courtesy of the Texas Music Museum Billy Gibbons (1949----, Houston) Dusty Hill (1949----, Dallas) Frank Beard (1949----, Houston) Genre: Electric Blues Other Sites: Little ol' Web Page from Texas ZZ Top Photo Album

Although all the ZZ Top players were born the same year, the band came to life with the seventies. By far the most successful Texas group over the next two decades, ZZ Top has had more than $200 million in box office receipts and sold around 50 million records in a career that now extends into its 28th year.

Lead guitarist Billy Gibbons was the catalyst of the group. Son of a bandleader and a mom who doubled as an executive secretary, Billy was a guitar prodigy. By eighteen he had a successful single release, "99th Floor," and had also released an album. In 1967 his band the Moving Sidewalks was opening in Houston for such hot national acts as the Doors and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. But toward the end of the decade, Gibbons and a couple of musicians from the Moving Sidewalks broke away to form a new band they called ZZ Top, whose name evoked associations with legendary Blues singer Z.Z. Hill and Zig-Zag roll-your-owns.

After getting off to a rough start with a southern boogie-and-blues recording that went nowhere, Gibbons acquired a couple of new partners in Dallasites Frank Beard and Dusty Hill, drummer and bass respectively, from the band American Blues. About the same time the newly staffed ZZ Top acquired its current manager, Bill Ham.

By February 1970 the group was ready for its first gig -- at the VFW Hall in Beaumont, a typical venue, as it turned out, for the next couple of years. Not that the band ever lacked for exposure. They averaged more than 200 appearances each year, rocking the teen-packed houses with the powerfully amplified electric blues-boogie style that became their concert trademark. Toward the end of that year, London Records brought out ZZ Top's First Album, which was modestly well received at the time. But the fans loved their Rolling Stones-knockoff hit single "Francine," taken from the second album, Rio Grande Mud, which was released in 1972.

An appearance that year at the University of Houston's football stadium drew 38,000 fans to hear the band share the stage with Blue Oyster Cult, the Doobie Brothers, and Savoy Brown. The sheer size of the audience showed the group what was possible, and became a harbinger of even bigger crowds to come. The group's next album, 1973's Tres Hombres, with its raunch-rock boogie "La Grange," finally made the band known to, if not beloved by, the rock critics. It also made possible the 80,000 attendance at ZZ Top's next big shindig at the University of Texas' Memorial Stadium in Austin in 1974, a rough and raucous gathering that ended rock concerts at the stadium for the next 25 years. Although ZZ Top had been on the road practically from the group's inception -- Tres Hombres proceeded to sell a million copies and the next two albums Fandango! and Tejas did the same -- it became clear that ZZ Top was ready for a really big tour.

For almost two years (1976-77) ZZ Top was on the road with its World Wide Texas Tour, an unparalleled rock extravaganza that sought to take the icons of Texas -- including a menagerie of longhorns, brooding vultures, and a buffalo -- to the world. And the crowds came in unprecedented numbers, with ticket sales of more than a million.

After a long rest during which all three band members went their separate ways while their manager severed relations with London and negotiated a contract with Warner Brothers, the group reunited in 1979. During the interim Gibbons had experimented with electronic music and more lyrical modes of expression, in the interest of expanding the band's approach and potential appeal. The result of the transferred collaboration was Deguello, the most adventurous album to date, an effort which also went platinum.

With Gibbons and Hill sporting the impressive beards they had nurtured during their break, the band lost no time taking to the road again with the "Hot Rod Tour," which lasted from late 1979 through most of 1981 and extended the band's new sound to Japanese and European audiences. El Loco, an album with more experimentation, followed in 1981 with disappointing sales.

But 1983 brought Eliminator, ZZ Top's monster album, which sold 5 million copies that year and eventually 11 million in the U.S. alone. One thing that may have made the huge difference in sales was the string of clever videos that promoted the album on MTV. When 1985's Afterburner turned out to be a comparatively slow mover, ZZ Top took another long break before releasing Recycler in 1990. Although not nearly the hit that Eliminator turned out to be, Recycler kept the band in front of the public. In 1993 they were able to arrange a five album, $35 million contract with RCA, under which ZZ Top has produced two respectable album efforts since, 1994's Antenna and 1996's Rythmeen, which Texas Monthly 's Joe Nick Patoski called "the band's best in a decade." Still one of the best concert tickets around, ZZ Top continues to draw big crowds worldwide.