BILLY F GIBBONS
Some time back in the early 70s, when ZZ Top were just starting out, Billy Gibbons met blues great BB King. Gibbons was a 20-something guitar hotshot from Texas who’d got a papal blessing from Jimi Hendrix himself a few years earlier. He had every right to be cocky, but he was enough of a class act even then to shut up and listen when BB King spoke.
At some point during their conversation, BB picked up Billy’s guitar and strummed it. He looked quizzical, then handed it back to Billy. “Why you working so hard?” asked BB. “Don’t work so hard.”
BB was talking about the thick, heavy guitar strings Gibbons used to get ZZ Top’s thick, heavy guitar sound, but he might as well have been talking about life. “Don’t work so hard.”
Taking the veteran’s advice, Gibbons ditched his thick strings for slinkier, lighter ones right away and never looked back. King’s credo has stuck with him down all these years, in life as well as in music. Few people can make not working so hard look so damn easy as The Reverend Billy F Gibbons.
“I would like to believe that,” says Gibbons. “As the old saying goes, we’re fortunate in that we get to do what we like getting to do, so why mess with it?”
It’s 11am Las Vegas time when Gibbons calls to talk about his new solo album, Hardware. Even via Zoom, his innate Billy Gibbons-ness fills the room: foot-long gingery beard, pink-rimmed glasses, bobbled beanie hat (acquired when he swapped it for a Stetson with a Cameroonian tribal chief years ago, if myth is to be believed). I can’t see him from the waist down, but there’s every chance he’s wearing pyjama bottoms.
“The only difference between Billy on stage and off stage is that off stage he’s always in pyjamas,” says Matt Sorum, former drummer with Guns N’ Roses and latterly one of Gibbons’s chief collaborators outside of ZZ Top. “If you watch the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame when he played with Jeff Beck, he went on stage in pyjamas with a leather jacket on top.”
Pyjamas or not, Gibbons is a solid-gold character, albeit less the cartoon figure the public knows from videos and shows, more curious cultural lightning rod. Few other rock’n’roll veterans of
