A Fool for Your Stockings

The Zoo Crew has got a slow one on the turntable, and if you are a Zoo Freak who likes your blues with a little smoke on it, settle in. That little ol' band from Texas is working through "A Fool for Your Stockings," the long, low groove off Degüello, and it is the kind of cut that does not hurry anybody. Billy Gibbons lays a clean line over Dusty Hill's dry bass and Frank Beard's patient backbeat, and the whole thing feels like a porch light left on for somebody who already knows the way back. Over on THE ZOO we keep the deep album tracks in the rotation for exactly this reason. A hit will get you in the door. A song like this one keeps you in the room.

Billy has told the story more than once, and it is a good one. A lot of ZZ Top songs started as something overheard, a scrap of talk that stuck. He was listening to a buddy explain how he fell for a certain girl, and the fella said, plain as a beer coaster, that he was a fool for her stockings. Gibbons wrote it down on the spot. He later told Classic Rock it was honest and unexpected, and that it served them well. That is the whole ZZ Top method in one sentence. They did not dress a feeling up. They caught it the way a man actually says it, then built a groove underneath.

The guitar on the track carries its own tale. When the trio cut Degüello, their sixth album, Gibbons reached for a Fender Stratocaster that Jimi Hendrix had given him years earlier, back when Billy's band the Moving Sidewalks opened for the Experience on a stateside run. The Strat would not behave through the amp. They ended up running it straight into the board at the studio, and that accident is why the solo sits so clean, almost bare, against the rhythm section. Hendrix had already modified the guitar, turning the three-way toggle into something closer to the five-way switch players take for granted, and he showed Gibbons how to pull the spring so the in-between positions would stay put. So the prettiest blues number in the ZZ Top book was cut on a gift from Jimi, plugged in wrong on purpose, and it came out right.

Degüello itself was a reunion record in all but name. After the Worldwide Texas Tour, the one with the longhorns, the buffalo, and the buzzards tethered near the amps, the three of them scattered. Frank Beard has laughed about those buzzards puking when the backline fired up. The break that was supposed to be a few months stretched out. Gibbons headed one way, Beard another, Hill down toward Mexico. When they finally gathered again they were, in Billy's words, virtual unknowns to one another. Nobody had bothered to shave. That laziness became the look the world still knows them by, beards on Billy and Dusty, and Frank, the drummer, ironically the only one without one. They holed up at Ardent Studio in Memphis through most of that stretch and made the record with their longtime producer Bill Ham, Terry Manning engineering. Warner Bros. put it out in November 1979, the first album under the new deal.

The title is an old Mexican battle call, Degüello, no quarter and no mercy. The music is kinder than the name. Gibbons has called the album a bridge out of the hard-blues trio years. It still had the marks of the beginning, he told Uncut, but it leaned a little more toward R&B, and the girl theme was starting to show. Cars, girls, fast and loud, those pieces were beginning to lock together. "A Fool for Your Stockings" sits on side one, right after "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide," and it points down the road toward the leer that later showed up in songs like "Legs." On this one the leer is slower. The singer will not quite admit he is gone for her, then admits it anyway. Sweet things can always get sweeter. That is the whole confession.

To get how a song like that could come out of three Texas players, you have to go back to how the band got started, because the blues was never a costume they put on. Billy Gibbons came up in Houston. His mother hauled him and his sister to see Elvis in the late fifties, and he has said he knew from about the time he could remember that music was the job. By his teens he was in the Moving Sidewalks, a psychedelic outfit that opened for the Doors and, more importantly for this story, for Hendrix. Manager Bill Ham, a record man out of Waxahachie, met Gibbons backstage at that Doors date and stayed in the picture for decades. The Sidewalks ran out of road when the draft and a war pulled pieces of the lineup apart. Gibbons kept a blues idea in his pocket.

Dusty Hill and Frank Beard came out of Dallas, not Houston. They had played together in the American Blues, a band that grew out of earlier groups Dusty shared with his brother Rocky, including the Deadbeats and Lady Wild and Her Warlocks. When American Blues broke up, both men drifted to Houston without telling each other. Beard landed in a band with Gibbons. One night he heard about a bass player across town who was laying down tricky stuff on a funny-looking Gibson. He went to see, and it was Dusty. The audition that followed is the one they still tell. Hill sat in, they called a shuffle in C, and they played straight through the night. Dusty later said breaking in a band is fun, that he and Frank were already comfortable, and that everything felt different with Billy. They got tight in a hurry.

The name came off old blues posters Billy kept. One end of the alphabet had B.B. King. The other had Z.Z. Hill. For about half a minute the idea was Z.Z. King. Then Gibbons figured the king was already on top, so it became ZZ Top. He has said he likes the zig-zag rolling-paper theory just fine, but the poster story is the one he finally wrote down. The first show under the new name landed in February 1970 at a hall in Beaumont, a town whose radio had already taken a liking to them when the bigger Houston and Dallas stations had not. London Records eventually put out ZZ Top's First Album. Mick Jagger was an early admirer. Tres Hombres and "La Grange" carried them onto national radio. By the time Degüello arrived, the same three men were still the band, which stayed true until Dusty Hill's passing years later, with Elwood Francis stepping in on bass, and Frank Beard keeping that Texas backbeat until he laid his sticks down.

If you want the catalog straight from the source, the band keeps house at ZZ Top, and the Degüello track list, with "A Fool for Your Stockings" sitting right where it belongs, is up on the site. Their own shop still carries the Degüello LP, sleeve and all, song four on side one. The verified pages are easy to find: Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the folks who argue set lists and beard lore in the comments, the long-running ZZ Top Fans group has been swapping stories since 2010, and the public room ZZ Top Fans Unite is another place the faithful gather. We will let this one ride out. A man can be a fool for a pair of stockings and still keep the groove honest. That is Texas blues, and that is what the Crew came to play.