“I didn’t meet the whole band the first time. “My first meeting was with Billy and Bill Ham,” Manning continues. It reaches enough levels of sonic purity to be pleasing to me in that way, but it’s also down and dirty and funky. “That album is very big, to me, when I listen now. When you try to marry two things together like that, sometimes it can be a disaster, but I think in our case we were fortunate that it did work. “I wanted to keep the blues element, which is the grit and the grunge, where things aren’t perfect, but I wanted to fit it into that highly technical framework where things were perfect in certain ways: sonically, timing-wise. I think they probably did that particular thing better than anybody ever did it. To me it was very obviously blues-based, and they were doing a rock’n’roll-band style of as pure blues as you can fit into that. Manning already had a sonic ideal in mind for his debut with the Top: “I wanted the band to sound powerful and tight and just sonically as pure as possible. And it’s always really nice when you can work on something you really love like that.” So I wasn’t surprised at the quality of the songs they were playing, or the sound. "Billy just loved the sound of that, and it turned out that he was also putting out feelers to work with me. And it turned out that Billy Gibbons had heard that I’d engineered and essentially mixed the Led Zeppelin III album, which was doing so well. “I had really liked the first two albums, and had actually put out feelers to the band that I was interested in working with them. “I was a big fan ,” Manning told The Blues magazine. It was as they worked on their third album that they first crossed paths with Terry Manning, the record producer, songwriter, photographer, recording engineer and artist.Ī quick dip into Manning’s enormous list of credits reveals that he was part of the production team at Stax Records in Memphis that had worked their magic on Staple Singers classics Respect Yourself and I’ll Take You There.Įven better, in Billy Gibbons’s mind, Manning had engineered Led Zeppelin’s third album. ZZ Top released two albums prior to Tres Hombres: 1971’s ZZ Top’s First Album, and the following year’s Rio Grande Mud, both produced by manager Bill Ham. He would put a guard on us so that we wouldn’t be dragging women in there.” So we slept there, up in the dressing room. It was Mardi Gras, so there was no place to stay at all in New Orleans. “Bill conned Don Fox, who owned it, into letting us play there,” Hill continues. We knew we had found the right place to play!” Gibbons: “A hurricane had come through New Orleans and literally took the roof off our heads. Gibbons: “The first night we played there the roof blew off…” “People was lightin’ up reefers and nobody said shit. “It was the hottest place in town,” remembers local musician Deacon John Moore. Now demolished, it was a lively joint by all accounts. The Dead and the Allman Brothers were busted by the NOPD when they came to the city to play The Warehouse. Jim Morrison played his last show with The Doors there. The Grateful Dead, Fleetwood Mac and The Flock opened The Warehouse in January 1970. It was thanks to the band’s new manager that the trio found themselves a ‘home’ at The Warehouse, a 30,000-square-foot music venue on Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans. We cut the first album and travelled with it.” “So Ham did his thing up there and got us on the label. “ The Rolling Stones had been on London, and we thought that was real cool,” says Hill. Ham said all the right things, claiming he could get the band a deal with London Records. “It didn’t hurt that he had John Mayall as a house guest at the time either,” Beard says. “He kinda liked what he heard, and handed us each a cigar and said: ‘Boys, I’m gonna make you stars!’” “He wandered by the rehearsal hall, and there was quite a clatter going on,” Gibbons recalls. Things started to happen for ZZ Top when Texan music impresario Bill Ham happened upon the band and offered his services as their manager. The Moving Sidewalks (Billy Gibbons second from right) with Jimi Hendrix, backstage at the Will Rogers Auditorium in Fort Worth, Texas, Febru(Image credit: Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |