ZZ Top – La Grange (Live From Gruene Hall)

“La Grange” is one chord and a shuffle. Everything that makes it move is the drums.

Asked once to explain why ZZ Top had never entertained the idea of a different drummer, Billy Gibbons declined to elaborate: “There is no other drummer. There’s one guy.” The argument for that statement is three minutes and fifty-one seconds long and it has been on the radio continuously since 1974. Strip La Grange down and there is startlingly little there — a boogie figure, one chord’s worth of harmonic information, three men declining to complicate something that already worked. What carries it is Frank Beard.

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The band existed because the drummer went and built it. In 1969, after Gibbons’s psychedelic outfit the Moving Sidewalks came apart, Beard drove to Houston looking for him, found him, and pressed him into a rehearsal room for most of a day. Gibbons has said the decision took him no time at all. Beard then fetched the bass player he had been working with in American Blues, Dusty Hill, and that was the group — assembled by the drummer, and unchanged for over fifty years.

By 1973 they had two albums out and three straight years on the road behind them, which had made them considerably sharper than the records suggested. Tres Hombres was cut partly at Robin Brians’s studio in Tyler, Texas — a converted space behind his parents’ house — and partly at Ardent in Memphis, the band’s first work with engineer Terry Manning. Bill Ham produced, as he did everything they made. London released the album on July 26, 1973.

Where he puts the beat

The temptation with a shuffle like this one is to push it. It sits at a tempo that invites a drummer to lean on the front of the beat and drive, and almost every cover version you will ever hear does exactly that, which is why almost every cover version sounds slightly wrong in a way people struggle to name. Beard does the opposite. He places the backbeat fractionally later than the ear expects and holds it there without wavering, so the whole record leans forward without ever tipping over. It is not a fill or a pattern or anything you could transcribe usefully. It is a decision about placement, made identically several hundred times across four minutes, and it is the difference between a boogie and this particular boogie.

Everything else on the track is built to leave room for that. Gibbons plays the figure and gets out of the way. Hill locks to the kick and does nothing decorative for the entire song. Ham’s production is close to unadorned — few effects, little echo, the band more or less as they sounded in a room. There is no second guitar arriving to thicken the chorus, because there is no chorus.

London put it out as a single in January 1974 and it climbed slowly, reaching No. 41 on the Hot 100 that June while Tres Hombres went to No. 8 on the album chart. Those figures understate the record so badly as to be misleading. It became the most-played thing ZZ Top ever recorded, the song that moved them from regional draw to national act, and one of the small handful of tracks that classic-rock radio has never once stopped playing.

The riff they never claimed

In 1992 a federal suit in California argued that the song was a reworking of John Lee Hooker’s 1948 record Boogie Chillen, and that two decades of royalties were owed on every spin. The court dismissed it in 1995, on the ground that the Hooker recording had already entered the public domain. The band’s position throughout was faintly bemused: they had never at any point suggested the figure was theirs. It is a Texas boogie, of a kind played in that part of the world for decades before anyone thought to put it on a London 45.

What was theirs was the feel, and the feel belonged largely to the man at the back. Frank Lee Beard was born in Frankston, Texas on June 11, 1949, played on all fifteen ZZ Top studio albums from 1971 to La Futura in 2012, and was the only member of the band who never grew the beard his surname had already promised. He died on August 17, 2026, aged seventy-seven, at his ranch in Texas. Dusty Hill went in 2021. Thousands of drummers can play what he played on this record. Very few of them sound like it, because the thing they are copying was never the notes.