One of the longest-running lineups in popular music, ZZ Top brings fifty shades of electrified boogie blues (and a touch or two of grey) to the Basie stage on Wednesday.
Cream turned sour before long, and the Stray Cats were put down. Mountain became a molehill; the Police a case of arrested devleopment. Hard as it is to keep a band together (and yet not so close they’re at each other’s throats), it seems especially tough to navigate the three-for-all that is the trio format.
So give all due props to the longbearded pops of ZZ Top, the guitar-bass-drums force of nature that first blew like a twister out of Tejas in the lunar-landing/ Miracle Mets year of 1969 and comes to the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank on Wednesday for a date rescheduled from autumn 2014.
Rivaled only by their northern neighbors in Rush (classic roster in place since 1974), the core of Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard have soldiered and swaggered on through regional cult status, intermittent FM rock radio breakthroughs (“La Grange,” “Tush,” “Cheap Sunglasses”), an astonishing run of synth-slickened MTV video hits in the 1980s (“Give Me All Your Lovin,” “Legs,” “Velcro Fly”), and a subsequent recommitment to the blues-crunch boogie that always underpinned the band’s high-mileage road shows.
They’ll be bringing their Hall of Fame chops and — just in case you thought they were “all hat and no catalog” — more precious-metal records and chart toppers than many famous acts who haven’t pushed upwards of 25 million units.
The also impressively bearded, electrified bluegrass unit Ben Miller Band serves as must-see openers for the show that’s being co-presented by radio stations WRAT (Lake Como) and WDHA (Dover). Take it here for tickets ($75 – $129.50) — or take it into the stratosphere, as a limited number of ZZ Top Meet & Greet Packages ($325) and ZZ Top VIP Tour Packages ($225) are being made available.
