Nobody’s flagging them down, so the durable Houston blues-rock trio stick to what they do best. This live album cherry-picks renditions of their most robust and crunchy boogies from across America, Europe and Brazil, with Jeff Beck guesting on Rough Boy.
No startling surprises here then, as they grind stoutly through Legs, Sharp Dressed Man, Gimme All Your Lovin and other masterpieces of wry licentiousness. It’s always been the way they transcend their own 12-bars that makes this unit effortlessly efficacious: they don’t so much hit the nerve of what makes loud guitars so stupidly sexual as embody it. They are to rock what George Clinton is to funk. It’s irresistible, as ever, to hear them being both bad and nationwide and great and global.
ZZ Top: The First Time I Met The Blues
