Rocks Off: Describe a typical day for ZZ while you were making this album.

BG: Well, we had the golden work ethic. We were in by 9, out by 9.

RO: 9 p.m. to 9 a.m.?

BG: Either way. The clock was upside down many times. We didn’t know which way was up. But Memphis was a robust scene. We still retain a lot of friends. There’s quite a few Houstonians that were misplaced and landed in Memphis, and that played as a great backdrop to making us feel at home.

Memphis after dark

We just had an interesting, interesting time making discovery of what was going on up there, both in the studio and with the social set. The crazy thing about Memphis is they don’t stop serving alcohol – if they want to, they can stay open all night. And it’s just in that one county. The rest of the state is not quite like that, but Memphis is kind of a little oasis.

RO: Well, of course several songs do reference various forms of partying. How crazy was it?

BG: I wouldn’t call it unmanageable, I’d call it manageably out of control [both laugh]. There was a couple spots – there was a spot called the North End, which was on the south end of Main Street; go figure that out. There was the Green Parrot, there was a couple nightspots way out in East Memphis at White Station. That’s where "TV Dinners" erupted.

ZZ Top in 1982, around the time of recording Eliminator

We had this music track and we couldn’t figure out what to put with it. This was way, way after hours, and some girl walked in in a white jumpsuit, and the word ‘TV Dinners’ was stenciled on the back of her jumpsuit. I said, ‘I don’t know what it means, but that’s the next song.’

RO [laughs]: Did you ask?

BG: Yeah. She didn’t have any clue what it meant either. She just said, “I like the way it looks.”

RO: And you did too, I guess.

BG: Yeah. It was moments like that – there was a flag on top of White Station Power, and we knew if the flag was fluttering in one direction it was going to be a good night. If it was not, we didn’t know. But it didn’t slow us down any.

ZZ Top cast their handprints in concrete for Ford Park's Hall of Fame, Beaumont, 2007.
Angel San Juan/KFDM.com

RO: Whatever happened to the woman with the nightstick in “Under Pressure”?

BG: Oooooooh. She may still be around – we just don’t want to run into her anymore.

RO: I guess the story is you saw a woman stalled on the freeway and that became “Legs.” Is that true?

BG: Yeah. That was in Houston, right there on Post Oak near the Galleria. At one time there was a movie theater next to a department store down the street from Nieman’s towards San Felipe. I’ll think of it in a minute. At any rate, there was a movie theater and we were thinking the rain was going to bring a blackout, so we said “Well, let’s go to the movie theater – at least we’ll have popcorn if it goes dark.”

Post Oak Blvd., near the Galleria

We were on the way and sure enough, one of those famous Houston thunderstorms erupted out of nowhere. We saw this pretty girl and said “Well, we better go back and offer her a ride.” In the space of making a U-turn, she had dashed across the street and out of sight. I said, “She’s got legs and she know how to use them.”

RO: So how good were they – 1 to 10?

BG: Oh, it’d be a 10-plus. 10.5.286.

RO: One of the songs that wasn’t a single but has always been one of my favorites on the album is “I Got the Six.” It sounds almost punk rock to me. Were you guys listening to any of that stuff back then?

RO: This would have been early ‘80s?

BG: Early ‘80s. And it was having an impact on just about everywhere we turned. That was the happening thing, and it didn’t escape our radar. We were curious and dialed in, and then got sucked in, and some of that stuff got punky and funky.

RO: Did you feel any kind of kinship with bands like the Clash?

BG: Yeah. The Clash, they were a little more along the lines of what we were pursuing. I don’t think that they were as punked-out as they were, to use a paraphrase, funked-out. They were fierce, no question about it. They had a punk synergism. Their music, I think, was a little more rock-oriented.

RO: They were really diverse at this point. This would have been around London Calling and Give ‘Em Enough Rope.

BG: Yeah. And you remember that famous photograph on London Calling, that black-and-white. It was kind of a takeoff on the first Elvis Presley record, but they added their guitar-bashing twist to it.

RO: Supposedly that was taken in Austin. Am I right?

BG: It was. It was.

RO: At the City Coliseum.

BG: Yeah. Sure was.

RO: Even though you made the record in Memphis, how much Houston would you say is in Eliminator – the people in the songs, and just the city itself, the musical stew we have down here?

RO [laughs]: That’s true. Or Kansas music.

BG: Yeah. There’s a mystery element yet to be totally defined. I don’t want to challenge it, I just play it. - Chris Gray

Monday morning, a construction crew attached House of Blues' new sign to the exterior of the nationwide restaraunt/music venue franchise's new Houston location at 1204 Caroline in the Houston Pavilions complex. HOB's first show is Saturday with New Orleans revival-rockers Cowboy Mouth; other first-week shows include Presidents of the United States of America with Austin's The Black & White Years (Sunday); Ghostland Observatory (Oct. 14); Reverend Horton Heat with Asleep at the Wheel and Houston's Whiskey River Revival (Oct. 17); and the official grand opening with the dudes from According to Jim and Ghostbusters (Oct. 18). See www.hob.com/houston for ticket info and all that good stuff.

Rocks Off will have a slideshow of HOB's interior - including several custom murals by Houston-area artists - in the next day or two. A few more exterior-type pictures after the jump. - Chris Gray

Minimalist blues approach – sometimes just guitar and harp, fattening to drums and bass on some. COldfire grew up in the 80s listening to his dad play 50’s music on the piano…took immediately to stringed instruments and went professional at 13 after falling hard for his local (Texan) guitar heroes. Wild for SRV, etc., he left for New York at age 21. There he began to feel there was not that much difference between country and blues, and kept open ears to widen his approach to songwriting. Sounds like it did him some good. Really refreshing sound – a feeling for old-style blues with new approach to songs. Young-sounding voice/killer guitar chops. Really do like themore traditional-sounding/acoustic songs best though.

Ellison, Scott – “Ice Storm” (Earwig) B+

A Tulsa native heavily influenced by Motown and Memphis, which led to a great appreciation of BB King and the blues, Ellison has a Luther Allison guitar screamin’ approach to blues, but can peel back the fuzz and make the guitar cry and sing when he wants to. His voice is a little gravelly and his band solid in the blues pocket leaning hard toward rock, with occasional horn backups. All originals and Scott and Dennis Walker (of Robert Cray’s band). Rock blues – pretty nice.

Hyatt, Walter – “Some Unfinished Business” (King Tears Music) B-

A collection of songs from a young singer songwriter who tragically died in a plane crash in ’96. Friends and family release this disc of his self-penned tunes, backed by fine musicians like Jerry Douglas, the Jordannaires, Riders in the sky and Carrie Rodriguez, etc. Middle range voice over fairly uninteresting tunes—strange chord progressions make tunes sometimes seem stilted, like a songwriter who’s thinking about it too hard. Does make it happen like Elvis on #7 with the Jordanaires on backup, and #11 has some nice blues feel woven throughout. Not really my cuppa.

James, Chris & Patrick Rynn – “Stop & Think About It” (Earwig) A-

Guitarist and bassist from the “Blue Four” band, the duo steps out on their own to memorialize many revered blues musicians (Dave Myers, Willie Kent, Robert Lockwood Jr, Homesick James, Snooky Pryor, Henry Townsend, and Jay McShannon) – all who recently passed, leave gaping holes behind. In this tribute to them, Earwig tossed in a bundle of other great players to back ‘em (David Maxwell, Eddie Kobek, Sam Lay, Bob Corritore, etc.) with the result a nice combination of Chicago feel blues.

Johns, Karen & Company - “Star and Season” (Vital Force) 2008 B

Jazz singing from a multi-talented performer. Originally from Alaska she has moved through Seattle (picking up a husband and a bundle of opera, music and journalism/theology degrees. The couple worked on a Bering Sea fishing boat to earn money to buy a recording studio, which they eventually located in Nashville, TN. There she’s put out this album of jazz vocals over a fluid supporting band. Strong belter voice with facility of movement and smooth delivery and scat singing thrown in when the spirit moves. It’s hard to do such road traveled traditional songs in a new way, but her voice ain’t hard to take. Smooth cocktail jazz stuff.

Johnson, Alvon- “Guitars & Cars” (Pig Heaven Rec.,) 2008 C

Veteran guitarist on West Coast for 30 years doing side-man work for (Babatunde Olatunji, Drifters, John Lee Hooker, Lowell Fulson). Now out there with his own group on his friend (harmonica player and label owner Albert Parks) doing his own record – pretty much road house rock and blues designed to support his electric guitar leads. Nothing special I’m afraid.

Kolvane – “Kill These Blues” (Indie) D

No need…you’ve already done it. Not recommended .

Left Lane Cruiser – “Bring Yo’ Ass to the Table” (Alive Records) C

Street musicians composed of a guy who bangs on whatever he can reach, calls himself “Sausage Paw” and hollars “trash” throughout other guy’s “singing.” Second guy yells lyrics bristling with “ass” and screams while he plays loud electric slide that sounds like his slide bar is wrapped in barbed wire and his head too. Couple bottles of whiskey and a couple of painkillers and I’m there…. Not recommended.

Nouveaux Honkies – “Where Do I Go?” (Bluzpik Rec. ) A-

Described as country-soul, roots and Austin Rock (though they are from the South Eastern part of the US), this band puts together a really different sound – quirky songwriting that takes you from fast two-steps, to Cajun, to fiddle and blues. Really original sound. This group didn’t even bother lookin’ for a label, but after it’s first Indie release, got picked up right away for it’s great roots sound. Check er out.

Parks, Little Albert & the Blue Stars- “Two Thumbs & A Finger”

(Pig Heaven Rec.,) 2008 C

A record label owner putting out his own disc with friends from Southern California. Vocals kinda talky and tired. Instrumentation okay, sometimes nice grooves, but nothing to write home about. Not recommended.

Wheeler, Charlie Band – “Highway Run” (All Sound Group) C

Not a bad voice over basher rock. Not bad backup vocals either. Music is de-da-lee, de-da-lee, de-da-lee up there in lightning delivery with the best of the power rock boys. Eddie Van Halen, you’ve got a boatload to answer for mister. You too Zep. “Katrina…you should have seen’er”…eek. Southern rockers unite. This Yankee cannot recommend.

Zito, Mike – “Today” (Electro-Groove) 2008 B-

A St. Louis kid who made it to the West Coast with his head full of musical dreams…he got a chance on Delta Groove’s branch Electro-Groove. Medium love and pop-rock tunes, nice guitar work and sturdy backup band.
Tunes, singing AND songwriting have a sameness that doesn’t appeal much, even with good guitar work.
Not really recommended.

We're going through some exciting times here at Cover Lay Down. Just yesterday we announced a thrilling new partnership with Philly folk artist Denison Witmer; today, I'm helping kick off a week-long exploration of Dylan Covers over at Star Maker Machine, where I am proud to be a regular contributor. So far, covers have included everything from Manfred Mann to U2 to Sonic Youth, not to mention not one but two Jimi Hendrix covers, neither one of which is the one you're thinking of; not a bad early mix for a blog that usually experiences a slow Sunday kick-off before whirling into the workweek with the usual growing set of thematic song.

My own first Dylan Covers post at the collaborative this week is a doozy of an exploration of the traditional song In My Time Of Dying, which was first recorded by Blind Willie Johnson in the late 1920s, and made famous when Dylan recorded it for his first album. The post examines Dylan's role in bringing older blues forms into popular music, the long-lasting effects of which continue to reverberate through the folkworld, though surely Dylan's iconographic power in bringing such songs forward was as much a product of cultural timing as it was skill and passion. I'm pretty proud of it, and I think folks who would have liked it here will like it there just as much.

The entry over at Star Maker Machine is written with the depth and cultural grounding I aspire to here at Cover Lay Down, and yesterday's post announcing our new partnership with Denison Witmer was pretty exhaustive, too; given the effort expended, I hope no one minds if I treat this pair of featurettes as sufficient verbiage to stand for our usual weekend feature-as-promised. I'd be remiss, however, if I didn't add some value here, if only to push the usual mp3 aggregators to pick up the post. So here's a paired pair of covers and "first recordings" of other tunes made popular by Blind Willie Johnson, while we're on the subject; if you like 'em, grab the Blind Willie Johnson box set, pick up the self-titled album from new gospel swingfolkers The Sacred Shakers, and get more from Austin bluesfolker Mo Pair.

• The Sacred Shakers: John The Revelator (trad.)
  
• Blind Willie Johnson: John The Revelator (trad.)
  
  
• Mo Pair: God Moves Over The Water (orig. Blind Willie Johnson)
  
• Blind Willie Johnson: God Moves On The Water (original)

So keep an eye on Star Maker Machine this week, folks; given the vast breadth of taste represented in our little collaborative, a think we can expect a busy week of great music and writing, suitable for even the most avid covers collector. If you're eager for even more Dylan covers, feel free to check out the archives here for many, many Bob Dylan covers, most notably nine separate versions of Girl from the North Country. And don't forget to come on back Wednesday for our usual midweek feature, and Friday for our next installment in The Denison Witmer Covers Project.


Speaking of elseblog: For more covertalk and song from the broader bloggiverse, I highly recommend this lovely, highly diverse set of 80s covers over at Fong Songs, whose host has finally returned to the coverfold after several weeks of obsessing about The White Stripes, Amanda Palmer, Ben Folds, and the Large Hadron Collider. Especially noteworthy: a stellar Huey Lewis and the News cover from Cover Lay Down favorite Glen Phillips, and the wry touch radio folkstar Shawn Mullins brings to his acoustic take on Wham classic Wake Me Up Before You Go Go. Check it out: seeing Fong at his coverblogging best is a genuine joy.

Hello readers.  Its not a good day for Texas considering the nerves Hurricane Gustav is unedging allover the south.  So enough about aliens and UFOs for a bit (Mars Webbens is out there somewhere), lets talk about Elliot Cole.  Judging from the picture, you might guess this guy is my age, pushing 37, but no he’s just a kid.  You could say the same for his music, the former that is.  Just listening, you hear seasoned, mature works.  So lets see, born in 1984, that makes him somewhere in his 20s?  Wow, talk about a future ahead.  Elliot composes tonal and chromatic works and I really have yet to hear one I haven’t liked.

Click here to quickly be shuttled to his works.

Excerpt from his website:

Elliot Cole was born in 1984 in Austin, TX. In 2008 he graduated from Rice University with a B.A. in Cognitive Science (Linguistics concentration) and a B.Mus. in Composition. He studied composition with Karim Al-Zand, Edward Applebaum, Kurt Stallman and Anthony Brandt and jazz piano with Larry Slezak. In 2006 he won first place in the Foundation for Modern Music Young Composer Competition for his string quartet “Birds” and was an ASCAP Finalist. In 2007 he studied Boulanger-style harmony, counterpoint, analysis and composition at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris with the EAMA program, completing with honors in counterpoint and harmony. He also has experience as a record producer, arranger (rock band to big band), music director for musical theater, and teacher. He currently lives in Houston, putting himself through his own private graduate school of one.

The centenary of Olivier Messiaen, a formerly radical-seeming composer who now belongs to the ages, is being celebrated with a rather impressive array of concerts around the world. Andrew Patner describes a ten-day Messiaen festival now unfolding at the University of Chicago; the kickoff concert last night had the great British organist Gillian Weir performing Messe de la Pentecôte, among other works. (When I reviewed a great pile of Messiaen organ discs for Fanfare magazine some years ago, I came to the conclusion that Weir's cycle, originally issued on Collins Classics and now available from Priory Records, reigned supreme.) Chicagoans should take note of a screening of Paul Festa's intensely personal documentary film Apparition of the Eternal Church on Saturday morning. Festa's website gives a sense of the movie, although nothing can quite prepare you for the experience — for one thing, it's a bit racier than you might expect. As this page reveals, there will be two more showings of Apparition in Chicago and others in Sackville, New Brunswick; Austin, Texas; Concord, NH; Washington DC; Tempe, Arizona (I will appear at a related event with William Bolcom); and the Barbican in London. Another big Messiaen festival is unfolding in Montreal, leading up to a grand birthday presentation of Saint Francis under the direction of Kent Nagano. The actual centenary falls on December 10; oddly, neither Carnegie Hall nor Lincoln Center has relevant programming that day, although Reinbert de Leeuw and the Yale Philharmonia will present Turangalîla at Carnegie on Dec. 14 — in the wake of a week of Messiaen at Yale — and in February David Robertson will conduct the Juilliard Orchestra in From the Canyons to the Stars during the reopening festival of Alice Tully Hall.

For many people, the gateway to Messiaen's world is the Quartet for the End of Time, although there is no right place to start. Despite much formidable competition, the finest recording of the quartet remains Tashi's, on the RCA label. Currently at the top of my recommended CD list is a budget six-CD reissue, on the Naive label, of some staggeringly good recordings of major Messiaen pieces under the direction of de Leeuw and Pierre Boulez. Of the two conductors, it's the scandalously underrated de Leeuw who shows deeper sympathy for Messiaen's all-devouring aesthetic; the recording of From the Canyons to the Stars attains a degree of passion and intensity that you rarely find on disc. The beginning of "Zion Park," from Canyons, is excerpted above; the ending is pure animal joy in sound. Three other cherished Messiaen recordings: Pierre-Laurent Aimard's Vingt Regards (preview his new DG album here), Riccardo Chailly's Turangalîla, and Nagano's Saint Francis. You can hear more audio excerpts on my Messiaen/Ligeti pages.

Update: Marcus Maroney and Steve Smith add details of more events in Houston and New York. I should also mention the Celebration Messiaen series in Pittsburgh and the ongoing OM Century series at Jacaranda in LA. Notice that the Messiaen 2008 site I linked to at the top has an audio archive of Claude Samuel's extensive interviews with the composer (in French, naturally) — a great resource for scholars. According to that site's concert listings, the Quartet for the End of Time will have been performing 145 times by the end of the anniversary year.

The New York Daily News is reporting that soulful songstress Erykah Badu is expecting her third child.The R&B star reportedly revealed the news over the weekend at the Austin City Limits festival, where she performed Saturday in a smiley-face t-shirt that exposed her baby bump.Badu, 37, has a 10-year-old son named Seven Sirius, with Outkast's Andre Andre 3000' Benjamin; and a 4-year-old daughter named Puma Rose, with rapper The D.O.C.The new baby's father is reportedly Erykah's boyfriend, rapper Jay Electronica, although she will neither confirm nor deny.

Rap mogul Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter says he's no different than most married men who hope to someday have children.The press caught up with Jigga at the U.N. Global Leadership Awards Gala in New York Wednesday night, where he received recognition for his work to bring clean water to Africa's youth."Most people dream of having a family someday," he told reporters, according to People.com. "So I'm just a regular American boy."