During his senior year of high school, a Texas blues band called the Gentlemen came to play a school-sponsored rock concert, featuring neighborhood hotshot guitarist - and future fellow fake Zombie - Sebastian “Seab” Meador. He was good-looking, he had a sweet girlfriend named Vicki, and he loved playing guitar. But, in terms of sheer audacity and brazenness, it’s a story that’s still hard to top.īefore he joined Hill and Beard in the Texas band that passed itself off as the Zombies, Mark Ramsey was 18 years old and living on the outskirts of Dallas. Nearly 50 years later, what happened with the Zombies is now more myth than scandal, hazy details further lost to history, with many of its principal players gone or forgotten. As the British Invasion spurred rock's cultural explosion in the '60s, there simply weren't yet enough of these upstart bands touring North America to meet the demand. It was in this climate that Delta Promotions took this exploitation to a new extreme, figuring out a way to tour and sell “the Zombies” and other bands without those bands or their fans even realizing. Over the course of their existence, the Drifters have had somewhere around 60 members. In the doo-wop era, if a member of a popular group pushed back against a manager or label boss, they were simply sent packing, with a new, more compliant candidate brought in to replace them. In the history of the American popular music, artists have often been seen as interchangeable by the industry that promotes and distributes them. 3 on the Billboard chart and the Zombies were suddenly in demand. label, Date Records, decided to release the track “Time of the Season” as a last-ditch effort the song went to No. Almost two years after their breakup, after little fanfare and two failed singles, the band’s U.S. Nobody even saw fit to correct the unintentionally misspelled “Odessey” on the record’s cover, viewed in hindsight as typical psychedelic-era wordplay. The Zombies quietly disbanded when Odessey and Oracle failed to make the charts. The real Zombies would have never worn cowboy hats. Cruz and Chris Page are scrawled over them. I inform White that the two young men wearing cowboy hats are Dusty Hill and Frank Beard from the legendary Texas blues-rock band ZZ Top, although the names D. There are only four guys pictured despite the fact that the Zombies were a five-piece. That look, with all three members wearing dark sunglasses and Gibbons and Hill sporting long, wispy beards, became so familiar, in part thanks to their MTV videos in the 1980s, that it was the subject of a New Yorker cartoon and a joke on “The Simpsons.”Īn earlier version of this story was corrected to reflect that ZZ Top was formed in 1969, not the late 1970s.I pull up another grainy photo from 1969 on my laptop: a traditional black and white press photo for the Original "Zombies" (in conspicuous scare quotes), autographed. When I first saw them, I thought, ‘I hope these guys are not on the run, because that disguise is not going to work.’” “These cats know their blues and they know how to dress it up. “These cats are steeped in the blues, so am I,” Richards said. ZZ Top was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, introduced by Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. Their million-selling albums included ”Eliminator,” “Afterburner” and “Antenna.” The band went on to have such hits as “Tush” in 1975, and the 1980s songs “Sharp Dressed Man,” ”Legs,” “Gimme All Your Lovin’” and “Sleeping Bag.” The band’s 1976 “Worldwide Texas Tour,” with its iconic Texas-shaped stage festooned with cactuses, snakes and longhorn cattle, was one of the decade’s most successful rock tours. Three years later, they broke through commercially with “La Grange,” a funky blues song in the style of Slim Harpo’s ”Shake Your Hips” that paid tribute to the Chicken Ranch, a notorious brothel outside of the Texas town of La Grange. Their debut release, “ZZ Top’s First Album,” came out in 1970. Hill and influenced by the British power trio Cream. They didn’t give a cause of death, but a July 21 post on the band’s website said Hill was “on a short detour back to Texas, to address a hip issue.” At that time, the band said that its longtime guitar tech, Elwood Francis, would fill in on bass, slide guitar and harmonica.īorn Joe Michael Hill in Dallas, he, Gibbons and Beard formed ZZ Top in Houston in 1969, naming themselves in part after blues singer Z.Z. In a Facebook post Wednesday, guitarist Billy Gibbons and drummer Frank Beard said Hill died in his sleep. HOUSTON (AP) - ZZ Top’s Dusty Hill, the long-bearded bassist for the million-selling Texas blues rock trio known for such hits as “Legs” and “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” has died at age 72.
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