(Somebody Else Been) Shaking Your Tree

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on "(Somebody Else Been) Shaking Your Tree," the opener from ZZ Top's First Album, and if you have been riding with THE ZOO for any length of time you already know how that little Texas trio liked to start a record. No fanfare, no handshake, just a shuffle that sounds like somebody left the back door of a Houston beer joint propped open. Billy Gibbons wrote it, Bill Ham produced it, and London Records pressed it as the only single off the debut, backed with "Neighbor, Neighbor," catalog number 45-138. The album hit the racks in January 1971. The single did not climb the national charts, and neither did the record, which is exactly the kind of fact the Zoo Freaks enjoy. Plenty of the best bar-band rock never asked permission from the countdown.

Gibbons has told the story more than once, and it is worth keeping. The music got worked up in Houston, in a rehearsal room parked right beside a cantina, which tells you about as much as you need to know about the working conditions. They polished the track, then drove up to Robin Hood Studios in Tyler with the title in hand and the verses still unfinished. The title itself was an old blues way of talking, the kind of warning you might hear across a table: somebody else has been messing with your girl, so you had better pay attention. Gibbons stayed with it until the lines were done. "I'm tryin' just to get a line on you," then the hook, "Somebody else been shaking your tree, supposed to be saving all that stuff for me," and finally the shrug at the end, "Anything you wanna do is cool with me, I don't care who shakes your tree." That last turn is pure Gibbons. The singer is jealous, then he is done, then he is almost polite about it. The whole debut leans on that kind of wink. Brown Sugar, Bedroom Thang, Backdoor Love Affair, the lot of them treat a double meaning like a house specialty.

There is a studio argument attached to this cut that the crew likes even better than the lyric. Gibbons had been fooling with a pedal steel, and once they were in the lounge at Robin Hood somebody asked whether steel was too country for a rock and roll song. They tossed a coin. Heads. The steel stayed. It is one of the rare ZZ Top tracks with Gibbons on pedal steel, the other famous one being "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide" years later. You can hear it keening over the groove, halfway between a juke joint and a honky-tonk, which is about as Texas as a two-and-a-half-minute single gets. Billboard, reviewing the album, called them a hot rock band with blues in the blood and singled out this song and "Brown Sugar" as the plus points, praising Gibbons' classic blues singing. Other ears called the record dull and unfinished. Gibbons later said he wanted that lo-fi, lived-in feel on purpose. They had been together about six months, knocking around the usual funky joints, and they treated the studio like an extension of the stage show.

The album title is its own little joke, and it did not come from the band. Art director Bill Narum, handling the London packaging, told them to make it plain that this was an offering of what they did, and that it was only the first one. Gibbons has said they called it ZZ Top's First Album because they wanted everybody to know there would be more. They were not sure they would get another shot in the studio, but they had high hopes. In another telling he credits Narum straight: hope for a second record, say so on the cover, and the name stuck. The thing that kept them going through the sessions, Gibbons told Guitar World, was the chance to put a record out on the same label that had handled the Rolling Stones in America. London had the Stones catalog in its bones. For three Houston and Dallas players still learning the room, that association was fuel.

Before any of that wax existed, the band had to get invented, and the origin story runs through two Texas groups that never quite made the national map. Gibbons came out of Houston's Moving Sidewalks, a sharp psychedelic outfit with a local hit called "99th Floor" and one album, Flash. The Sidewalks opened Texas dates for the Doors and for Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix later named the young guitar player a favorite when he turned up on The Tonight Show, which is a heavy compliment to carry out of your teens. The Sidewalks came apart when the draft took organist Tom Moore and bassist Don Summers. Gibbons was not going back to school. Manager Bill Ham, a Waxahachie promo man and frustrated singer, had already met him backstage at that Doors show and had ideas. The name ZZ Top came from the alliterative initials of bluesmen B.B. King and Z.Z. Hill. An early lineup with Sidewalks drummer Dan Mitchell and keyboardist Lanier Greig cut a 1969 single, "Salt Lick" backed with "Miller's Farm," on Ham's little Scat label. It did not stir much. Greig left, Mitchell left, and the chair opened up.

Frank Beard had come down from the Dallas side, where he had been the drummer in American Blues with the Hill brothers, Dusty on bass and Rocky on guitar. Beard got the ZZ Top drum seat and vouched for Dusty. The audition, by every account that has survived, was a shuffle in the key of C, the people's key, and it ran for hours. Gibbons has called that first session a straightaway they ground down for a solid three hours. Hill later said breaking in a band was fun, that he had loved playing in a three-piece with his brother, and that everything felt different with Billy, while he and Frank were already comfortable. They got tight quick. The first gig under the ZZ Top name landed on February 10, 1970, at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Beaumont, a room some old hands remember as a VFW hall, with Beaumont radio man Al Caldwell helping pry the door open when Houston and Dallas stations were still looking the other way. They played teen clubs, dance halls, and at least one high school prom. One early night drew a single paying customer, and the band bought him a Coca-Cola so he would not leave.

That is the crew that walked into Tyler and cut this song. Dusty Hill on bass and background voice, Frank Beard on the drums, Gibbons on guitar, vocal, and that coin-toss steel, Ham at the board. The record cost about twelve thousand dollars. It did not make them famous. Tres Hombres and "La Grange" did that a couple of years on, and the beards, the Eliminator cars, and the worldwide Texas tour came later still. What the first album did was plant the flag: blues, boogie, a hard little rock edge, and lyrics that grin while they complain. "(Somebody Else Been) Shaking Your Tree" is the front porch of all of that. If you want the long trail, the official homestead is ZZ Top, where the debut still sits in the catalog next to Rio Grande Mud and Tres Hombres. The band keeps a verified page at Facebook, posts road news on Instagram, and holds the handle at X. Die-hard listeners compare notes in the long-running ZZ Top Fans group. Spin it again, Zoo Freaks. Somebody else been shaking that tree, and the steel guitar still does not care.