2000 Blues

The Zoo Crew has that slow one spinning right now, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks for any length of time you already know the feeling. ZZ Top's "2000 Blues," tucked away on Recycler, is the kind of cut that does not kick the door in. It sits down, turns the lamp low, and tells you the truth in a drawl. A hundred thousand dollars would not touch the price that was paid. A hundred thousand moments you wish you had stayed. Ten thousand clouds on a rainy day still cannot wash the dust off. Money, miles, and a whole airplane with a co-pilot will not fix what is wrong when you have got two thousand blues. That is the lyric, and it lands harder than most of the jokes that little ol' band from Texas usually tells.

Recycler landed on October 16, 1990, the band's tenth album, and it was supposed to be something else entirely. Billy Gibbons laid the story out later, in a long Guitar World conversation that still gets passed around the shop. They had planned to follow the line they drew on Eliminator and Afterburner. A couple of highly structured pop tunes got written in the Houston studio. Then they went out to Los Angeles for a couple of months and fell into the sequencer thing, everything in its place. Memphis was where the record was supposed to get finished, at Memphis Sound on Beale Street. The high-tech gear did not show up on time. While they waited, the three of them set up in a circle, borrowed whatever the room had, and started playing like a band again. Gibbons said the sound was rougher and looser, and it felt right in every way. "2000 Blues" and "My Head's in Mississippi" both came out of those sessions. That is why he took to calling Recycler their Tres Hombres slash Eliminator album. The sequencers and synthesizers never fully left the building, but they sat further back in the room.

He told the Associated Press something even plainer in 1991. They started playing the blues. Two days later they had scrapped what they had done up to that point and started writing new material in a more traditional style. In about 48 hours the direction changed, because it was natural. He also told the Los Angeles Times they had started jamming the same three chords they always use, and it felt so good it redirected the angle. If they had stayed on the synthesizer road, he figured, they might have ended up as a rap band or something. Frank Beard, the man behind the kit, said the album got named Recycler because of their love for rebuilding old cars and for taking old blues tunes and restructuring them. Beale Street did not help the clock. Gibbons said the neighborhood was full of distractions and characters, including a street musician named Alabama who knew only one song, "Baby Please Don't Go." Not counting the Houston and Los Angeles prep, the record took about four months, one of their longer jobs.

Rolling Stone heard the turn when the album came out and called "2000 Blues" a stately, straightforward slow blues. The review figured Gibbons was looking at the condition of celebrity and the emptiness of corporate pop, a rare introspective stretch for a writer who usually prefers playfulness and crazy fun and who does not often let anybody peek behind the mask. The words do read that way. Nothing does you any good when you have got those blues. The airplane verse, with the tracking system and the safety fuse and the countdown, is pure ZZ, half heartache and half hot-rod daydream. The track sits eighth on the record, a little over four and a half minutes, and it has stayed a deep cut rather than a single. The radio hits off Recycler were "Doubleback," "Concrete and Steel," and "My Head's in Mississippi." "Doubleback" had already been cut for Back to the Future Part III, and that one kept more of the slick processed sound. "2000 Blues" did not need a video with a spinning Eliminator car. It needed the three of them in a circle.

There is a Memphis side story that belongs in the same chapter, even if it is not pinned to this one song. While they were making Recycler, Gibbons was handed a vial of dirt from the crossroads of Highways 49 and 61 in Clarksdale, the spot where the old story says Robert Johnson bargained with the devil. The warning that came with it was simple. Do not keep it in the house. Gibbons said he sprinkled it around the front door, and a bit in the beard, and some on the guitar. Dusty Hill was the one who prompted the beard part. That is the kind of tale the Zoo Crew likes, half folklore and half shop talk, and it fits a record that was busy finding its way back to the blues while the rest of the industry was still chasing the last neon video.

How that little ol' band got started is its own Texas shuffle. Billy Gibbons came out of Houston and the Moving Sidewalks, a psychedelic outfit that opened for the Doors. Backstage at one of those shows he met Bill Ham, a record promo man and frustrated singer out of Waxahachie, who became the manager and stayed in that chair for decades. The Sidewalks broke up under the draft and the usual band trouble. Gibbons cut a 45, "Salt Lick," on Ham's Scat label with a shifting lineup, and it did not stir much. Over in Dallas, Dusty Hill and his brother Rocky had been playing with drummer Frank Beard in American Blues, after an earlier run as the Warlocks on the old Cellar circuit, those after-hours rooms in Fort Worth, Dallas, and Houston. American Blues split in 1968. Dusty and Frank both drifted to Houston without telling each other. They ended up working about six miles apart and did not know it.

Frank heard about a bass player across town who was supposed to be bad, in the good way, and who was playing some funny-looking Gibson. He went to see for himself and found Dusty. The reunion ran into a first meeting with Gibbons, and they started cooking and went right through the night. The audition story the band has told for years is that they called a shuffle in C on a borrowed bass and just kept playing. Dusty later said breaking in a band is fun, that he had loved playing in a three-piece with his brother, and that everything was different with Billy, while he and Frank were already comfortable. They got tight pretty quick. The first show as ZZ Top was in February 1970 at the Knights of Columbus hall in Beaumont, a room some old accounts remember as a VFW. Beaumont and Port Arthur radio played them when the big Houston and Dallas stations would not. London Records took the deal. ZZ Top's First Album arrived in 1971, Rio Grande Mud followed, and Tres Hombres in 1973 carried "La Grange" out to the rest of the country. Mick Jagger was an early admirer. The Rolling Stones later had them open shows. By the time Recycler came around, the beards, the cars, and the Eliminator years were already legend, and "2000 Blues" was the sound of three old friends remembering the shuffle they started with.

That is the cut on the turntable over at THE ZOO, commercial-free and spinning for the Zoo Freaks the way a biker DJ likes it, long and low and a little greasy. If you want the rest of the story from the band's own porch, the official site is ZZ Top, and the discography there still lists Recycler right between the Six Pack and the Greatest Hits. The verified pages are Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans comparing notes on that little ol' band keep a long-running room at ZZ Top Fans. Put the needle back on "2000 Blues" when you get a minute. Some records you rebuild. Some you just let idle.