“So posh that you couldn’t cuss or even be really drunk in front of the girls. “It was about the Waldorf Astoria of whorehouses in Texas,” Gibbons told Sounds magazine of La Grange, around the time of Tres Hombres’ release. La Grange: “We wrote the song as a celebration. Elsewhere, the band flirted with a more down-home, Delta-style blues on the album’s signature single, La Grange – even if the song’s rich backstory was 100 per cent Texan.
Tres Hombres certainly succeeded in putting ZZ Top’s inimitable blues-rock hybrid on the global map, though songs such as the tough, Thin Lizzy-ish Master Of Sparks and the Stax-esque soul ballad Hot, Blue And Righteous revealed they weren’t merely bad-assed boogie merchants. But once you’d heard it a few times, it was like, ‘I can’t hear it any other way now’… That was probably my best edit ever.” “But when I was sequencing the album… I remember feeling those two could be like one very powerful recording… It was a shock to them because it was so abrupt-sounding. “The songs weren’t recorded that way or planned that way,” the engineer revealed to Classic Rock.
Indeed, Gibbons and company made the creation of their new music sound so effortless that Manning was able to segue Tres Hombres’ itchy opening cut, Waitin’ For The Bus, directly into the rangy groove of Jesus Just Left Chicago. Their playing having hit nigh-on supernatural levels of understanding from constant touring, the band nonchalantly slipped into infectious blues-rock grooves on songs such as Move Me On Down The Line and the rubber-burning Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers, the latter of which would spawn a suitably abrasive cover by Motörhead. Wanting the band to sound “powerful and tight” while also keeping “the grit and the grunge” of the blues, Manning succeeded in helping ZZ Top create their most satisfying collection of songs to date with Tres Hombres. The songs: “It was about the Waldorf Astoria of whorehouses in Texas” 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 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,” Terry Manning – who later worked on the band’s multi-platinum-selling album Eliminator – told The Blues magazine. A complex famous for hothousing classic records from artists as diverse as Isaac Hayes, Led Zeppelin and Big Star, Ardent also brought ZZ Top into contact with a talented studio technician who would play a crucial role in their future success.
However, all the overdubbing, mixing, editing and sequencing of Tres Hombres took place at Memphis’ legendary Ardent Studios. Texas’ DNA is still detectable in Tres Hombres, as ZZ Top began recording the album’s backing tracks at Robin Hood Studios, in Tyler, where they’d laid down their potent second album, Rio Grande Mud. The recording: “Billy just loved the sound of that” I don’t know if it’s this lineage of rich musical heritage… So we go up and live it, breathe it and see what we can do with it.” “There’s just something that comes over you. “When you get into Memphis and you start breathing that air and you feel that musical vibe hit you, it inspires you to write,” he added. “There was something about it… I suppose by sticking in Memphis it offered us a little psychological advantage of maybe getting away from the house for a while. “We’ve always ascribed to the old phrase: ‘T for Texas, T for Tennessee’,” vocalist/guitarist Billy Gibbons told Classic Rock magazine in 2020. The backstory: “Memphis inspires you to write” Yet while Billy Gibbons, Frank Beard and the late Dusty Hill will always be synonymous with the Lone Star State, a journey to another of the Southern states’ most significant musical meccas provided much of the inspiration for their landmark third album, 1973’s Tres Hombres. Having long since styled themselves as “that little ol’ band from Texas”, hirsute rockers ZZ Top have never been ashamed of their roots.
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