Happy 45th Anniversary to ZZ Top’s fourth album Fandango!, originally released April 18, 1975.
While the fandango is generally defined, according to Merriam-Webster, as a “lively Spanish or Spanish-American dance in triple time that is usually performed by a man and a woman to the accompaniment of guitar and castanets,” it can also mean just simple “tomfoolery.” While ZZ Top have never really been known to play anything close to resembling music that would inspire a fandango as defined in the former, they definitely have been known to engage in the latter.
By 1974, “That Little Ol’ Band From Texas” was flying high on the strength of their breakthrough third album, 1973’s Tres Hombres. Whereas both First Album and Rio Grande Mud gave notice that they were not your average hyper-masculine southern-blues-boogie band, Tres Hombres had the songs to back up their gritty but slightly off-kilter sound.
From the John Lee Hooker/Slim Harpo homage “La Grange” and the now-classic one-two punch of an opener, the since inseparable “Waitin’ For The Bus” and “Jesus Just Left Chicago,” to the pummeling attack of “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers” and the late-night sweaty salvation of “Hot, Blue, and Righteous,” Tres Hombres defined the ZZ Top sound for at least the next decade, and laid the foundation for the rest of their career. But how would they follow it up?
One clue as to how happened on Labor Day weekend in 1974 during what was billed as ZZ Top’s First Annual Texas Size Rompin’ Stompin’ Barn Dance and Barbeque at Texas Memorial Stadium. Ambitiously headlining a bill that also included the newly-formed Bad Company (with labelmate Jimmy Page sitting in on guitar), Santana, and Joe Cocker, the event became the largest one-day music event in Texas history up to that point, drawing a whopping 80,000 fans to the University of Texas in Austin on an oppressive 91-degree afternoon.
The “first annual,” however, ended up being the final, as well as the last concert at Memorial Stadium for over twenty years (when the Eagles made it acceptable for live music again in 1995). "I remember having to sit face-to-face in front of Darrell Royal (the legendary country music-loving head coach of the Texas Longhorns football team and personal friend of Willie Nelson, and at whose stadium the concert was held), trying to explain why his AstroTurf had been carved out in the shape of Texas, which took up the 50-yard line into the 40-yard line," Billy F. Gibbons told Texas Monthly in 2008.
While no official live album was made from that particular event, it did spark the idea that ZZ Top’s next project should at least reflect that sort of energy on record. A live album was imagined—well, half-imagined.
Listen to the Album:
In the 1970s, the live album was the go-to for several reasons. Marketed as a souvenir of the respective tour or show, it was sometimes basically used to fulfill a contractual obligation or as a stopgap to tide over the hungry marketplace while the artist re-energized their creative juices. After all, it was cheap and quick to make, and back then, a guaranteed seller at least to an act’s fanbase.
ZZ Top decided, of course, to do it a little differently, as Gibbons told MusicRadar in 2013, “The live capture wound up being in the can first. We had enough live material to make up one side of the disc, so we decided to go with the unusual move of making the album half live, half studio. It turned out to be a winning combination for us.” The “live capture” was done at The Warehouse in New Orleans on April 12, 1974 (months before the Memorial Stadium tomfoolery), as the liner notes read, “captured as it came down--hot, spontaneous, and presented to you honestly, without the assistance of studio gimmicks."
Fandango! shares that rarefied air of half-live and half-studio albums. From the Allman Brothers Band’s Eat a Peach to Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma, it was usually reserved for double-albums (not counting the many, many studio albums that include a live track or two—or three—scattered about). Fandango! however, was just one single succinct slab, clocking in at just over a half-hour, with half of that—or side—being the “live” portion.
Kicking off with a frenetic celebration of the cheapest, most horrid wine imaginable, “Thunderbird” not only borrows, it downright burgles the arrangement made regionally popular by influential Dallas-based rockers, The Nightcaps. Never having copyrighted the song, however, The Nightcaps sued, and lost, to ZZ Top, who did register the song. (To be fair, as it goes with most rock, blues, and folk songs, The Nightcaps were hardly the first to record the song, either, as Dossie Terry’s 1957 version makes clear. (Not to mention they all owe more than a passing nod to the very first hit for Atlantic records, Stick McGhee’s classic, “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” in 1949, but I digress.)
After a ferocious proto-metal version of “Jailhouse Rock” with rafter-blasting vocals by Dusty Hill, the breakneck nine-minute-plus “Backdoor Medley” takes up the rest of the “live” side, complete with an outright-bonkers take on Little Walter’s “Mellow Down Easy” (which never does), and a callback to John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen” motif as a sort of tip-of-the-Stetson for the “La Grange” riff. Yet that’s just half the story: Flip the record over, and you’ll be confronted with the best album side of ZZ Top’s long career.
Launching with the balls-out badassery of “Nasty Dogs and Funky Kings,” side two immediately changes gears into “Blue Jean Blues,” the deepest, sexiest blues Gibbons, Hill, and Beard ever put to tape. Dusty is allowed the floor again for the southern boogie-yet-kind-of-Grateful-Dead-esque “Balinese” (Hill’s voice is heard more on Fandango! than any other ZZ Top album, and it’s all the better for it), before Billy delivers the severely bawdy and tongue-in-cheek country of “Mexican Blackbird.”
The powerful five-hundred-thousand-watt (you read that right) radio stations that blasted from across the border of Mexico that made famous the likes of Wolfman Jack out of Del Rio and others (namely stations XERF and XERB) are saluted in “Heard It On The X” before side two closes with ZZ Top’s first big hit, the just over two-minute salute to, well, “Tush.”
“Tush” would propel Fandango! Into the top ten of the album charts, which in turn would give ZZ Top their first taste of chart success and inspire them to think even bigger. Within a year, they would take to the road with one of the most ambitious stage sets ever assembled for their Worldwide Texas Tour, including live cattle, longhorn skulls, western nudie suits, corrals, and much more, proving that the Little Ol’ Band From Texas had dreams as big and endless as the western skies they grew up under.
Fandango!, in retrospect, may now seem quaint to some in comparison to what came later. But taken on its own, it’s ZZ Top’s most concise, powerful statement of purpose and time has not diminished its power, vitality, or glorious tomfoolery one iota.
LISTEN: