ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band from Texas (2019 Documentary)

The iconic nature of a musical act can be judged by the speed with which you can draw a cartoon of them. The Beatles: four dark circles with offshoot side burns and maybe a pair of granny glasses. Madonna: conical bra. David Bowie: lightning bolt across a forehead and cheek. Grace Jones: black rectangle with wide eyes and big bared teeth. Slash: big hat, big sunglasses, cigarette dangling precariously from lips. Freddie Mercury: crew cut, moustache.

ZZTop are perhaps the easiest of all to draw: three faces all with sunglasses, two with rectangles of beard and hats, one with a moustache and curly hair. Like AC/DC, whose image has been defined since the beginning by Angus Young’s schoolboy uniform, the Top’s cartoonish look has given them instant brand recognition and also helped to deflect attention away from their personal lives. In the likeable documentary ‘That Little Ol’ Band from Texas’, the only dip into this area is the disclosure that drummer Frank Beard had been in rehab in the mid-seventies. There is absolutely no information about the non-Top lives of other bandmembers Billy Gibbons or Dusty Hill, a refreshing anomaly in an era when we are constantly being served the most mundane information about anyone who’s been on the telly.  

According to the film, in the band’s early years, manager Bill Ham had insisted that they avoid appearing on TV as a way of developing a sense of mystery. It’s possible that Ham’s decision may have had more to do with the fact that the band consisted of three very ordinary looking men. If so, it was a good move: during a two-year hiatus from recording and touring, Gibbons and Hill grew their now trademark ultra-long beards and later adopted the sunglasses that completely masked their faces and turned them into the most instantly recognisable band in the world.

The documentary is mostly about the early years, and while that is almost always the best part of any such film, I was surprised by the speed with which the MTV mega-stardom years were glossed over. There was a little bit about discovering a new, turbo-charged, processed sound and a bit about the making of the unforgettable video for ‘Gimme All Your Loving’, which looked incredibly slick at the time, and a clip of the follow-up ‘Legs’ and then a blank. Nothing about the global success that followed, the sudden jump to stadium concerts and life at the top table, no clips from the videos of subsequent hits. Was this the result of a contractual obligation? Was the recent death of Bill Ham a factor?  It reminded me of the Dolly Parton doc that omitted any mention of ‘Islands in the Stream’.  

Despite this puzzling omission, the film is worth a look. The three bandmembers make for genial, self-effacing interviewees and they remain a curious rarity as 1960s garage band also-rans who became superstars in the 1980s.    

Q Magazine, 1986-2020

‘Lock up your granddaughters: it’s The Rolling Stones!’ That was the caption on cover of the first issue of Q magazine I bought, back in September 1989. I suppose an updated version would read ‘great-granddaughters’. That same snoot-cocking irreverence is also in evidence in this month’s final issue of Q in a republished interview with Lou Reed. The godfather to a million rock bands, and writer of ‘Femme Fatale’, ‘Heroin’, ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ is described in the first paragraph as a ‘legendarily cantankerous old moaner’.  British rock journalists haver rarely had much time for preciousness and Q’s writers were no exception.

According to editor Ted Kessler, it was the pandemic that did for Q in the end, though apparently it had been operating on slim margins for most of his tenure at the helm. Truth be told, had I not learned of the magazine’s passing via the internet I probably wouldn’t have noticed its disappearance from the shelves of my local mag-sellers. The final issue was the first copy I had bought in over twenty years.

A thick square book of a monthly jammed with reviews of the latest releases, Q was pretty conservative. The editorial team invariably chose dependable mainstream megastars for their covers. Paul McCartney (desperately unfashionable for people under thirty) was the first cover star and the likes of Annie Lennox and Phil Collins (both of whom had entered dull mid to late eighties zones) made regular appearances.  Mark Ellen, the original editor, had seen a gap in the market (the music weeklies were at their most politicised and sceptical about the post-Live Aid ‘rock aristocracy’ and there was a large middle-aged pop music audience who were ready to shell out for CD re-releases of old classics) and he exploited it.

But despite its devotion to comfy shoe-wearing superstars, Q could be funny. As well as making fun of the ageing Stones, it also teamed grumpy Van Morrison with Spike Milligan for a photo shoot and for several years its opening feature was the often brilliant interview series ‘Who the Hell does … think s/he is?’ in which Tom Hiddleston regularly punctured the pomposity of stars of varying stature. Long before Louis Theroux, his interview with Jimmy Saville caught the spiky weirdness of the man. ‘I hate children’ was the eyebrow-raising quote highlighted in a text-box.

As a teenager just finding out about pop music, I had purchased it now and again but on discovering NME and Melody Maker it seemed immediately and irreparably staid. It was definitely not the place to go if you were looking for bands on independent labels and even ultra-populist throw-back merchants Oasis didn’t appear on the cover until ‘What’s the Story, Morning Glory’ was a global best-seller.

NME and Melody Maker were the angry teenagers to Q’s comfortable big brother. And they were also where I first read about Captain Beefheart, The Fall, The Velvet Underground and a slew of brilliant albums from the sixties to the nineties. There was less to discover in Q where stadium-fillers like Clapton, Collins, Eurythmics, Dire Straits, Peter Gabriel, Bowie and Sting always seemed to be in the spotlight.  But no doubt that changed over the years as younger readers got on board.

Like all magazines, it had been under the cosh for years, struggling to hold its head up within the flood of freely available digital content – I seem to recall it rebranding itself for a while as a ‘lifestyle’ magazine. and has now gone the way of the weeklies. All that’s left on the shelves are Hot Press (which I always thought survived because of its wide-ranging remit: music but also film, sport, politics and sex) and the rock heritage monthlies Mojo and Uncut. Both of the latter are specialist publications aimed squarely at collector nerds but they do provide oxygen for plenty of new artists. How long those three will survive is anyone’s guess. Online there is Pitchfork and the excellent The Quietus and millions of people blogging, vlogging and commenting on music as a hobby.