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Country Releases
by Michael Simmons

VARIOUS ARTISTS: PICKIN' ON ZZ TOP
(CMH)

One of the weirdest country CDs to appear in the last few years has to be Pickin' on ZZ Top: A Bluegrass Tribute, a collection of ZZ Top songs played as bluegrass instrumentals. On the surface, the project seems like a cosmic mismatch between material and instrumentation, but banjos, fiddles, Dobros, and mandolins work surprisingly well on songs like "Legs," La Grange," and "Sharp Dressed Man." The bluegrass versions manage to exploit the one common element between the high lonesome sound and electric boogie: the blues. Both bluegrass and ZZ Top's music have deep roots in the blues, and the secret to playing the blues well has more to do with having the right attitude than it does with having electric guitars, stacks of amplifiers, or long beards. These acoustic players sure have the right attitude. The musicians include some hot pickers, like guitarists Bryan Sutton, Kent Truitt, and Kenny Blackwell; banjoists Richard Bailey and Dennis Caplinger; fiddlers Sara Watkins and Gabe Witcher; and Dobro player Rob Ickes. CMH has released some other CDs in the Pickin' On series, including tributes to Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Garth Brooks, George Strait, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

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It's their first LP from 1970 or 1971 {depends which discography you read}, but it's simply titled 'ZZ Top's First Album' and features a lot of country funkin' blues jams, where the boys just work around a bunch of laid back grooves while Billy Gibbons squeals and pinches out all these funky little 'pinch harmonic' leads.

It doesn't have the metallic rhythm crunch of their later 1970's LP's and certainly not the computerised 1980's stuff.
Very raw and funky and the best songs they've ever had, just looser than the rest of their material.