A Boot In Your Ass

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on a short, mean little instrumental that does exactly what the title promises. Andy Timmons calls it A Boot In Your Ass, and it sits second on his 2004 album Kick Ass Blues Rock. No singer, no apology, just a North Texas guitar player laying down a two-minute blues-rock stomp that feels built for a highway, a shop radio, or a room full of Zoo Freaks who came to hear something with dirt under its fingernails. Over on THE ZOO, that is the whole idea. Freeform rock, deep cuts, and the odd record that never got a proper billboard but still kicks the door in.

Kick Ass Blues Rock came out on March 17, 2004, on FirstCom Music, catalog number EVO016Q, the kind of production-library record stations and film cutters keep on the shelf when they need a riff with a pulse. Timmons wrote and played the first eleven tunes himself. A Boot In Your Ass runs about two minutes and five seconds, clocked around 147 beats a minute, published through First Digital Music and logged with BMI. The FirstCom sheet sells the whole album in plain language: a fresh batch of kick-ass rockin' blues from a legendary guitarist, pitched for cars, trucks, racing, and sports. The titles around it read like a road map out of the state. Dual Carbs opens the disc. Then the boot. Then Rio Grande Raid, Fireworks, Power Texas Hit, Working It Out, Big Power, Built Tough, Hot Fingers, Big Dog, and Crunch Time. The last three cuts, South Texas Jam, Blues Off!, and Rest Stop, share the writing with Jamey Perrenot, sometimes credited as James Perrenot. Every full track was also cut down to sixty, thirty, and ten seconds, the old broadcast trick so a music director could slam a bed under a liner and get out. The package carried eighty-four pieces of music on a CD and a data DVD, pressed in the States and glass-mastered at Sonopress. That is why a song with a title like this can feel familiar even if you never bought the disc. It was built to leak into the air.

There are not many sit-down interviews where Timmons walks through this particular library date. The record does the talking. It is the same muscle he has used for radio beds and television cues for years, just turned up and given a name that would get a laugh in a guitar shop. Dallas sports station The Ticket later hired him, through TM Studios, to play on a whole package of live-band imaging with a rhythm section of studio cats. Program directors go back to that kind of player because the tone is already in his hands. A Boot In Your Ass is the cousin of that work: short, loud, and finished before the light turns green. Zoo Freaks who grew up on album rock will hear the joke in the title and the sincerity in the playing. The boot is not a lyric. It is a groove, a Texas shuffle with the amp leaned back and the pocket locked. Listen for the way the riff sits on the beat instead of racing it. That is a session player who has spent years making two minutes feel like a whole side of a record.

The man holding the guitar did not come out of nowhere. Andy Timmons was born July 26, 1963, in Scottsdale, Arizona, and grew up in Evansville, Indiana. In a 2019 conversation he said he started playing at five. Older brothers were buying English pop and rock, the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, the Kinks, and that was the first guitar language in the house. By the seventies he was teaching himself off a record player and a guitar he had bought at a local pawn shop. Lessons came later. The records that stuck were Kiss, Foghat, and Rush, the stuff that ruled rock radio when a kid still had to wait all week for the station to play the deep cut. His first concert, at thirteen, was Kiss on the Destroyer tour. He has said the spectacle, the volume, and the power of the guitar told him this was the work. That same stretch of years he put together his first band, Taylor Bay, right there in Evansville, and graduated from Evansville Harrison High School in 1981.

On his own site he put the next decision in plain words. Early on, he realized making it in a rock band was such a long shot that he had better figure out other ways of making a living playing guitar. He started reading about players like Steve Lukather and Larry Carlton who paid the rent as session musicians. That appealed to him because he already loved a wide spread of styles, not just one lane of hard rock. He studied classical guitar for two years, including time at the University of Evansville, then transferred to the University of Miami for jazz guitar, largely because the Dixie Dregs, Pat Metheny, and Jaco Pastorius had passed through there. The NAMM oral-history folks later caught him back at Goldman's Pawn Shop in Evansville, the store he credits, along with guitar teacher Ron Prichard, for lighting the fuse. The interview happened while the shop was marking 125 years, staff and customers gathered around, and a local jam broke out with him in the middle of it. He has also led a band called the Pawn Kings, and anybody who has stood in that Evansville shop can hear why a name like that would stick to a blues-rock trio.

Dallas is where the session plan turned into a life. He landed in a busy studio scene, and in 1988 the Andy Timmons Band started drawing a Texas following. The trio came together the old way, through jam sessions. Drummer Mitch Marine showed up with the right energy, bassist Mike Daane clicked the first time they played, and after a few gigs billed almost like a teen beat revue they stripped down to three pieces and mixed originals with covers of Eric Johnson, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Steve Morse, and a little Bubble Puppy for the hometown heads. Epic's Danger Danger then pulled him in to finish their debut record, shoot videos, and hit the road. Four years in New York followed. As their guitarist he toured the world opening for Kiss and Alice Cooper, the same Kiss he had seen as a kid on the Destroyer tour, and the band sold over a million records with two number-one videos on MTV. He played on the 1989 Danger Danger album and on Screw It! in 1991, with later sessions turning up on Cockroach. In 1993 he came back to Dallas, picked up the studio chair and the Andy Timmons Band, and put out ear X-tacy in 1994, the instrumental record guitar players still pass around. ear X-tacy 2, Pawn Kings, Orange Swirl, and The Spoken and the Unspoken followed. Favored Nations, Steve Vai's label, put out That Was Then, This Is Now and later Resolution. The library date that gave us A Boot In Your Ass landed in the middle of all that, a working guitarist writing short, tough cues under his own name.

The sideman list is the other half of the story, and it explains a two-minute blues-rock cue better than any press release. He has been music director and guitarist on Olivia Newton-John's U.S. tours, cut with Kip Winger, sat in sessions for Paula Abdul and Paul Stanley, and turned up on records with drummer Simon Phillips. He has shared stages with Steve Vai and Joe Satriani on G3 stops in Dallas, and with Eric Johnson, Steve Morse, Mike Stern, Ace Frehley, Ted Nugent, the Beach Boys, Lesley Gore, and Gordon Waller of Peter and Gordon. Japan's rock magazines kept voting him into their top twenty favorite guitarists. The Dallas Observer named him Musician of the Year four years running. Ibanez built signature guitars around his specs and sent him around the world as a clinician. He has called McKinney home, which puts one of the best working guitarists in the country a short ride from the same North Texas air the Zoo Freaks already know. When he talks about tone, he does not reach for fancy words. He has said he is just trying to get the most pleasant sound he can, even when the music is aggressive, because the rock field can turn abrasive if you let it. That is the player you hear on A Boot In Your Ass. The riff has a boot in it, but the note still sings.

If you want the long trail, his official site is andytimmons.com, where the bio, the shows, and the discography live. He keeps a verified Facebook page under Andy Timmons Guitar, posts as andytimmonsofficial on Instagram, and writes on X as Andy Timmons. Fans and friends gather in the Andy Timmons: Fans & Friends Group, a busy room of a few thousand players and listeners trading stories and pictures, with a standing request from Andy himself that folks skip posting certain live clips. None of that changes what is coming out of the speakers. A Boot In Your Ass is two minutes of Dallas-hardened blues rock from a kid who bought his first real guitar in a pawn shop, opened for Kiss, and never stopped treating the instrument like a job and a joy. The Zoo Crew will let it ride. Zoo Freaks, turn it up.