Mom, There's Some Beardo Weirdos Here, And It Ain't Even Christmas Yet...

If I were a hundred percent the music snob that my more mainstream music-minded college buddies say I am, this comp would probably look something like this: Gather some of the deep cuts from ZZ Top's first decade as that 'lil' ol' blus band from Texas', maybe top the whole thing of with some choice cuts from their mid-90s to today work, when they renewed the rowdy blus and barroom boogie of their beginnings, and certainly stay away a mile from their charts successes and music of the 80s, when that lil' red ZZ Top Eliminator ran on sequencers, electronic drums and tech effects over everything. 

But, you know, I'm not as much of a hipster as it seems, and it just so happens I forgot my hipster card today, together with my streaming service subscription and my social media accounts. So obviously I'm gonna run straight into the opposite drection of what an acceptable ZZ Top compilation would look like! That ol' OBG and that lil' ol' blues band from Texas - a match made in machine heaven. 

As for the weird-looking title, what can I tell you...that's how the comp is in my collection, so that's probably how it will be in yours. The first Greatest Hits is the original Greatest Hits of ZZ Top, though I did add "Stages", their best pop tune. A couple of years later, my dad bought the double disc anthology Rancho Texicana, of which I took most of the tracks I didn't have and that weren't on the first volume to make a Greatest Hits Vol. 2. Which of course means that this will be comp number three, and thus Greatest HIIIts...And Missus. Hopefully not too many misses. because this album is definitely not doing what you think it might be doing, picking up the best of the rest. Hell, to be fair the Greatest Hits moniker is somewhat of a lie, done so that my Greatest Hits series can continue. 

This isn't really a Greatest Hits comp - even taking the skeezey-looking Vol. 3 into account - because what I wanted to do with this is probably quite different from what a lot of other people want from their ZZ Top. As said above, I wasn't around when the 'little'ol blues band from Texas' started to make a name for itself in the early 70s, neither for their unexpected and improbable, if short-lived stint as weirdly admirable hipsters following the success of 1983's Eliminator. But those ZZ Top, who chain drummer Frank Beard to a sequencer and load up the keyboards and Fairlights, those are my ZZTop, for better or worse. ZZ Top? More like ZZ Pop, am I right? So, in order to compile this album, I actually had to dig for something that any ZZ Top fan would tell you should stay buried. Like, six feet under buried.

After the breakthrough of Eliminator and the relative success of carbon copy Afterburner, the record company and the band decided, that if folks were interested in checking out more ZZ Top, they should be able to do that in the CD format. Except that the first five ZZ Top albums, plus 1981's eperimental El Loco had never made it onto a digital disc. Ready to give the fans what they thought they would want, and following the little-known doctrine 'Fix if it ain't broke 'til it's broke', the band added new electronic drum effects and treated guitar, so the old blues albums would sound more like thne-contemporary ZZ Top. This was obviously an affront for old fans of the band, who recoiled in horror when The Sixpack came out in 1987, and those old albums didn't sound anything like they did originally. 

Old school fans were aghast and despite its ubiquity in the late 80s and early 90s, The Sixpack was easily one of the most hated big archival releases of a major band. But, as I said: That sound is my ZZ Top sound, and so I went on the hunt for The Sixpack, which got deleted in the early 200s, though it took another ten years or so until finally all the songs off the old albums came out in their original form in the early 2010s. Happily, a blog concentrating on 80s music, and I mean really 80s sounding music, had a copy of that box set, which is the foundation of most of Greatest HIIIts...And Missus. So, if you're a ZZ Top or blues-rock purist, stranger, you might want to bypass this. 

If, like me, however, the synth-tech, almost New Wave-sound of early-to late 1980s ZZ Top is your thing, as it is mine, then by all means stick around. In order to not make the title a complete lie, I included their three biggest hits, a.k.a. the three big Eliminator singles, in later live versions. And I added a couple of more old-school sounding tracks, after the band slowly stripped away the excesses of the mid-80s in the early 1990s: 1994's "Breakaway" and "I Gotsta Get Paid" from 2012s La Futura, the last album made with Dusty Hill, and also their last studio album to date, which it will probably stay. By this time, Gibbons' voice has definitely gotten a good bit (okay, fine, a lot) more husky and rough, but still, one of the highlights of their very mixed 21st Century output. 

A couple of times on these pages you've heard about a single disc comp growing completely out of proportions and becoming a two-disc proposition, but this is one of the rare cases where I actually deleted some tracks for a better overall flow and listenability. This has so far in One Buck Records history only happened with the first compilation of Aerosmith's Geffen era material. Like Aerosmith, ZZ Top have their own style and groove, and if you're down with those, you can have a fabulous time, but like the Glimmer Twins & bandmates, it's a relatively limited sound. They have a little more variety than notorious three riff band AC/DC (even if it's really good three riffs), but there still is a sameyness here that could get a little tiresome as the original comp crept easily over the 70 minute mark. So I deleted four tracks and completely reworked the sequencing into what I think is now a really neat and pretty hot 64 minute affair. That's probably about as much ZZ Top as one can take in one listen.

So, Greatest HIIIts...And Missus maybe isn't what you'd expect from the band, but is possibly still worth a listen to what is now a double anachronism. You might not have wanted these songs in these versions in the first place, but now a comp like this is the only place to listen to them. So, if you're courageous, leave your hipster cards also at the door, and rejoin 70s ZZ Top in their glammed up 80s suits...