I discovered this most excellent album in the summer of 1981 when raking the record racks on my lunch break from work at a shoe store in the centre of Aberdeen. This was in the pre-Internet era when if you were looking for a particular record, you searched the record shops and scoured the bargain bins, or if you were a bit more ambitious, you ordered it from a shop, or a mail order company , sending a cheque or postal order by mail for it, it wasn’t as simple as nowadays where you can obtain whatever music , in whatever form you want, from Amazon, Spotify, or whichever website or app, at the click of a mouse or finger to key, with no real effort.
In those days there were many places one could browse for records and one day in Ezy-Ryder, a second hand record stall in the back of Happy Trials , a clothes shop in Rosemount Viaduct, my record searching bore fruit in a form of a 2nd hand copy of ‘Deguello’ by ZZ-Top.
I already had their eponymous first album, and quite liked it , though it didn’t set the world on fire for me, as Deguello did.
Now in the days when I wasn’t browsing for records during my lunch break, I would eat my lunch in the Union Terrace Gardens, not surprisingly surrounded by hovering hungry pigeons waiting for a falling crumb or crust from my home made sandwiches. On these lunchtimes , I tended to read one of the music papers of the day, Sounds, or maybe the newly established Kerrang magazine, but one day in June 1981, a week or so before buying Deguello, I had purchased a magazine called Flexipop. Every week this magazine was on the racks in the newspaper shops, but this week’s free Flexi disc was by Motorhead, my favourite band, then sailing high in the charts, and ubiquitous on TV, in magazines and record stores. Motorhead’s version of ‘Train Kept ‘A Rollin’ , an old rock’n’roll song , was the track this week, so as a completist, I had to have this.
There was a short interview with Lemmy Kilmister, who discussed some of his favourite songs; one of which was ‘Dust My Broom’ by ZZ Top. ZZ Top , here was that band again, not pronounced ‘Zed Zed Top‘ but ‘Zee Zee Top’, as I say, I knew they were good, had their first album, and hadn’t Motorhead covered one of their songs ‘Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers’ on one of their eps, which I had on blue vinyl?
The endorsement of the band from Lemmy was good enough for me, but the proof of the album was when I took the album home and put the needle in the groove to play the first track , yes ‘Dust My Broom’ , a real blues tune, written by a guy called Elmore James, who I would later discover by way of the Central Library Record Section, was a Mississippi bluesman famed for his slide guitar playing and his angst ridden vocals. The guitaring ,as we used to say back then, was by Billy Gibbons, who was a phenomenal player, with a really stinging style. He had previously been in a psychedelic band called the Moving Sidewalks who had been support act to Jimi Hendrix, and he was really adept at the blues. In his younger days, Gibbons had been under the tutelage of jazz musician Tito Puente, so knew his blues and his jazz stylings. Deguello features ‘the Lone Pine Horns’ also, basically the members of the band playing saxes rather then their usual instruments. It all amounts to a damn good blues album, with such great songs as ‘I Thank You’ ( an Isaac Hayes /David Porter composition) , She Loves My Automobile, Lowdown In the Street’, the awesome Cheap Sunglasses , and other rocking delights. There is also the weird track ‘Manic Mechanic’, which a friend of the era told me was ‘like Frank Zappa’, I’m not sure if I agree with that, but it sure is a weird song. I have loved the guitar playing style of Billy Gibbons for many years, and I think his playing has become louder as time goes on; I remember describing the music on Deguello as ‘funky blues’ to a friend, and all these years later, I don’t think I am too far off the mark. The vocal on ‘Manic Mechanic’ was distorted and weird, and I would suspect proves that ZZ Top experimented with technology way before ‘Eliminator’ hit the airwaves in 1983 with its drum machines and modernity. They were clearly a band who had one eye on the past – their Texan blues heritage and on the future- their use of technology in the pre-digital age. As with the music of Rory Gallagher, this album led me on to discover the music called (the) Blues in a big way, especially the music of Muddy Waters , John Lee Hooker , Howling Wolf, and B.B. King, and I have a huge collection of blues albums, and even still have 90 or so blues cassettes from years ago! Of course , I still play Deguello more than any of my ZZ Top albums, as it was the first one I really got into.
The Eclectic Audio Lab 
eddiesrockmusic
/ September 20, 2020Great Post – ‘Deguello’ is a superb ZZ Top album!