By 1975, ZZ Top was on a roll. They had just come off their most
successful album to date,
Tres Hombres, and had nabbed themselves a bonafide hit with
“La Grange”. So how could they follow this up?
The answer – 1975’s
Fandango! – was both the right and the wrong answer. Sure,
this album includes “Tush,” one of the all-time favorite hits from
ZZ Top, but it also showed signs that the band was running out of
steam creatively. Including a half-assed live effort didn’t help
things either.
It’s tough to translate what a trio can do in the studio onto
the concert stage, though ZZ Top – Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and
Frank Beard – seem to be willing to give it a try on the first half
of
Fandango!. The problem is not only that they don’t touch on
songs they had become known for (“Thunderbird” was a new track and
“Jailhouse Rock” was a cover), but also that they took a good song
like “Backdoor Love Affair” and turned it into a bigger mess than
eating barbecue with no napkins. The constant vamping during
“Mellow Down Easy” (part of what they called “Backdoor Medley”)
gets real old, real quick – and it makes it sound like ZZ Top
wasn’t taking their moment in the spotlight that seriously. This
might explain why we’ve never seen a full-length live album from ZZ
Top in their 30-year career.
To be blunt, this pitiful attempt at capturing the live
experience left ZZ Top in a hole for the rest of the album. If
Fandango! was going to succeed, it needed some killer studio
tracks. If only they could have consistently delivered the
goods.
Yes, I know that “Tush” is on this album (though the remix I
have from the
ZZ Top Six Pack sounds atrocious – memo to Bill Ham: why did
you take the rough sound off these albums and screw them up?), and
“Blue Jean Blues” gives Gibbons the chance to fall into a nice
pattern of 12-bar blues like you’d hear in a smoky club. And let’s
not forget about “Heard It On The X,” possibly one of the best
“forgotten” hits of ZZ Top’s.
But that’s only half of the studio material – and the other
three songs run the gamut from passable to pathetic. On one
extreme, you have “Nasty Dogs And Funky Kings” and “Balinese,”
neither of which have the power to light the speakers up, but are
not bad efforts in and of themselves. On the other, you have
“Mexican Blackbird,” which is sung in a style that sounds like a
Yankee trying to sound Southern. It’s tragically comedic… only
I’m not laughing.
In fact, ZZ Top was working themselves toward a much-needed
hiatus, though they’d put out one more album before taking an
extended break. And while I understand they had to be feeling
pressure to follow up the success of
Tres Hombres, I kind of wish they had taken a break instead
of releasing this one. You can find the hits elsewhere;
Fandango! is hardly fantastic.
