Put Frank Zappa and ZZ Top in one picture. What you will have is a lot of beards in one picture. These artists made a name for themselves with their craft and their facial hair. But was there a time that these beards influenced their music?
A Little About Frank Zappa
Not many artists can keep up with the workaholic Frank Zappa in delivering his craft. Frank had a 30-year music career and in that period, he released 60 albums.
Frank Zappa’s road to success was not an easy one. It was filled with setbacks and years of little or no rewards. Before his breakthrough into the limelight, Frank Zappa had to leave his boyhood band, The Blackouts, to join The Soul Giants. After Frank joined his latest band, the name mutated into The Mothers on Mother’s Day. There, he recorded some measure of success, but it was still nothing to be compared with the success he enjoyed later in his career. Even then, it took the inclusion of Herb Cohen, who already had a remarkable history in music, to revamp the band.
Their first release was a double album, Freak Out, in 1966. It was this album that influenced The Beatles’ hit song, Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band. After this double album, the group grew in popularity until 1971 when it experienced some major setbacks, one of which affected Frank Zappa’s health. He fell from the stage during one of his performances and sustained serious injuries. And no. He was not high on drugs or anything. In fact, his resistance to drugs was one reason he left the band. But the injuries he had from the fall doomed him to a lifetime of back pain and left him with a crushed larynx.
Beard Influence In His Songs
One thing Frank Zappa had was what we can call one of the most outstanding beards of all time. You could never have this kind of beard and mix in with the crowd. Frank kept a thick moustache that framed his upper lips in a neatly trimmed fashion. His lower lip was not to be without support in the form of beards as the musician kept a thick rectangular patch of hair right under his lower lip.
His unique facial hairstyle lived on long after the artist died in 1993. You could even argue that his signature look outlived his songs. Today, there are still a lot of people who sport the Frank Zappa beard.
A Little About ZZ Top
ZZ Top was a band that comprised three artists, Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, and Frank Beard. Billy handled the guitar, Dusty did the bass, and Frank was the man on the drums. And with those three instruments, the trio ruled the worlds of rock-and-roll and blues throughout their time in the limelight, which lasted from the 70s to the mid-80s.
One thing the band was known for was its creativity in the way it delivered its songs and its videos. Its songs always stood out from the songs of other bands, and you could say that was what its fans loved about it. They never knew what was coming, but they were sure that whatever it was would blow their minds.
ZZ Top released its first album in 1970 and that was when they turned the ears of listeners towards themselves. However, what established the band was the hit single, La Grange in 1973. The song made its way to the top 20 on Billboard singles chart. Since then, ZZ Top went ahead to be a household name.
The year 1983 came, and the band released another album, Eliminator. This album was one of the most successful albums from ZZ Top, going ahead to sell 10 million copies all over the world. The band may not be as popular as it used to be, but it established its legacy in 2004 when it made it into the Rock-and-roll Hall of Fame.
Beard Influence In Their Songs
Music was not the only thing that made ZZ Top stand out in its time. Whenever you looked at the images of the trio, one thing that always stood out was the enormous beards hanging down the faces of two of the artists, Gibbons and Dusty. Ironically, Frank Beard was the only one of the three who didn’t have any beards. He, however, made up for the slack of beards with a well-trimmed moustache.
The beards were so iconic that they could have been worth a million dollars if only the group had agreed to cut it off. Gillette, a renowned manufacturer of shaver products offered the bearded men that enormous amount of money if they would agree to shave it off for an advert. They refused.
“No dice,” Gibbons disclosed in an interview with Bravewords.com. “Even adjusted for inflation, this isn’t going to fly. The prospect of seeing oneself in the mirror clean-shaven is too close to a Vincent Price film…a prospect not to be contemplated, no matter the compensation.”
If the beards were worth that much, you may then begin to wonder about the story behind them. The men revealed the secret when they described that they had both grown the beards coincidentally without planning it. After a long break in which the artists had limited contact with one another, the group returned to continue its music.
Tom Vickers, a music journalist, wrote that “[The manager] called a band meeting, and when the three members arrived, they noticed something had changed during their time apart. They had always had some form of facial hair, with Frank usually sporting a moustache, while Billy and Dusty had scruffy little beards no more than an inch or two long.”
“I walk into the room, and I’m lookin’ at a guy I think I know,” Gibbons said after the group re-converged. “My beard has grown to doormat proportions. And I realize that Dusty had done the same thing.”
“Z” for Beards?
Nope. While there aren’t many pictures of a time when Frank Zappa was without his trademark beards, ZZ Top already formed the band name long before the beards came. So, it wasn’t the beards that influenced the names or the arts of the artists. However, it makes a lot of sense to say that the beards of these artists formed important parts of their brands. I mean, these beards were celebrities living on the faces of celebrities!
