(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on a live cut that still raises eyebrows among the Zoo Freaks, and that cut is "(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear" by ZZ Top, pulled from the 1999 album XXX. It is not a studio confection cooked up in a Houston rehearsal room. It is a stage recording, and the little ol' band from Texas treats Elvis Presley's 1957 hit like a barroom dare. The original, written by Kal Mann and Bernie Lowe for the picture Loving You, sat at the top of the charts and played the cuddly card. ZZ Top keep the chain-around-the-neck line, then stretch the joke until it is greasy enough to belong next to "La Grange." Rolling Stone's Sandy Masuo, writing up XXX in early 2000, called the performance the standout of the four live tracks on the record, a raunchy reworking that turbocharges the coy popabilly tune with the libidinous force of "Steamroller Blues." That is about as fair a description as a rock critic ever gave a Texas shuffle.

XXX itself was the band's way of marking thirty years together, released on RCA on September 28, 1999, with Billy Gibbons producing. The studio half leans into the boogie they had been refining since Rhythmeen, titles like "Poke Chop Sandwich," "36-22-36," and "Dreadmonboogaloo" doing exactly the wink-and-nudge work the name ZZ Top always promised. Then the record flips to the stage. A short spoken introduction by Ross Mitchell sets the room, and the trio rolls into "Sinpusher," this teddy-bear cover, "Hey Mr. Millionaire" (Jeff Beck sitting in on guitar), and "Belt Buckle." The teddy-bear track runs a little past five minutes, long enough for a guitar solo and a second pass through the animal jokes. Credits on the album put the lead vocal on Dusty Hill, which fits. Hill was the one who stepped up front when a song wanted a coarser voice than Gibbons' low drawl, the same job he did on "Tush" back in 1975.

The lyric sheet is where the Zoo Freaks usually start grinning. Elvis sang about not wanting to be a tiger because tigers play too rough, and not wanting to be a lion because lions are not the kind you love enough. ZZ Top keep that bridge, then pile on a cheetah that scratches your stuff and, depending on which pressing notes you trust, a rhino whose horn is too gruff. The intro on the live tape is pure stage patter. Somebody asks where they are. The answer comes back, California. From there Hill leans into "baby, let me be your lovin' teddy bear," chain around the neck, fingers through the hair, and later the lock-and-key line that turns the old movie song into something you would not play at a church social. It is the same humor that ran through "Tube Snake Boogie" and "Legs," just pointed at a song their parents already knew by heart.

That habit of raiding the jukebox and dragging it through a Texas roadhouse goes all the way back to how the band got started. Billy Gibbons came out of Houston's psychedelic circuit with the Moving Sidewalks, a group loud enough that the Jimi Hendrix Experience took them out as an opening act in 1968. The draft and the war broke that lineup up. Gibbons kept a hangout room papered with the rainbow-colored blues posters that used to get nailed to telephone poles, the ones listing who was coming through town. Looking at those posters he noticed how many of the names ran on initials, O.V. Wright, D.C. Bender, B.B. King down at one end of the alphabet and Z.Z. Hill at the other. He liked the ring of ZZ and King, then decided ZZ King sat too close to B.B. King. King being at the top, he settled it. The name would be ZZ Top.

The other two pieces of the trio were already a rhythm section, just not in Houston yet. Joe Michael Hill, known to everybody as Dusty, was born in Dallas on May 19, 1949. By his middle teens he and his brother Rocky were working in bands that mutated with the British craze, the Deadbeats, then Lady Wild and Her Warlocks, then the American Blues, where they played with drummer Frank Beard. American Blues broke up in 1968. Dusty headed for Houston. Beard headed for Houston too, neither one telling the other. Beard fell in with the band Gibbons was putting together after the Sidewalks. One night a guitar player told Beard about a bass man across town who looked like all hat and no cattle until he got on the stand and blew the room apart. Beard knew that description. He went across town, found Dusty, and the three of them played straight through the night.

The formal start is usually dated to late 1969, with the first show under the ZZ Top name in February 1970 at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Beaumont. Beaumont and Port Arthur radio stood by them when the bigger Houston and Dallas stations would not, and a KLVI personality named Al Caldwell helped land that hall gig. Early sets ran through teen clubs, dance halls, and a few high school proms. Manager Bill Ham shopped a deal and landed London Records. The first single was "Salt Lick" backed with "Miller's Farm." ZZ Top's First Album arrived in 1971, barrelhouse rhythms and double meanings already in place. Mick Jagger was an early admirer, and the Rolling Stones later put the trio on bills in 1973, 1981, and 2003. The national break came with Tres Hombres in 1973 and "La Grange," the John Lee Hooker shuffle that finally got them on radios outside the Gulf Coast. "Tush," with Hill singing lead, made the Top 20 in 1975. The Worldwide Texas Tour that followed Tejas in 1976 hauled steers, buzzards, and a Texas-shaped stage across the country, which tells you everything about the sense of humor that later let them stuff a teddy bear into a thirty-year anniversary record.

Hill stayed the bottom end and the occasional lead voice for more than fifty years, right up to his death in Houston on July 28, 2021. He once described his bass tone as big, heavy, and a bit distorted, because it had to overlap the guitar, and offered the unpretty comparison of farting in a trash can, raw but with the tone still in there. Longtime guitar tech Elwood Francis, whom Hill had told the others to hand the bass to if he was ever late to the stage, stepped in and kept the band on the road. Beard, the clean-shaven drummer whose name was the running joke against the two beards up front, anchored that backbeat from the Beaumont hall until his death in 2026 at his ranch in Richmond, Texas. Gibbons has said the band would keep on keeping on, the way Beard wanted.

Spinning "(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear" on THE ZOO is a good excuse to remember that the whole ZZ Top idea started with a Dallas rhythm section, a Houston guitar player, and a stack of blues posters. The live cut on XXX is Dusty out front, Frank pushing the groove, Billy bending strings, and a California crowd getting a song they thought they already knew. For the records, the tour dates, and the long story of that little ol' band from Texas, the official home is ZZ Top. The band keeps a verified page at Facebook, posts road shots and stage notes at Instagram, and runs the verified account at X. Listeners who want to argue set lists with other die-hards can find the long-running ZZ Top Fans group, the one whose own greeting is still "Ahaw, haw, haw." Put the chain on, cue the California intro, and let Dusty be the teddy bear. The Zoo Freaks already know the rest of the words.