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On a break from touring Hill worked at Dallas/Fort Worth airport, to ‘feel normal’.
On a break from touring Hill worked at Dallas/Fort Worth airport, to ‘feel normal’. Photograph: Syspeo/Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock
On a break from touring Hill worked at Dallas/Fort Worth airport, to ‘feel normal’. Photograph: Syspeo/Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock

Dusty Hill obituary

This article is more than 2 years old
Bassist known for his inventive playing with the multiplatinum-selling band ZZ Top

The trio of guitar, bass and drums is just about the most stripped-down a rock band can be, and ZZ Top fully exploited the format’s power and versatility. The band’s bass player, Dusty Hill, who has died aged 72, became renowned for his inventive playing, meshing with the drummer Frank Beard and the guitarist Billy Gibbons with economy and precision. They created a sound that seemed far greater than the sum of its parts.

ZZ Top were always rooted in the blues, but combined it with a hefty rock punch. “ZZ Top started as a blues-based rock’n’roll band, but we were never a blues band in the style of Freddie King or Muddy Waters or whoever,” Hill said in 1983. “We had a lot of that feeling in the band, though, and it was our intent to bring that feeling through to rock’n’roll.”

It was their third album, Tres Hombres (1973), that broke ZZ Top through to a wide audience, boosted by the US Top 50 single La Grange. The latter, based on a traditional blues-boogie beat used by John Lee Hooker and others, was the perfect showcase for ZZ Top’s skills, opening with a simple, minimal beat before the trio exploded into full-tilt life. The fact that the song was about the Chicken Ranch brothel in Texas (also the subject of the 1978 Broadway musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) aptly reflected the faintly dissolute aura ZZ Top liked to project.

Their next album, Fandango! (1975), reached the US Top 10 and gave them a Top 20 single with Tush, but the follow-up, Tejas (1976), was less well received, despite a Top 20 chart placing. This came after their Worldwide Texas tour, an extraordinary multimedia event that featured a stage in the shape of Texas with Texan wildlife including steers, buzzards and snakes. “It took a full day to set things up and a full day to take them down, so we only actually played one day in three,” Hill recollected. “We tried to bring it over to Europe but we had a problem with the quarantine on the animals.”

After this, the group, who had been gigging and recording solidly for seven years, took a two-year break, during which Hill spent some time working at Dallas/Fort Worth airport. “I just wanted to feel normal,” he said. “I did it to ground myself.”

When they reassembled in 1979, their manager Bill Ham had secured them a new record deal with Warner Bros, which would result in new levels of success. Degüello (1979) went Top 30 and brought them two of their best-known hits with I Thank You and Cheap Sunglasses. El Loco (1981) reached the US Top 20, but they hit the real big time with Eliminator (1983), which charted all over the world and has sold 10 million copies in the US alone. (Asked why it didn’t follow the ZZ Top tradition of Spanish-language titles, Gibbons deadpanned that its real name was El Iminator).

It also found ZZ Top embracing the latest digital recording and video technology, generating a streak of sleek chartbusting hits including Gimme All Your Lovin’, Sharp Dressed Man and Legs, whose videos became heavy-rotation staples on MTV. Gibbons’s red 1933 Ford hot-rod became a video star in its own right.

By now Hill and Gibbons had adopted the chest-length beards, stetsons and sunglasses that gave ZZ Top a new cartoon-like image, with Beard confining himself to a moustache. Afterburner (1985) was another multiplatinum smash, and gave them one of their most successful singles with Sleeping Bag, which reached No 8 in the US.

Hill, left, with Billy Gibbons and Frank Beard. Photograph: Chris Delmas/AFP/Getty Images

Dusty was born Joseph Hill in Dallas, Texas, and grew up in the Lakewood district. His mother was a talented singer and a devotee of blues artists such as Bessie Smith, while his older brother Rocky was a guitar player and blues fan. When Rocky formed a band called the Starliners, he needed a bass player and recruited Dusty, who had been learning to play the cello at the local Woodrow Wilson high school. Dusty found himself onstage in a Dallas bar, working out how to play bass as he went along.

The Hill brothers then joined Beard in a succession of Dallas groups including the Warlocks, the Cellar Dwellers and American Blues. In 1968 Dusty and Beard moved to Houston, where they joined Gibbons, who had been in the Dallas-based psychedelic band the Moving Sidewalks, and replaced existing members of his newly-formed ZZ Top. They signed with London Records in 1970, and released ZZ Top’s First Album (1971) and Rio Grande Mud (1972), to little fanfare.

ZZ Top scored further platinum-selling albums with Recycler (1990) and Antenna (1994, the first under a new $35m deal with RCA), though subsequent releases saw their sales falling away. In 2003 the four-CD set Chrome, Smoke & BBQ presented a comprehensive survey of the band’s history from its earliest days. In 2004 they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Keith Richards.

Hill had suffered several health problems. In 1984, he was accidentally shot in the abdomen when his girlfriend pulled off his boot, causing his Derringer pistol to fall out and discharge itself. “My first reaction was ‘shit’ and then ‘ouch’,” Hill said. “I couldn’t believe I’d done something so stupid.” In 2000 ZZ Top cancelled a European tour when he was diagnosed with hepatitis C, and cancelled a European tour in 2007 when Hill needed ear surgery for acoustic neuroma. In 2014 they had to reschedule dates after he injured his hip in a fall on their tour bus. Earlier this month when he needed medical treatment for his hip, he was replaced on stage by their guitar technician, Elwood Francis.

Hill took intermittent acting roles, including appearances in Back to the Future Part III (1990), which also featured ZZ Top’s Doubleback on the soundtrack, and the TV series Deadwood.

He is survived by his wife, the actor Charleen McCrory, whom he married in 2002, and a daughter, Charity.

Joseph Michael (Dusty) Hill, musician, singer and songwriter, born 19 May 1949; died 27 July 2021

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