Episode 140: Andrew Fink / ZZ Top

Introducing the Band:
Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) are with guest Andrew Fink. Andrew lives with his wife Lauren and their five children in Hillsdale County, Mich., and is an attorney, Marine veteran, current state representative, and candidate for Michigan Supreme Court. He's on X at @AndrewFinkMI, and his website can be found here.

Andrew’s Music Pick: ZZ Top
No matter how far into the future this show might run, when you stack Political Beats episodes alphabetically, this is the one that always will show up at the bottom. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to turn the spotlight on "That Little Ol' Band from Texas," ZZ Top. Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, Frank Beard. Blues, guitars, and boogie. And, of course, later on, synths, drum machines, and sequencers.

Maybe you're like Jeff and your mental picture of ZZ Top is frozen in time around 1983, when Eliminator was soaring near the top of the charts. We're here to tell you you're missing an awful lot from the band. The entire decade of the 1970s featured album after album of incredible music. There's seriously never a misstep. 

Early on, you can hear the influence of and influence on other bands like The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. ZZ Top figures out early exactly who they are as a band and refine, refine, refine until perfecting it (we think) on 1979’s Degüello. Billy Gibbons, the group’s main songwriter, singer, and guitar player, has a style all his own, a unique approach that cuts through each song, even when he’s incorporating the sound of another player.

At the turn of the decade of the 1980s, the band makes what we consider to be a fairly natural evolution. The tones, beats, and rhythms on Eliminator might seem out of place in a vacuum, but not if you follow the contours of the band’s career. Post-worldwide fame and success is a different story, and one we also tell during the course of this episode. 

By the way, this is the longest one-part show in Political Beats history, surpassing the U2 show, which actually makes some sense. The feeling here was we wouldn't go quite so long -- otherwise we would have split the thing in half! But once we got going, there was too much fun being had and too many good arguments being made to stop. All for the benefit of you, the listener.

They’re bad, they’re nationwide. And now’s the time to discover the full story of ZZ Top on Political Beats.