"This is from my dad’s senior prom in May 1971! [sic - 1970] This was taken at Little Cypress-Mauriceville High School in Orange, Texas.More info, including comments from Billy Gibbons, at Texas Monthly.
Apparently some time between signing the contract to play for the dance and the actual prom itself, the band broke out big. They tried to get out of the contract, but the school couldn’t find a replacement on such short notice so ZZ Top still performed. My dad said that people were climbing through the windows, crashing their prom, just to hear the band play. This was all at a really small school with a graduating class of around 100, maybe less."
Reposted from 2015 to add this photo of Private James Hendrix of the 101st Airborne (Fort Campbell, 1962):
According to your link, the band was questioned about this photo and details in it make them conclude that the photo is from May 1970, not May 1971.
ReplyDeleteI've placed the May '71 comment in quotes and added an editorial "sic" correction. Tx.
DeleteTwo years before that May 1970 prom, Billy Gibbons played in a psychedelic rock band, The Moving Sidewalks. They released one record, Flash. Gibbons wrote one-third of the songs and co-wrote almost one-quarter of the other songs.
ReplyDeleteThe band sounds like a bad version of Cream and Hendrix jumbled together.
Songs Gibbons wrote: You Make Me Shake, Crimson Witch, 99th Floor, What are you Doing to Do, Need Me.
The entire recording is up on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBvHOIdgj8M&list=PLRQKT-Cu2_2RXmvuaVa6mpeEWqnXXXEO8&index=3
Similarly, my grandfather booked some two-bit yokel from Mississippi named Elvis Presley to play on the back of a cotton trailer at the St. Francis (AR) County Fair in the 1956. This was just before he first appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, and no one in eastern Arkansas had heard of him at the time. The county fair organizers thought my grandfather had lost his mind, until the thousands of people who had seen him on other shows or heard him on the radio came from miles away to see him. The 1956 county fair attendance record stood until the early 1990s!
ReplyDeleteSimilar to our small county fair (Tioga Co. PA) having Garth Brooks booked just as his popularity was rising way back when.
ReplyDeleteBut how about The Who at Shawnee Mission South High School Nov. 17, 1967?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.kcur.org/2014-12-17/the-coolest-rock-concert-in-kansas-city-you-never-knew-about
“I can’t explain...”
The Grateful Dead played a debutante ball:
ReplyDeletehttps://blog.sfgate.com/thebigevent/2015/07/01/grateful-deb-when-the-dead-played-a-debutante-ball-in-1966/ Grateful deb: When the Dead played a debutante ball in 1966
And as a top comment - Language differences exist between English speakers, the American pronunciation of words such as herb and letters such as Z have the rest of US, not U.S. but US, tittering as we watch American TV shows or movies.
ReplyDelete'Back in the day' when the Texas trio became world famous, anyone the 'otherside' of the Pacific or Atlantic writing the band name down would use zee zee, rather than zed zed, because that is what we heard.
If you all remember the Nissan Z cars (engineering marvels basically) we 'overseas' people called them Niss San 350 Zed, not Knees San 350 Zee.
Its a bit like the way some say the name Porsche ... you can either say it the way the German makers themselves say it - poor sher - or incorrectly.
Find a Japanese person and ask them to say Nissan 350 Z ... you'll hear Niss San ... but with Fairlady on the end rather than the 350 with a Harry Potter lightning strike.
Herb. Yeah, ok, but why not Ospital ?
Oh, just in case I sounded super critical ... I fantasised about the women in ZZ Top videos, back in the 80s, and to this day I have the band's CDs in the stacker in the car. As driving music through the scenery of New Zealand ... just 4 minutes from my front gate ... there are few that can match it.
ReplyDelete