For about a week, the relentless riff from ZZ Top's 1973 hit song "La Grange" has been playing in my head. Such a great, great song, not least the powerful and exact drumming. And the vocals are really funny, with the singer sounding like a right old lecher.
So I got the album, Tres Hombres
I was kind of stunned to find that the trio's members were 23, 24 and 24 in 1973. They must have looked pretty incongruous, three fresh-faced white Texas kids sounding like grizzled blues veterans from the wrong side of the tracks.
Update 4 February: I wish some musical astronomer would record a filk version of the song with lyrics about Lagrange points. Maybe something like this.
Rumor spreadin' 'round
Planetary town
'bout those points named for Lagrange
(You know what I'm talkin' about)
Just let me know
if you wanna go
to that home out on the range
(They gotta lotta space debris)
Well, I hear it's fine
if you wanna open a mine
and the Gs to get yourself there
And I hear it's dense
with rare elements
but now I might be mistaken
(Have mercy)
[More blog entries about music, blues, zztop; musik, blues, zztop.]
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It does not get much better than pre-MTV ZZ Top. If anyone is curious the inspiration for La Grange can be found here:
http://gatorpress.com/stories/page23.html
Interesting! That writer has an, err, uncommonly enthusiastic perspective on prostitution. Swedish papers ran a story a few years back about one of the ZZ Top beards requesting -- and receiving -- the attentions of a prostitute after a gig in Gothenburg.
The music of "La Grange" owes a lot to Robert Lee Hooker's 1948 hit "Boogie Chillen", which it surpasses.
"The music of "La Grange" owes a lot to Robert Lee Hooker's 1948 hit "Boogie Chillen", which it surpasses."
It doesn't owe a lot to the music of JOHN Lee Hooker it plagiarises his music in the official legal sense, ZZ Top had to pay a lot of compensation. There is a great cover version of La Grange with Russian lyrics on the Crazy Backward Alphabet CD.
I stand corrected!
But authorship is tricky with the blues. Wouldn't surprise me if someone was strumming that riff on a banjo somewhere in the Delta already in the late 19th century.
Ah, the wonders of copyright putting creativity down to make it know its place!
No compensation paid, it was ruled that JLH's song was public domain at the time. Get your facts straight. And yes, I agree La range surpasses the "original".