (that is if a gif of Stone Cold Steve Austin smashing two cans of beer into his face is a sign of approval… But we’d say so, sure).

But something else caught out eye on Gueikian’s page, which has historically been the go-to news source for Gibson teasers of forthcoming attractions.

It was there we first saw the return of the Les Paul Supreme, the Marty McFly Back To The Future ES-345 replicas (the real one is still in the wind), and Mark Morton’s debut Gibson signature guitar, the Mark Morton Les Paul Modern Quilt. And now, has Gueikian revealed the first of his DES series of guitars?

There is a video of him playing a Ghost Burst SG, much like the CEO#4 Hammett played onstage that sold at auction for $76,800 in November 2025.

It has “DES” on the truss rod cover, and looks like a more refined version of the finish. Speaking to MusicRadar ahead of the auction, Gueikian revealed that there would be a Gibson range based on his specs.

“The ones that we’re going to be releasing are going to be based on these guitars that I built, with these features, in the Ghost Burst finish,” he said. “And so I guess it’s not a signature model, but they are built on the basis of the specs of what I did.

“I didn’t want to name them the Cesar line or CEO line. So what we agreed with the team is that we’re going to call them DES, which is what I love on everything, which is ‘Do epic shit.’ So they’re gonna be the DES collection. And then that, one day, if it keeps going and it keeps growing based on other things that I build, hopefully it will outlast me.”

Gueikian says had been a modder all his life but it wasn’t until he took the hot seat as Gibson’s big boss that he decided he wanted to learn how to make one from scratch.

“I had tinkered anchored with them, changed things, opened [them] up, changed parts and things like that,” he said. “But I had never built one.”

Initially, he just wanted to know how to make them. But more importantly it would give him an appreciation of the work done by his team on the shop floor.

“What I really enjoyed was learning from them, and putting myself in a vulnerable situation and having the team in the craftory teach me how to do something,” he said. “That was my favourite thing.”

There was a lot of learning to do. Luckily, he had Gibson’s master luthier Jim DeCola as his coach. Each Friday morning, when time allowed, Gueikian would get hands-on. It wasn’t always so easy.

The first build taught him a hard lesson. He had spent months on this guitar and thought he had one last job to finish it off, only for disaster to strike.

“I happened to be in Nashville then, so with Jim DeCola, I went to a craftory between Christmas and New Year’s. It was just the two of us,” he said. “And I finished buffing it and I was going to assemble it that day. I finished. It took me about three hours to buff the guitar, which probably takes the team members there about 15 minutes for a guitar. It took me three hours. And that was done.

“Then I noticed a little something, a little orange peel from the lacquer on the headstock, and when I put the headstock on the buffing wheel, it threw it out of my hands, and in a fraction of a second, it was on the floor with the broken headstock. That day I learned how to fix a broken headstock.”

You can read more about Cesar Gueikian’s CEO guitar builds here, a conversation in which he talks about how it felt to see Kirk Hammett play the SG he made at the Black Sabbath tribute show. For full dates and details of The Elevation Tour, head over to the official ZZ Top site.

• Gibson gives three of its most-iconic acoustic guitars a Special makeover

There is no better musical education than jamming with players who have some years on you – players with experience, whose command of the instrument elevates all around them.

Ask anyone who has played with the great Buddy Guy. He is blues guitar’s preeminent showman, its standard bearer. No one has been doing it longer. No one does it better. And Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top was no different to the hundreds of players who have jammed with Guy over the years; being onstage with him was a chance to learn something.

Speaking to Jay Mohr on YouTube, Gibbons reflects on Guy and his mission to keep the blues alive, night after night. “He will be doing it, and doing it, and doing it again, it doesn’t matter where, or when, he just likes doing it,” he says.

Gibbons recalls one of the special nights when they got to jam together, an unscheduled guest spot at the Montreux Jazz Festival, when Guy was “one of the top name Saturday night artists”.

Gibbons and Guy have played Garbage Man Blues at Montreux together, but this performance, Gibbons’ “favourite”, was when they played T-Bone Walker’s Stormy Monday, or, to give it its unabridged title, Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad). Gibbons says he was not prepared to play it that night. He was just there to watch Guy’s set. But there was a little peer pressure involved, and musicians are nothing if not easily led.

“A buddy of mine came over and said, ‘Man, you oughta sit in!’” recalls Gibbons, who politely protested. “I said, ‘I haven’t been invited.’ He goes, ‘Well don’t you know Buddy Guy?’ I said, ‘I know him. But I don’t know if he knows me.’ He said, ‘But you recorded together!?’ I said, ‘It doesn’t mean anything. He’s recorded with everybody!’ And he said, ‘I’ve got a guitar. I’ll loan it to you. Just go up. Just walk on.’ And I did.”

The band were playing Stormy Monday, but not the version originally recorded by Walker. After all, this is one of those blues standards that everyone puts their own stamp on. BB King has done it. Slash has done it. The Allman Brothers have done it (with Gibbons). Albert King played it. On this night, Guy and his band were doing their thing with it.

“The band saw me coming, and the bass player said, ‘Yeah, come on. Come on!’” says Gibbons. “And Buddy had his back to me. They plugged me in. Somebody had a spare amplifier.”

Only Guy and his band were switching it up on the evening; they were going to do the Bobby Bland version, which is a little different – it’s a little awkward, not least from an administrative perspective. It was original released as “Stormy Monday Blues” and this led to a royalties snafu. But Gibbons’ problem on the night was more musical.

Bland’s guitar player, Wayne Bennett, skewed towards jazz guitar, and his version is hard to get under the fingers.

“The Bobby Bland version, the LP version, which included the middle guitar solo, was the genius of Wayne Bennett, and it is one of the most difficult guitar solos to mimic,” says Gibbons.

Gibbons was feeling game, though. He had been working on it. And he did all right. Guy approved.

“You can get kinda close. I started playing it because I had gotten close,” he says. “And Buddy Guy turned around, smiling, he knew it note for note.”

Of course he did. Afterwards, Gibbons says he took the opportunity to ask for some advice. Guy could have been specific, shared a technique, maybe a gear tip – famously, it was BB King who advised Gibbons to use a lighter gauge of electric guitar strings and he never looked back.

Gibbons says Guy had something else in mind: “I said, ‘Buddy, you’ve been at this so many years, so successfully, do you have something you can share with other guitar players, maybe?’ He said, ‘Yes. When you are playing, look down at the guitar neck, and look as though you can’t believe what you’re doing!’ [Laughs] I said, ‘Okay!’”

That's a real showman's logic: if you look as though can’t believe what you’re doing, maybe the audience won’t believe it either. It's like what Guy told MusicRadar in 2020: "If people come see you, I think you should give them every damn thing you’ve got."

Most of us can agree that it is not the instrument but the player that is the main ingredient in guitar tone. It’s how we play, not what we play, and that especially holds true for the greats.

We could play through Jimmy Page’s rig but who could phrase those notes with the same cavalier panache? Conversely, he could pick up any old piece of firewood with a pickup in it and make it sound godly.

Vast sums of money have been spent reassembling the myriad components of Eddie Van Halen’s rig, with night classes in home electronics enjoying an economic boom from curious players trying to fathom the magical properties of the variac to turn their sound Brown, and yet without EVH’s buccaneering virtuosity writ large on the fingerboard, that sound will always be just out of reach.

But that’s not to say that we shouldn’t try, and nor does that prove that the electric guitar doesn’t have a say in all this.

Some guitars really do have something in them, something kind of mythical, and ZZ Top frontman, Billy F Gibbons, owns one of them.

She goes by the name of Pearly Gates, and while Gibbons said he agreed with Brian May and similarly subscribed to the tone-is-in-the-hands maxim, the bewhiskered raconteur argues that no matter who picks it up this legendary 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard, they’ll feel something.

And it's something magic, as though the Lady of the Lake herself has just opened up the guitar case for you and out popped this Excalibur comprising mahogany, maple, hide glue, nitro lacquer and wire.

“I’ll tend to agree with Brian’s assessment. Although in the case of ZZ Top, we count largely on the dramatic performance from our famous 1959 sunburst Les Paul – the one we call Pearly Gates,” says Gibbons. “Even today, that instrument is fascinating. It came together on one of those lucky days when it was the right combination of wood, the right amount of glue, the right amount of paint – it’s kind of crazy.

“I’ve passed it around and players of all sorts have all come to the same conclusion – there is something magic in that instrument.”

Maybe it as the air it was being exposed to at the time when Gibbons first acquired the guitar in 1968. There was a lot of magic going around. Gibbons tasted some of it as he toured with Jimi Hendrix with the Moving Sidewalks, before forming ZZ Top in ’69.

“It was a wonderful time, largely due to the unexpected invitation to join The Jimi Hendrix Experience tour back in 1968,” says Gibbons. “Rock ’n’ roll was becoming more cerebral. Bands were beginning to experiment with expansion of consciousness. It genuinely was a period of great experimentation.”

This unbridled musical curiosity could manifest itself in various ways. With the Moving Sidewalks, it was psych-rock. This was an era when rock’s primordial gloop was producing bands like Cream and Pink Floyd, mind expansion you could own on vinyl and experience live in concert. But it wasn’t all pure cosmic experimentation. Gibbons’ curiosity was piqued by blues guitar, what was happening with the British Invasion, and going back to the source.

“We touched upon The Moving Sidewalks and the psychedelic surroundings of that excursion, but at the same time things were swinging back to a bluesier influence, particularly from bands from the UK,” he says. “It’s no secret that the British revived the art form in no small terms. We were rediscovering that which had been left by the wayside – all thanks to The Rolling Stones and Eric Burdon and The Animals and The Pretty Things, so many influential arrivals on these shores, allowing us to get back into the blues thing.”

With Dusty Hill on the bass guitar and Frank Beard behind the drum set, he had chanced upon a groove unit that had already played together and hit its straps – and it just so happened their interests aligned perfectly with Gibbons’.

“I shared quite a number of the same influences that struck both Dusty Hill and Frank Beard, so it was quite natural to take the ball and run with it,” says Gibbons. “I inherited such a great rhythm section. Dusty and Frank had been in a band together for years before I even met them. So I stepped on to this ready-made platform to take it straight ahead.”

There was no better instrument to do that with than Pearly Gates. This would become the holiest of holies, the guitar whose voice has been heard on every ZZ Top recording. Gibbons lucked out when he got it. Nearly everyone who owns a ’59 Les Paul gives it a name. Most reading here can talk about their favourite ‘Bursts even though we will never hope to own one; there’s the Keith Burst, the Skinner Burst, Lazarus…

And let’s not forget the Beano Burst, which belonged to Eric Clapton until it was stolen from a practice space in 1966, never to be seen again. That Beano Burst gave Gibbons the idea that he should get one of his own in the first place.

That Gibbons’ is named Pearly Gates is all to do with a car of almost divine providence. Gibbons and friends owned a 1939 Packard and had lent it to an aspiring actress friend to drive down from Texas to Hollywood for an audition.

“We didn’t think the car would make it past El Paso,” said Gibbons, speaking to Guitar Player in 2020. “But it brought her all the way to Hollywood, and she got the part. We figured the car must have divine connections, so we named it Pearly Gates.”

The actress asked what she should do with the car now she had made it there? Gibbons and friends told her to sell it. She wired the money back, and Gibbons had a $250 war chest to find his Les Paul, and he had a lead.

A pal by the name of John Wilson, who played in the Houston-based garage-psych band The Magic Ring (also known as the Hobbits, and they were pretty good), had heard of a rancher who was rumoured to have one hidden under his bed. Gibbons told Guitar Player that this rancher had swapped country music for cattle and this thing was up for grabs. The bold Billy drove on out there and met with a guy who looked like Big Jake himself.

“The guy was big,” said Gibbons. “He was like a John Wayne guy. I had $250 in my pocket. And when he pulled out that ’59 ‘burst, the deal went down.”

Inside the case was a love letter and a spare set of flatwounds and Gibbons maintains he still has both. Nothing has changed over the years besides the wear and tear.

But what makes Pearly Gates so special – where is the magic? You could argue it was all factory made. The story behind it – Hollywood, a vintage car, the rancher who looked like ‘The Duke – gives it a certain mojo. But you could argue the magic was factory made.

Nineteen-fifty-nine was Gibson’s annus mirabilis. The best figure for how many Les Paul Standards were made by Gibson in 1959 is 643, though the log books are missing and experts, such as Joe Bonamassa, have said the figure shipped was 536 or 539. By most player’s estimation, Gibson never managed to top it, and it is reflected in the prices they command in the vintage guitar market.

The ‘59s had Seth Lover’s ‘Patent Applied For’ PAF humbuckers. They had the Honduran mahogany bodies with carved maple tops and that Cherry sunburst finish that fades just right over time. They had the long neck tenon, the single-ply binding, the Tune-O-Matic bridge, the nickel hardware, and they were, in Bonamassa’s opinion, “perfect”. And he should know. He owns eight of them.

“It’s a perfect combination of build quality, wood, electronics, contours,” he said, in a video segment for the BBC. “The greatest thing about a ’59 Les Paul – because of its association with rock music – is that when these were built, they were built to play jazz, and they were built to play more pop music, so when I grew up listening to Eric Clapton, the Jeff Beck Group, Free, Led Zeppelin – wonderful musicians who could play any plank of wood with a pickup strapped to it – they chose these for a reason, because of the sound, the clarity, the ability to create these wonderful dynamics in music, where we go very clean, and then with just a simple twist of a knob you’re in rocket mode.”

Gibson has tried to recreate the magic. In 2009, it launched a Custom Shop VOS Pearly Gates Les Paul Standard alongside a super-limited run of replicas aged by Tom Murphy, with a further 50 aged and then played and signed by Gibbons himself. Those replicas have become some of the most sought-after Les Pauls on the vintage market in their own right.

But even if they are beyond most players’ budgets, we could always retrofit our own Les Paul with a little bit of the Pearl Gates secret sauce – the eponymous Seymour Duncan humbucker set that was co-developed with Gibbons to replicate the PAFs in the original.

This $278 tonal power-up might not fully explain why Pearly Gates sounds the way it does but it does offer some clues.

The Californian electric guitar pickup manufacturer discovered that the neck humbucker on Pearly Gates had more midrange than other PAFs. “The result is a neck pickup that cuts through with stronger tailored mids, but still has the open and airy treble attack of the Alnico II bar magnet,” says Seymour Duncan. “Combined with a warm, spongy low-end, this pickup is great for both rhythm and lead playing.”

For the record DCR rating on Seymour Duncan’s Pearly Gates neck humbucker is 7.3k. At 8.2k, the bridge runs a little hotter than its contemporaries. That extra heat counted when Gibbons was playing it through his 1968 Marshall Super Lead. Again, Seymour Duncan used an Alnico II bar magnet to recreate the original, wax-potting both pickups to put the nix on squeal.

For an extra touch of authenticity, it wound them Seymour Duncan’s original Leesona winding machine that he got from the Gibson factory in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In lieu of another Gibson Custom Shop run, that might be our best bet for nailing Gibbons tone.

But then the rest is in the fingers, in those super-light .07s electric guitar strings he switched to on BB King’s advice, and maybe also in the romance of Pearly Gates’ origin story, too. We can’t discount the power of legend. It’s the kind of thing that would never happen again.

Good luck saddling up at a Texan ranch to buy the world’s most sought-after electric guitar with nothing but $250 bucks in your pocket and a glint in your eye. That trick’s already been done.

ZZ Top delivered a late-career classic in 2012 with the song I Gotsta Get Paid, from the band’s 15th album La Futura. But as guitarist and lead vocalist Billy Gibbons admitted, it wasn’t easy working on that album with producer Rick Rubin.

Speaking to Classic Rock magazine in 2018, Gibbons chose his words carefully when he reminisced about the making of La Futura.

“Rick and I had been friends for quite some time,” he said. “He had been patiently waiting in the wings for the opportunity to work with ZZ Top. But I must say the process of making that record was rather lengthy. From the day we joined forces with Rick to the day it came out, it took four years.”

Back in the mid-’90s, AC/DC fell out with Rubin when he produced their album Ballbreaker.

AC/DC didn’t care for Rubin’s painstaking methodology, and this was also a challenge for Gibbons and the other two members of ZZ Top, bassist Dusty Hill and Frank Beard.

“I know that some artists complain that they don’t like working with Rick because he’s constantly asking for songs to be played again and again,” Gibbons said. “That’s one of the peculiar qualities of Rick’s production technique.

“But the bottom line is: ZZ Top really enjoys playing, and when you work with Rick, playing is the name of the game.

“It was kind of funny. We’d play long into the night, these jam sessions. I remember one night Frank said to me, ‘Is Rick serious? We’ve been playing this song for about five hours!’ I said, ‘Rick, you think we should take a break?’ And he goes, ‘Oh yeah, we got it on tape three hours ago – we just like hearing you guys play!’”

ZZ Top haven’t made another album since La Futura, although the band has continued to tour in the wake of Dusty Hill’s death in 2021, with their former guitar tech Elwood Francis on bass.

And if La Futura turns out to be ZZ’s final album, it will be remembered mainly for one extraordinary song – I Gotsta Get Paid.

This track is based on the 1996 hip-hop anthem 25 Lighters by Houston-based DJ DMD and rappers Fat Pat and Lil’ Keke.

As Gibbons told Classic Rock, the seed of I Gotsta Get Paid was planted after Rick Rubin told the band to get back to their roots.

“We’d been working in Malibu at Rick’s studio,” Gibbons recalled, “and then he turned the reins over and said, ‘Why don’t you get back to Texas and see what you come up with?’ And that’s when I got thinking about 25 Lighters.

He explained: “The title of that song was a ghetto slang term that the crack dealers used. They would buy those little cigarette lighters, twenty-five in a box, take them home, disassemble them, take the guts out, repack them, and sell them on the street corner.

“So you got this catchphrase: ‘Hey man, you got a lighter?’ That was less conspicuous.

“I kept going over that particular song and my instinct said: ZZ Top is a far cry from being a rap band. But then one day, while I was in the studio control room, I heard the sound of Lightnin’ Hopkins coming through the doorway.

“Our second engineer, Mr. Gary Moon, was in the lounge, playing YouTube videos of old Lightnin’ Hopkins songs. I said, ‘Let’s try and bluesify 25 Lighters.’ And that turned into I Gotsta Get Paid.”

It was somewhat ironic that ZZ Top would reinvent a hip-hop song while Rick Rubin was absent – given that Rubin had produced some of the big rap records the ’80s, by LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys and Run-D.M.C.

“Rick flipped when he heard it,” Gibbons recalled. “He said, ‘It sounds like something from another planet.’

“But he loved what we did with it, and by the time we turned that song inside out, it was classified as a derivative work, which is quite different to a cover song. A derivative work means that you’ve changed it significantly.

“Rick asked me, ‘What does 25 Lighters mean?’ I said, ‘You got to do your homework – it’s ghetto slang!’”

ZZ Top have recorded some great blues songs over the years – none of them better than the one on which Billy Gibbons played a Stratocaster gifted to him by the most revered guitarist of them all.

It was in 1968, in the days before ZZ Top, that Gibbons befriended Jimi Hendrix.

Gibbons was then a member of psychedelic rock group The Moving Sidewalks, who opened for The Jimi Hendrix Experience on a US tour.

Eleven years later, when ZZ Top recorded their sixth album Degüello, Gibbons pulled out the Strat that Hendrix had given to him. He played it on the track that many fans consider to be ZZ Top’s finest blues number – A Fool For Your Stockings.

In a 2018 interview with Classic Rock, Gibbons recalled: “Many of ZZ Top’s songs started out from picking up a catchphrase, just something off the cuff, and that was certainly true of A Fool For Your Stockings.

“I remember overhearing one of our buddies recollecting why he fell for a certain girl. When he uttered the phrase, ‘Man, I was a fool for her stockings’, it was so honest and so unexpected. I wrote it down immediately, and it served us well.

“Interestingly, when we recorded that song, I was playing the Fender Strat that Jimi Hendrix gave me when we were travelling together, and for some reason the guitar wasn’t working through the amp. We wound up plugging the guitar straight into the board, and that’s why it’s such a clean tone on that particular track.”

Touring with Hendrix was a legendary period in Gibbons' life. Not only were the Moving Sidewalks opening for Hendrix, they were covering his songs to fill out their set. Hendrix just had to admire the cheek of it.

For Gibbons, it was an education, particularly about the unadvertised capabilities of Leo Fender's most successful electric guitar design. Hendrix could not only play it like no one else, he had modded it, too, anticipating the five-way pickup switch we see on today's models.

“Jimi took the three-way toggle switch into five-way,” said Gibbons, speaking to Total Guitar. “He’s the one that discovered the in-between positions, and in order for that not to pop out of place, he showed me how to take off the back scratch plate and remove the spring within the toggle switch, so it would more or less stay in place! And that sound had this extra chimeyness to it.

“This is the first five-way toggle switch that I ever saw. He took the springs off the standard switch so that it just hung there. When he wanted to move it out-of-phase, Jimi’d shake the guitar until the switch moved, smooth as can be, into the position.”

Gibbons argued that Hendrix never quite got the credit he deserved for that. But he won't forget it. As for the pink Strat, it is still in his rotation.

“It's in safekeeping, and it still gets a good whoopin' in the studio every once in a while," he said, speaking to Premiere Collectibles in 2020.

There are many other classic blues songs in the ZZ Top catalogue – most notably Sure Got Cold After The Rain Fell from the album Rio Grande Mud (1972), Jesus Just Left Chicago from Tres Hombres (1973), Blue Jean Blues from Fandango! (1974), I Need You Tonight from Eliminator (1983) and 2000 Blues from Recycler (1990).

Gibbons told Classic Rock how his love for blues guitar originated.

“I grew up in a house where music was a constant,” he said. “My dad, a rather interesting all-round entertainer, provided a tremendous sonic background to my childhood.

“We also had a housekeeper and she loved listening to the rhythm-and-blues radio stations.

“And one day, when I was about seven years old, my dad took me to ACA Studios in Houston, where he had some business to do.

“There was a recording session in progress and my dad put me in there, sat me on a chair, and said, ‘I’ll come back for you in a little while.’ It turned out that the session was by none other than B.B. King. And what B.B. was doing with the guitar, I remember thinking, this is for me…”

He described this as a defining point in his life.

“It sure was. Also, my younger sister and I got to tag along with my mom to go to see an Elvis Presley concert. And those two events, to this day, loom large in the mind.

“Those two events were doubly responsible for taking my life into a certain direction. Between Elvis and B.B. King, I was done.”

Gibbons named two other blues artists who had a profound influence on him.

“I think it’s fair to say that when Muddy Waters left the acoustic guitar by the wayside and finally decided to plug in and power up, that was a rather significant turning point,” he said. “From that moment – the electrification of the blues – there was no turning back for me.

“And I would also add Jimmy Reed into the mix. Even to this day I find myself returning to his old recordings, and it’s somewhat remarkable that after hearing these things over and over again, there’s always something that pops up that I may not have caught before. It’s kind of amazing to me that I can still get such a charge out of Jimmy Reed’s stuff.”

On his 2018 solo album the Big Bad Blues, Gibbons recorded two Muddy Waters songs – Standing Around Crying and Rollin’ And Tumblin’.

“I like to extol the virtues of the originators,” he said. "We’re challenged to be successful as interpreters.

“In those silent moments when you’re all alone in a studio and you imagine what it might have been like during those rather captivating moments when many of these great songs were recorded, it’s inspirational.

He added: “It requires some measure of imagination, of course, but I think that’s part of the mystery of the magnetic appeal of this rather simplistic art form. I use that word ‘simplistic,’ but it really is rather complex.”

It’s been confirmed that Frank Beard is back on board with ZZ Top, resuming his place behind the drum kit for the band’s upcoming North American tour.

Beard has been absent since earlier this year when he had to take a break because of “lower leg problems”. He missed the group’s tour of Australia and New Zealand during which percussionist John Douglas filled for him.

In a statement, ZZ Top singer-guitarist Billy Gibbons said: “We’re happy that Frank is back with (bassist) Elwood (Francis) and yours truly, BFG. We missed him and are looking forward to turning it up and rocking out with him as has been the case for the last few hundred or so decades. His complete recovery is cause for celebration and that’s just what we intend to do on an open-ended basis. Welcome back, pardner!”

Beard has been a member of the band since almost the beginning, from 1969, part of the classic trio of Gibbons and late bassist Dusty Hill. The 75-year-old drummer simply remarked, “It’s good to be back. See you out there.”

The band kickstart a summer of touring on Sunday when they play the elegantly-named Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre in Victoria, British Columbia. They spend the next four months on the road throughout North America, ending up at Northfield Park in Ohio on 9 October For more tour details click here.

Seymour Duncan and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons have cooked up something super-hot to give your Fender Telecaster or Les Paul an all-new lease of life, with a pair of signature electric guitar pickups wound to give you a little more juice and sizzle.

You’ve all heard of Pearly Gates, Gibbons’ legendary 1959 Les Paul Standard, and the namesake pickups that give you its sweeter-than-thou PAF tone, well, take that core tone and imagine it a little hotter. Maybe something from the wrong side of the tracks. 

That’s where the Hades Gates Pickup Set Comes in, a humbucker pairing that uses an Alnico II magnet at the heart of its design, offering more output so sparks fly on your Texan blues guitar lines. 

Seymour Duncan is offering them with a variety of covering options, including the traditional uncovered with black bobbins (very Seymour), black covers, nickel covers, gold covers, and a radiator pickup option that has raw nickel with gold mesh inserts. That last one is very cool, very steampunk Billy Gibbons. 

Other options include all-white bobbins, zebra coils, or reverse zebra. In short, you are sure to find a finish that complements your guitar.

The bridge bucker has a DCR reading of 8.90k, while the neck reads 8.06k, offering “a fiery take on the mid-forward, punchy sound Billy is known for”. 

The Red Devil is a single-coil-sized humbucker designed to be dropped into your Telecaster’s bridge position, and it is wound to give you Gibbons’ trademark tones. “Whether you’re looking for cutting leads, tight pinch harmonics, or thick rhythm tones, it’s all at your fingertips,” says Seymour Duncan.

This little firecracker is designed around an Alnico V magnet, and like the Model T Ford it is only available in black. It’ll fit right in with your Telecaster. Seymour Duncan lists the DCR reading as “16.70k” but that looks like a typo; judging by the accompanying graphic, we would confidently say this should be 6.7k.

If you want your Tele to sound beefier, “this’ll do it,” promises Gibbons. 

“By putting this into the bridge, it fattens up the bottom end,” he says. “You eliminate hum,  you get a little more output. You get that extra stuff that makes these guitars sound so good.

The Red Devil is priced $129, while the Hades Gates is priced from $258 a set. Both pickups are handmade in Santa Barbara, California, and are available now. Head on over to Seymour Duncan for more details.

Remember ZZ Top and their 17 string bass? Who couldn’t. It was back in November 2022 when their long-time guitar tech-turned bassist Francis Elwood whipped out this ludicrous-looking yellow monstrosity at a gig at Huntsville, Alabama.

Anyway, in an interview with Guitar World, Elwood has been talking about how he originally got his hands on the behemoth bass. The answer? China, apparently.

“I hate playing that f**king bass,” he said. “I found it late at night while internet surfing on one of those Chinese websites. I couldn't believe they were making something like that.

“I found this guitar, took a screenshot, and sent it to Billy, saying, ‘We should order one of these, and I'll play it. It'll be hilarious.’ And three months later, we got it. It came in all the way from China, and Billy pulls out this big-ass yellow 17-string bass and is like, ‘Okay, we'll play it for a song, right?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I guess I can do this…’”

The song was, appropriately, Got Me Under Pressure. And yes, it proved problematic to play, to say the least: “Man, the guitar tech barely got the thing ready for the show,” he says. “And we don’t do soundchecks; I didn’t even play the guitar until the first time, so it was a baptism by fire while we were out on stage. I was like, ‘God damn, this thing is hard to play.’

“I was seriously struggling because you don’t always know where you are, and if you look at it from the bottom, it’s a big blank neck; I was having trouble finding the frets to play.”

Poor Elwood thought that was that. But no, not now we live in the era of social media: “I thought it was over, but the son of a bitch went viral, and I woke up to all these messages and links to all this fucking bullshit,” he says.

“I was cringing because I knew I was struggling to play that piece of shit. I’m like, ‘Great. Of all the things to happen... Now that I got this reaction, Billy’s never going to let me not play it.’ I was thinking, ‘If I can just get through this… it’s just one song, and I’ll never have to play it again.’ But now I’ve got to play it (every night).”

Never mind. Probably best to think about the 17-string bass as just a late addition to ZZ Top’s long tradition of offbeat iconography, from the furry guitars that were first seen in the Legs video to, well, the shades and the beards.

It must be strange. Being a replacement for a fondly-regarded rock icon after they pass. Elwood Francis though seems to be in a state of denial.

Elwood was a long time roadie for ZZ Top who filled in when bassist Dusty Hill suffered a hip injury in July 2021. Then just a few days later, Hill died and Francis found himself permanently stepping into the bassist’s well-worn boots.

But in an interview with Guitar World, Hill has explained how he found himself in this unlikely position: "I didn't have to worry about the weight of the crown because I was just helping. They pulled me aside and said, 'Can you honestly say you can't play his parts?' I said, 'I can do it, but I don't think people would enjoy me doing it.' They said, 'You can cover him for a few weeks.'"

"We'd done some gigs when Dusty passed, and by that time, I wouldn't say I was comfortable because I'm still not fucking comfortable. But I had a piece of paper on the riser for the first two shows if I got in trouble, and by the third show, I got rid of that, and just did the show."

"It's just weird. Dusty is their bass player. I'm not the bass player. I'm not in the band. I'll never be in the band. I shouldn't be in the band. It's Dusty's thing. Sure, I'll still play with them, but it's a weird thing, man."

It had been Hill’s wish that Francis – their guitar tech who has been working with the band since the 1990s – replaced him. It’s undoubtedly helped enormously that Francis – with his long beard and shades – fits neatly into ZZ Top’s long-standing visual symmetry.

Last year Billy Gibbons paid tribute to the new bassist: “Dusty used to say: 'If I'm late to the stage, be sure to give my guitar to Elwood.' Elwood is a family member; he's been with us for three decades. And sure enough, Elwood picked up the parts and pieces. Elwood was ready, having been a part of it for so long… [Dusty] said: 'The show must go on.' That was his wish, and we granted it."

Until Hill’s death ZZ had held a record as the band with the longest unbroken line-up. More than fifty years after their debut album they’re still going strong: they’re touring the States with Lynyrd Skynyrd in August and September and have a sixteenth album in the can, much of which was recorded before Hill’s death.

Over a thousand items from the estate of the late, great ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill are headed to the auction block with main attraction being Hill’s iconic Dean Z bass guitar from the video to the Texan trio’s 1983 MTV breakout hit Legs.

Or, should that be ‘mane attraction’, because this four-string inaugurated the fur look for electric stage instruments, with Billy Gibbons rocking an Dean Z model electric guitar with a matching look too. It’s a look that only ZZ Top could pull off. Only they would dare. 

Hill’s sheepskin-covered Dean bass is expected to fetch up to $120,000 at the event, hosted by Julien’s Auctions over three days, 7-9 December, in Hill’s hometown of Dallas, Texas. What that money buys you is something priceless, a piece of music history as the Eliminator era allied to the reach of MTV introduced ZZ Top to wider audience. 

The bass itself is hard to miss, with or without the sheepskins. According to the lot description, Dean Zelinsky fielded a late night phone call from Gibbons, who placed the custom order. The pièce de résistance arrived almost almost as an afterthought. “I’m sending you some sheepskins I purchased while in Scotland, I want you to put them on some guitars,” said Gibbons.

Well, Zelinsky aimed to please, and spec’d up the matching custom bass and electric guitars and finished them in white, with the fingerboards in white with the Eliminator logo adding a go-faster flash on the ‘board. The bass has no serial number. According to Zelinsky, he used electric horse shears to make room for the pickups, bridge and strings. 

“I remember we were still gluing the fur on the tuning keys when the FedEx driver showed up to pick up the guitars,” recalled Zelinsky. “He waited while we boxed them up, they had to make it to the video shoot the very next day.”

For some ZZ Top fans, there is an even more significant bass from Hill’s estate, and that’s his ‘50s Fender Precision Bass.

It is dated here as a 1953 P-Bass, though in an interview with Fender upon the release of his signature model, Hill couldn’t recall the exact year. He did recall sending Gibbons in to Rocky’s pawn store in Dallas to do his bidding, and that he did, with Gibbons managing to wrangle the bass that would be Hill’s number one instrument for years for the modest sum of $70, and that included a hard-shell case. 

The case alone is a work of art. The bass? Well, it was on the cover of Fandango!, which makes it hard to beat.

And yet it has some competition. Another choice four-string is the Bolin P-type that Hill used extensively through the 2000s – famously on the Live From Texas 2008 DVD.

That is pictured above and at the top of the page and as per ZZ Top’s style in the 21st-century, fur was out, pin-striping was in, with lavender and green details on the top of this relic’d blonde finish that extends right up the fingerboard to the headstock. Other cool details include the Dusty Hill graphic just above the bridge. 

To see more from The Collection of Dusty Hill, head over to Julien’s Auctions. A portion of the proceeds from the event will go to MusiCares. 

• ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons: "Gimme All Your Lovin’ is all about tone. Get the grind and you got it goin’ on"

Billy Gibbons has museum grade electric guitar tone. It’s a reference for generations of players, magnetic north for any guitarist looking for hot blues-rock sizzle with a distinct Texan flavour and a British accent – and the ZZ Top legend has made it available by way of a signature guitar amp with Magnatone.

There is a catch. Magnatone are only making six of these available worldwide, and priced £6,999 it is no one’s idea of a cheap date – no matter how much you paid for your sunglasses, those shades will be cheap in comparison. But finished in a silver crocodile covering, with Gibbons’ John Hancock on each of the six amps sent to market, this is a rare opportunity to upgrade your backline with sounds fit for that little ol’ band from Texas.

Available from Andertons, Zenker AG, Omega Music, and Musik Produktiv, the Billy Gibbons Super Fifty-Nine M80 is a holy grail half-stack, and one of the coolest tube amps we have seen this year or ever, and if you’ve just got paid you will be interested in what your hard-earned will be getting you. Steady now, though, the spec will weaken all fiscal restraint.

In a sense, the Super Fifty-Nine M-80 is a greatest hits package, bringing together the Super Fifty-Nine MkI and MkII models in one package. A pair of EL34 tubes delivers 45-watts of Class AB power, with both gain stages of the MkI and MkII footswitchable, or simply consult the front panel of the amp to select the low or high-gain modes. Gibbons might specialise in Texan blues but his amp voicing skews British.

• Billy F Gibbons: 10 guitarists who blew my mind

There is no vibrato in this model but there is a tube-buffered effects loop so you can invite your pedalboard to the party. The footswitch is included in the deal

The front panel is where you’ll find the power on/off and standby switches, a jewel power lamp. There are controls for Presence, Bass, Middle, Treble and and Master, with independent Gain controls for low and high-gain voicings, and a slider switch to choose which one is active. Treble controls high frequencies centred around 2kHz, middle around 500Hz, with Bass controlling lows centred around 60Hz.

Finally, at the extreme left of the panel, you have a pair of 1/4” instrument inputs, with the first a high-sensitivity in for maximum pickup output and frequency response, and the second a low-sensitivity option that takes off 6dB from your signal – useful if you’re using a guitar with super-hot pickups.

The rear panel has connections for the Gain Select footswitch, the send/return for the effects loop, a pair of speaker outputs, and a compensated line-out for sending the signal direct. 

The head is matched with a 4x12 speaker cabinet, loaded with Magnatone Custom 12” Ceramic speakers. One very cool signature detail on this run is the luminous gaffer tape with the legend for the controls on the top of the cab. Helpful if the stage light is low.

For more details on the Super Fifty-Nine M-80, head over to Magnatone. To stare at this one and dream – or to pony up and add to cart – head over to one of the lucky chosen retailers. If you are in the UK, that’d be Andertons. Remember, they're only making six of these. 

Hit The Lights as a laid-back blues boogie? File this under things you never knew you needed. YouTuber Denis Pauna has covered the whole of Metallica's debut album Kill 'Em All in the style of ZZ Top.

Why? Because he can, and it actually works! Proof that solid songwriting bears adaption well. Pauna does a mean Billy Gibbons impression too, slowing down James Hetfield's thrashy pace for shuffle and swing.

Pauna decided to record the whole album for its 40th anniversary after the popularity of his Seek & Destroy rendition in the style of the Texas blues-rock legends. And he's got impressive form for this kind of thing, from Pearl Jam in the style of Faith No More to death metal Michael Jackson. 

So your move now Metallica, let's hear your take on Eliminator. Or Denis's…  

• Billy F Gibbons: 10 guitarists who blew my mind

Billy Joel welcomed a surprise guest onto the stage for his latest gig at New York City’s legendary Madison Square Garden when Billy Gibbons popped up to jam with his band on a couple of ZZ Top classics.

Joel was playing his 89th show of what is now a world record breaking residency at the Garden, one that has just been extended with the 94th being announced for 10 September. And when you are that many dates in to a residency that’s lasted a decade, it does you good to shake up the set and get some guests involved. Who better than Gibbons, a man who loves to jam? Just hand him an electric guitar and count him in.

On this occasion, it was a Fender Esquire, or an Esquire-style guitar. Gibbons has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to custom and bespoke T-styles with a single pickup, and the fidelity of the video might be good but not quite good enough for a reliably accurate make and model id. 

Joel is a little coy when introducing the track and instructs his long-serving guitarist Tommy Byrnes to kick things off, who then picks out a blues-rock shuffle riff on a Gibson Les Paul Standard and the crowd goes wild, first, because said riff is unmistakably La Grange, from ZZ Top’s 1973 breakthrough album, Tres Hombres, and Billy Gibbons is walking out from side of stage dressed in his stage duds. 

A gentlemanly handshake with Joel and he’s ready to jam. The performance is a two-hander. Gibbons takes the first solo, going all legato with his left hand while conducting the crowd with his right, then counting in Byrnes to take his turn. Byrnes, who has been with Joel since 1993, did not disappoint.

For a moment, this was Gibbons’ show, and up there he was directing traffic, calling in Joel for a piano solo, then Mark Rivera to take his spot on the sax. It was like they had all done this before. Gibbons counting everyone down to the climax of the song. Not a beat missed.

A full-blooded rendition of Tush followed, with the late Dusty Hill’s vocals handled by Joel’s rhythm guitarist Mike DelGuidice. Gibbons, Byrnes and DelGuidice are all pictured above in Byrnes' Instagram post.

La Grange and Tush marked a big change in ZZ Top’s profile. Tres Hombres, their third album, broke them. Fandango! built on that momentum, half tracked in the studio, half live, all with that energy. 

As Gibbons explained to MusicRadar in 2013, both La Grange and Tush were three minute tunes that took all but three minutes to write and record. 

“[La Grange] was kind of a haphazard, last-minute thought that came together in all of three minutes,” said Gibbons. “We were waiting for the engineer to complete his house cleaning chores, and we were jamming out. At one point, we looked through the glass and the guy was waving his arms, signalling us to continue on. The song just fell into place.

“Another one of those ‘catch-it-in-three-minute’ tunes, was Tush. We had gone down to Alabama, and it started to take shape with the riff. As for the lyrics, well, it’s not exactly Bob Dylan. [Laughs] That one we recorded in the studio.”

That it felt right was all Gibbons knew back then. How these songs land with an audience is in the lap of the gods but there’s a lesson in doing what feels right in the moment. That’s exactly what ZZ Top were doing.

“Tush felt good from a musician standpoint,” said Gibbons. “But you know, you can never tell what’s going to be a hit or not. We were enjoying the recording experience, figuring out how to grab a moment and making it repeatable.”

Joel was named MSG’s first-ever music franchise performer in December 2013. Basically, he is the musical equivalent of the New York Knicks and New York Rangers. Playing Madison Square Garden must be like playing in his front room by now. Head to Billy Joel for ticket details for the residency. His September date is on sale now for Citi card members.

Billy Gibbons’ beard is the stuff of legend. It’s iconic. It is to the Texan blues-rock shuffle what Elvis’ white jumpsuit is to rock ’n’ roll. But Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme has revealed that the ZZ Top frontman’s beard is more than just a look. When he and Gibbons were jamming, Gibbons played a harmonic with his beard.

Homme was in conversation with Marc Maron for his WTF Podcast when he shared this moment of electric guitar history. The story goes back to 2004, and the sessions for QOTSA’s Lullabies To Paralyze. Being a huge ZZ Top fan, Homme was desperate to play with Gibbons and made the approach. 

“For me, that was one of the huge moments of my career,” said Homme. “Really, at the time he hadn’t really jammed with many outsiders in years, and luckily there were some people at his management who were into Queens. I got him in there under the guise of doing [ZZ Top’s] Precious And Grace but then I said, ‘But I have this thing…’”

Precious And Grace duly got recorded, with Gibbons performing lead vocals with Mark Lanegan, but that thing Homme had in mind was Burn The Witch, and he wanted Gibbons to take a solo over it. As Homme tells it, they were jamming it out and the beard did the rest.

“When was playing the lead on that song, his beard gently floated down and hit the strings and it made a harmonic with his beard,” said Homme. “I swear. It’s on film. And I literally grabbed him by the shoulders, I’m shaking Billy Gibbons, ‘Dude, you did the first ever beard harmonic!’”

Homme and Maron went on to speak about the influence of ZZ Top, with Homme admitting to using the early recordings as a reference for drum sounds. “It’s such a great drum sound,” he said. “It’s tight, dry, sort of vacuous, beautiful sound. I’ve used it as a sonic reference when I’m in the studio for what to chase after. I love all that stuff.”

Once Gibbons entered the QOTSA inner circle, Homme took the opportunity to ask him how he executed one of his signature licks.

“He’s got this certain lick that only he does,” said Homme, humming the lick. “And I was always like, ‘How?’ I said, ‘I deserve to know what that is. Because I can play [it] but there’s a way that you’re doing it.’ He’ll bend a note and then tap, like Eddie Van Halen’s tapping on the neck but he’s doing it once, and holding it. And instead of a million taps, it’s one. It was so simple I was like, ‘You’re fucking kidding me.’ [Laughs] It was so awesome.”

You can check out full conversation below and subscribe to WTF With Marc Maron here.

ZZ Top have returned to the stage for the first time since bassist Dusty Hill's death. Hill, who died aged 72 last week, was replaced onstage once more at the Tuscaloosa, Alabama show by long-serving guitar tech Elwood Francis, who has handled bass duties since the middle of July.

Indeed, it was a decision Hill made himself in one of his last acts with the Texan blues-rock superpower. In an interview with Variety, guitarist/vocalist Billy Gibbons revealed that Hill has made it perfectly plain that the band must carry on while he took time out for health issues, with Francis the natural choice to sit in for him.  

“He was adamant,“ Gibbons explained. “He said, 'The show must go on. Don’t forget it.' And he was pointing his finger and shaking it. It was a direct directive from Mr Dusty Hill.“

Hill had played the first two shows of the tour before taking some time out. He had been dealing with a number of health issues, including ulcers, and a broken shoulder followed by a broken hip. No official cause of death has been released, with Hill's funeral expected to take place over the next week or two. ZZ Top cancelled their forthcoming 3 August show at Little Rock, Arkansas, to attend a memorial service.

Onstage, it was in some ways business as usual, just as Hill would like it, with Francis well acquainted with the material, holding down the groove with drummer Frank Beard, Magnatone amps giving Gibbons' electric guitar that super-hot tone, and Gibbons placing Hill's stage hat over his mic stand in tribute.

Gibbons did admit that when Francis first sat in for Hill, he felt compelled to offer evidence for all in attendance that the newly installed bassist's whiskers were genuine.

“I had to stroll over and grab him by the chin to give him a yank, just to show the audience – I said, 'Folks, this is the real deal here.' [Laughs.] But he’s honouring Dusty’s wishes, and I know that, wherever Dusty may be, he’s probably smiling, just knowing that all the notes are in place and that the fierceness rolls on.“