ZZ Top is one of those bands that, if you’re not thinking about it, sneaks up on you with how many damn hit songs they have had on the radio. That’s especially true if you discovered them at their candy-apple red commercial apex in the mid-1980s, and worked back through the dust and mud of Fandango and Degüelo and Tres Hombres. The long-bearded Tejas power trio visited San Francisco in a rare theater gig at the Warfield, and played balls-out heavy blues rock for just under two hours in a tight show honed for arenas and big outdoor sheds—and not dialed back all that much for a 3500-seat art-deco playhouse on gritty Market Street. Their crowd, decked in tight pants, Hells Angels colors and the occasional fake beard, cheered like they were at the Garden. 

Guitarist Billy Gibbons, bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard (ZZ Top’s built-in irony is that he’s the one without the beard) blasted the room with hit after hit after hit, played pretty straight, with heavy-pocket groove and shredding guitar—blues bordering on metal. Black Sabbath from the Louisiana-Texas line.

The band’s stage was symmetrical—the two axe men stood before three amp stacks each, stacked three, two, and one speaker cabinet high, descending toward center stage, each capped with a clear-front head full of fat, orange-glowing vacuum tubes. Beard’s drum kit included two kick drums to maintain the symmetry, each bearing the band’s latest variation on their logo—this time some sort of cherry-red, chrome-prowed gangster-mod hot-rod cruise ship, slicing out through a swollen, flaming, red heart. Behind the band, the backstage wall was a bank of color-changing LEDs, a 21st century version of oil gels. And those amp stacks had light-colored grills—all the better to project videos onto, like the actual video for the ‘80s hit “Sharp Dressed Man,” in symmetrical split-screen glory, as the band sawed through the tune. And then came the smoke machine (they must have forgotten the artificial stuff is overkill in San Francisco).

All hats, shades and beards, and dressed all in black, Gibbons and Hill locked riffs all night, and sometimes traded off growling the verses. Hill’s beard is belly long and gray, his black hat a classic matte leather cowboy hat; frontman Gibbons’ belt-tucker was more of a Viking’s blondish-red, his hat the round-top, Billy-the-kid style outlaw derby variety, with a black bandanna tied on beneath.

Electronic drums played over the loudspeaker to warm the crowd up, but the band came out blasting with “Under Pressure.” Gibbons soloed with his guitar slung down low at his hip, then the two guitarists swung back and forth in synch. The guitars ticked their assault on “Waitin’ for the Bus,” and on came the smoke. During the slower blues “Jesus Just Left Chicago,” footage of Southland cemeteries scrolled across the ampstacks, and Gibbons and Hill rocked back and forth like biker rabbis davening, divining the blues from out of the wreckage of New Orleans.

“I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide” chugged, deep, deep in the pocket. These guys know how to slow time on a blues riff. But they like to play with the technology, too, like Beard’s triggered drums leading into “I’m a Pincushion.” Some of the sounds appeared to come from electronic samples.

“We been comin’ around for a long time,” Gibbons gruffed. “It’s the same three guys—playing the same three chords.” He told a long, rambling story about going to the dollar store, which led, inevitably, into the big riffs of “Cheap Sunglasses,” the LEDs red-orange like fire as that tune’s jam slowed like molasses into a fat breakdown, open-groove weird-o, Gibbons’ guitar ranging from full bore to very subtly-chopped rhythm, like coiled steel unsprung one wind at a time over the rhythm section’s titanic heartbeat. Probably, this show—which was ultra-tight—is tuned for the big halls and hockey rinks, where subtlety doesn’t come across. They could have taken even more advantage of the intimate room, let it unravel a bit more, take more chances, really let their beards down.

“Pearl Necklace,” one from the band’s adolescent sexmind, sounded like biker techno-metal, the guitar tones almost like Metallica. Of course, these are Metallica’s Texas daddies. “Heard It On the X” —about high-powered south-of-the-border radio stations from which Wolfman Jack once blasted blues and rock all the way up into Canada—was heavy, fast, and hard. They played the shit out of every riff. When Gibbons’ guitar tech came out, the audience chanted his name.

He brought Gibbons a gold Les Paul. Gibbons produced a purple glass slide, and tore a slide blues solo intro into “Just Got Paid,” and giving the bridge an Allman Brothers feel. “Blue Jean Blues” was slow, and Gibbons let his swamp-ass blues man out, rapping a story about his woman stealing his blue jeans (as it turns out, they look better on her). Then he told another story about touring around the country “with this guy who taught me this thing”—all the while quivering the preclimactic shiver into what became a pretty straight read on Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady.”

“Gimme All Your Lovin’” had the electro-drums, almost synthesized sound of Afterburner, and more ticking space sounds. Then came the big hits from Eliminator— “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Legs,” with the drums glowing blacklit, the guitars covered in white fur, the original videos projected on the amps, and the car, animated, rolling across in the LEDs.

They left the stage and you had to wonder what was left to play for an encore. Not to worry. They had a few more big friggin’ radio hits still in sling: “Tube Snake Boogie,” the John Lee Hooker-comped “La Grange” (done in medley with “My Head’s In Mississippi”) and “Tush.”

“I said, Lord, take me downtown. I’m just lookin’ for some tush.”

In the middle of that last stompin’ number, the guitar tech lit Gibbons a smoke. Smoke poured forth from the fog machines. It was pure excess. And that was the trip.

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