100 Best Albums of the Eighties

39. ZZ Top, ‘Eliminator’

ZZ Top‘s Eliminator was the hands-down party album of the decade, pleasing hard-core boogie freaks and New Wave ironists alike with its bluesy vamping, tawdry lyrics and chic, trashy videos. You practically had to be in a coma not to have found some opportunity to dance to “Legs,” “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Gimme All Your Lovin'” in 1983. ZZ Top had enjoyed million-selling albums in the Seventies, but Eliminator outsold all the band’s previous releases. Most amazing of all, the album suddenly made the Texas trio with two of the longest beards in Christendom the hippest and hottest thing in rock & roll.

“We still sometimes wonder what exactly did transpire to make those sessions dramatically different,” says guitarist Billy Gibbons. “I suppose it might have been a return to playing together as a band in the studio as we did onstage.”

Many of the songs were written backstage during the Deguello tour. “Those dressing-room sessions that so many traveling bands talk about really are invaluable to creating a body of studio work,” says Gibbons. The band was determined to keep that dressing-room ambience alive when it went in to record. Eliminator was cut at Ardent Recording, in Memphis, a city whose musical heritage of Stax-Volt soul and Beale Street blues rubbed off on ZZ Top. “There was quite a stirring of sentiment around 1983 in Memphis,” Gibbons recalls. “The city is steeped in a very time-honored and strong tradition. It’s in the air. There was a soulful element in that period of time that affected the way we were playing.”

A trip to England prior to the sessions yielded its own influences, with the band taking in synth pop and the intense fashion consciousness of its “new romantic” practitioners. The modern technology inspired the band members to have a go at synths themselves, while the cool threads they had seen on the streets of London inspired them to write “Sharp Dressed Man.”

The synthesizers the band began noodling around on at Ardent happened to be primitive analogue models, with lots of wires and dials and no presets. “When we finally did return from England to get our work done, I think curiosity was a real magnet to turning on those things,” says Gibbons. “What you got was a bunch of cowpokes on blues twisting knobs from outer space.” But it worked: The synthesizers ”” layered organically amid guitars, bass and drums ”” contributed to Eliminator‘s dense, bluesy feel. “Synthesizer meets soul was a good combo,” Gibbons says.

Often lyrics were inspired by real-life situations. “Legs,” for instance, came about one rainy day on the way to the studio. “There was a young lady dodging the raindrops, and being obliging Southerners, we spun the car around,” says Gibbons. “No sooner had we turned around to pick her up ”” boom! ”” she’d vanished. And we said, ‘That girl’s got legs, and she knows how to use them.'”

Another song, “TV Dinners,” was inspired by seeing those very words stenciled on the back of a woman’s jumpsuit on the dance floor of a funky nightclub on the east side of Memphis. “I was stunned,” says Gibbons, deadpan. “It was just that moment ”” there it is, a gift. I mean why, other than to inspire us, would she have walked past sporting TV Dinners on her jumpsuit?”

As Eliminator gathered steam, Gibbons and bassist Dusty Hill’s flowing, belt-length beards became a visual symbol of ZZ Top. At one point, the Gillette company actually offered to pay them to shave off their beards on national television. “Our reply was ‘Can’t do it, simply because underneath ’em is too ugly,'” says Gibbons, guffawing.