The early 80s were a time of reckoning for many veteran rockers. Androgynous bands with drum machines and synths were on the rise, as were postpunk new wavers with tick-tock guitars and skinny ties. The future for a hirsute boogie blues trio from Texas might’ve seemed as bleak and foggy as a song by The Cure. Especially since Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard looked like 18th-century prospectors.
But in one of the greatest surprise reinventions ever, ZZ Top added a few drops of new wave and romanticism into their brew and struck gold. Or rather platinum. Their 1983 album Eliminator sold over 11 million copies in the US alone, prompted largely by what's come to be known as the "Eliminator Trilogy" of videos.
The album's first single Gimme All Your Lovin’ got a lot of radio play, and ZZ Top charted internationally for the first time. The follow-up was Sharp Dressed Man.
Singer-guitarist Gibbons recalled the inspiration. “I went to see a film. The credits were rolling, and one of the players was described as ‘Sharp Eyed Man.’ That started it. The track had this heavyweight bass line from a synthesiser. You know who was popping at this time? Depeche Mode. I went to see them, and it was a mind-bender. No guitars, no drums. It was all coming from machines. But they had blues threads going through their stuff.
"I went backstage. I had to meet these guys. They were surprised, like ‘What brings you here?’ I said, ‘Man, the heaviness.’ We became friends. Martin Gore was a guitar player trapped behind the synthesisers. He was like, ‘Man, let’s talk guitar.’”
The track, produced by Bill Ham, mixed Top’s crunchy, distorted guitars with a Eurorhythm weave of drum machine and synth bass, a new twist on their signature sound. But it wasn't a complete departure, with Gibbons' solo designed to keep old-school fans content.
"That solo was truly the successful marriage of a techno beat with bar-band blues-style overtones from the guitar department, and that certainly includes a wide range of Southern inspiration," Gibbons told Guitar School's Alan Paul. "We were becoming increasingly attracted to the beats, you see, and yet the Allman Brothers remain some of our biggest heroes. On Sharp Dressed Man, we brought those two worlds together."
Even more important than Top’s kinship with Depeche Mode and use of Linn drums was how they slotted into MTV’s nascent video craze. The now-classic clip for Sharp Dressed Man – considered the first music video to be a direct sequel to its preceding release, Gimme All Your Lovin' – featured the band coaching an innocent young guy into the ways of fast cars and fashion, and into the arms of three young women (oh, those scoop-neck leotards). It was voted the best video of 1983.
“What became known as ‘the video era’ started off as a complete, non-designed, unplanned uprising,” said Gibbons. “For us, pretty girls and fast cars made for a good combo."
MTV wasn't the only broadcaster to become enthralled by the girls and by Gibbons' 1933 Ford Coupe, which is now on permanent display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum in Cleveland, OH. The band made their very first live TV appearance, playing a not-entirely satisfactory, horn-punctuated version of Sharp Dressed Man on NBC's Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, followed by the classic Tush.
Even the Brits were paying attention. “There was one very special moment that occurred in the UK not long after Eliminator came out,” Gibbons relates. “The BBC screened a marathon music video night, and Gimme All Your Lovin’, Sharp Dressed Man and Legs were broadcast in rapid succession just as the pubs were being let out. Right there, the entire country discovered this band of renegade misfits. We went on and had a runaway success.”
“The videos have given us a younger audience," Dusty Hill told Creem. "You know, our audience grew up with us until the videos, and they were beginning to get a little long in the tooth. Then the videos came along, and now we’ve recaptured the 16-year-old girls. The 16-year-old girls!” Hill wasn't being creepy. In all three videos, the heroes were the girls, the villains sexist men.
Sharp Dressed Man sold an astonishing 400,000 copies in the UK alone, and would go on to be covered by fellow southerners Molly Hatchet and the Charlie Daniels Band, lounge singer Richard Cheese and industrial giants Ministry. And in 1985, its cultural significance was confirmed when "Weird Al" Jankovic – forever a man with an educated eye on the zeitgeist – borrowed the lyrics for his Hooked On Polkas single.
