The Lone Rangers Ride Again

By Guy Garcia

ZZ Top, the hirsute Texas trio, has always cut a jagged diagonal across the pop landscape. During the egocentric '80s, when Madonna, Duran Duran and Michael Jackson were using MTV to magnify their star appeal, ZZ Top put an ironic distance between itself and the camera, vamping behind Rip Van Winkle beards, trench coats and sunglasses. The group's slyly salacious videos about glossy cars and sassy girls were always delivered with a knowing wink. One clip ends with the band standing on the edge of a dusty desert, striking its trademark truckin' pose before fading like a mirage on an overheated highway.

ZZ Top might have disappeared permanently if not for its canny ability simultaneously to buck and ride the new-wave trend, grafting its brawny, blues-inflected guitar licks onto slick synthesizer grooves and pulsing dance beats. On multiplatinum-selling albums such as 1983's Eliminator and 1985's Afterburner, guitarist Billy Gibbons, bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard (the only bandmate without one) perfected a progressive yet reassuringly familiar rock stance and tapped a huge audience that shared their ambivalence. By the end of the decade, however, their sound had become all too accurately described by the title of their 1990 effort, Recycler.

Now, on Antenna -- the 14th album for ZZ Top, and its first since signing a $35 million, five-album deal with RCA -- the band has returned to its roadhouse roots and emerged renewed and as bristly as ever. The album kicks off with the high-voltage Pincushion and never lets up. From the syncopated stomp of Fuzzbox Voodoo to the scrawl of searing guitar notes on Cherry Red, the trio, led by Gibbons' supple guitar work, rocks with earnest, no-frills intensity that harks back to ZZ Top's first hit, La Grange.

The stripped-down sound came only partly by design. "The day we were supposed to start recording, our equipment truck was late," Gibbons explains. He wound up jamming on a borrowed, primitive Fender Esquire guitar and a 1949 amplifier. The lyrics on Antenna also stick to the basics, concentrating on the pleasures -- and dangers -- of women and fast vehicles. Still, there are signs that the outlook of the band has mellowed and deepened since the days when it cranked out such adolescent anthems as Legs and Tube Snake Boogie. There's a brooding fatalism in Deal Goin' Down: "When the deal go down and the noose is bein' tied/ Ain't no gettin' round it fade black and let it lie."

Antenna's title was inspired by the band's collective memory of growing up in Texas when the only way to hear records by such guitar masters as B.B. King and Lightnin' Hopkins was to tune late at night to far-flung radio outposts like Chicago's WLS and pirate stations along the Mexican border. Twenty-four years and many albums later, that shared appreciation is still the glue that binds "the little ol' band from Texas." "We wanted to listen mostly to the blues and early rock bands that drove our parents crazy," recalls Gibbons. "They still stand with an intensity that has not evaporated." Teenagers all over America will no doubt tune in to Antenna for the very same reason.