ZZ Top: Antenna : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

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It was only fitting that ZZ Top inducted Cream into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last year, for the "little ol' band from Texas" has personified the powertrio format through nearly a quarter century of ever-shifting tastes and trends. But the differences between the blues-rock trios are telling, for where Cream quickly exhausted a style that encouraged extended improvisation, ZZ Top have steadfastly embraced the ensemble sound of a rowdy blues band with amplifiers big enough to blow down a roadhouse.

The unlikely fact that ZZ Top recently signed to RCA for some $30 million is due to a showbiz savvy that would please Elvis Presley's carnival-bred manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and to an abiding passion for the kind of rude rumble that a Texas bluesman like Lightnin' Hopkins would produce when he plugged in his electric guitar.

"I got down with a fuzz box," sings Billy Gibbons on "Fuzzbox Voodoo," a sinewy number from Antenna, the group's new album, that's about more than the guitarist's favorite distortion device. The fuzz box and other such gadgets have certainly helped Gibbons sustain his tradition-bound trio, but it's that rarest of rock-band attributes, a sense of humor, that has been the group's true saving grace. For while ZZ Top owe their latter-day success to a cheesy video image based on cool cars, leggy babes and big beards (except, of course, on the cleanshaven chin of drummer Frank Beard), you can always see the band winking from behind their cheap sunglasses.

In fact, ZZ Top have always hitched their guitar riffs to songs about cars and girls. The group's first big hit, "La Grange" (1973), celebrated a Lone Star brothel, with the lascivious glee of Gibbons' vocal underscored by a whiplash guitar that still sounds fresh. Their next album spawned another group-defining standard, an up-tempo boogie that established a vocal niche for bassist Dusty Hill: "Tush."

Both songs were spiced by the sexual innuendoes common to the blues and nailed by the soulful wallop of Gibbons' rhythm guitar, a musical characteristic that distinguished ZZ Top from their hard-rock contemporaries. The group can be faulted for toeing a stylistically conservative line; the result, though, has been a remarkable consistency born of the notion that successive albums needn't so much present a new statement as a novel twist on what has come before.

The group had the goofy gall to admit this approach by titling its 1990 album Recycler. Yet recycling is also part of the blues tradition, as artists frequently grafted new lyrics onto familiar musical frameworks. Elmore James even went so far as to re-record his biggest hit, "Dust My Broom," and call it "Dust My Blues." So it's only logical that when Gibbons takes a slide-guitar solo on Antenna's "Girl in a T-Shirt," he rips into the triplet rhythm that James himself lifted from the Delta blues.

The drawback of such a limited approach is that a ZZ Top album is typically about as surprising as a six-pack of beer. But has familiarity ever stopped anybody from buying more brew?

Taking the long view, the band's biggest breakthrough after the rhythmic crunch of "La Grange" was the wry conceit of "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide" (1979), for with that witty boast, ZZ Top anticipated the cartoon imagery they would profitably milk in the age of MTV. One ironic result of such clever calculation is that when you hear a song like "Girl in a T-Shirt," you can already imagine the inevitable video, including the peepshow choreography that is sure to accompany the sirenlike guitar riff embedded in the mix.

But just because Antenna is cut from the same cloth as Eliminator, Afterburner and Recycler, that doesn't mean it lacks its own singular pleasures. As befits a power trio, most of the sparks come from Gibbons' guitar, and what's most striking about his style is that despite his embrace of all manner of grungy tonal effects, he has a purist sensibility that favors function over flash.

Gibbons doesn't waste a note, whether it's within the swamp-rock rhythm that anchors "Fuzzbox Voodoo" or in the lead-guitar embellishments scattered throughout the driving "Antenna Head." Gibbons' restraint is put into dramatic relief during his solo on a slow blues called "Cover Your Rig," where in the midst of laconic phrases drenched in sustain, he erupts into a jaw-dropping tumble of notes played with the same sense of ease he brought to the song's slower passages.

ZZ Top have never pretended – or even aspired – to be hip, which is another secret to the group's longevity. After all, how many rock bands can promote themselves by sending the souped-up hot rod featured in their videos on a tour of car shows? Yet in the end, ZZ Top are as enduringly hip as the blues, for beneath the bluster of the group's arena-rock dynamics and two-bit imagery lies the soul of a Texas party band.

You don't go to the roadhouse for intellectual epiphanies but to blow off steam and find yourself a squeeze. ZZ Top have understood that these are enduring touchstones of rock & roll, and on Antenna, their message remains bracingly loud and clear – and rippling with fuzz.