Mr. ZZ King & the sound

translated by Dirkguy@aol.com

Locating Billy Gibbons has never been easy, but with ZZ Top being in south Africa and planning to play Europe live for 3 months afterwards, hope for an interview was constantly fading. Goal of the "hunt" was a chat about the latest album "Rhytmeen", the grunge-infected Tribute to the pre Eliminator era, in which ZZ Top stuck to "lean" songs, with many of the competitors of the rock arena dressing in silk costumes and combinating astrological accords with daring "Lord of the Rings"-inspired lyrics.

As we finally met Gibbons , he was sitting in his Johannesburg hotel room and occupied with some graphic arts. Even though it was 2 a.m. he suggested we have our little talk a couple of hours later. Maybe it's because of the local coffee blending but precisely at the agreed time the phone rang and Billy talked about the songs, sounds and guitars!

G&B: How did the songs on "Rhythmeen" develop?

Gibbons: Some pieces were already developed during the final show of the "Antenna" tour. If you wanna bring it to the point, we wanted all songs to be raw, hard and rough. One of the first songs for "Rhythmeen" already set the new direction. We came into the studio with a few basic ideas, and then director Robert Rodriguez asked us to do a song for the Quantin-Tarantino film "From Dust Till Dawn". We agreed right away and started with the basics for "She’s just killing me". Everything was done within 30 minutes -and that was really rough. Then we sent a tape of it to Robert. His reaction was "Don’t touch it! We’ll take it like this". That song was a start and we went on from there! There were simply three guys that sat down on the backbeat and powered up in the old ZZ Top tradition.

G&B: You can also hear influences of the 90s. What was special about the recording situation?

Gibbons: We put together the equipment we needed for the recording. It was a whole new game with a double garage as studio. I think direct eye contact is very important. We used a Marshall-Plexi-Head with a ‘66 touch and a 2’ 10" Marshall box and a 53 Alamo tube-amp with a 10" speaker. Dusty played over the other 66 plexi-double-10 and Mr. Beard stayed with a very simple drum setup. In the background we had our favorite drum-loops playing and that was about it! There is one guitar track, one bass track and the drum track. Lean and mean......