Billy Gibbons met his music heroes at a very early age. His mother took him and his sister to an Elvis Presley show at the age of five, and his father took him to one of BB King’s recording sessions when he was seven. Their maid also listened to blues radio, and eavesdropping on those tunes helped the musician develop a music taste. Later on, Presley and King became Gibbons’ primary musical influences and inspired him heavily when he formed ZZ Top.
“One day,” Billy Gibbons recalled while speaking to Classic Rock in 2018, “when I was about seven years old, my dad took me to ACA Studios in Houston, where he had some business. There was a recording session in progress, and my dad put me in there, sat me on a chair, and said: ‘I’ll come back for you in a little while.’ It turned out that the session was by none other than B.B. King. And what BB was doing with the guitar, I remember thinking: ‘This is for me.’”
When asked whether this was a defining point in his life, Billy Gibbons said, “It sure was. Also, my younger sister and I got to tag along with my mom to see an Elvis Presley concert. And those two events, to this day, loom large in my mind. Those two events were doubly responsible for taking my life in a certain direction; between Elvis and BB King, I was done.”
So, the musician was in awe of Elvis Presley’s music, but BB King had a more significant share in influencing his musical direction. The two spent so much time together, and Gibbons had a chance to learn from him. In fact, the blues icon even taught him some of the unique techniques that Gibbons was desperate to discover. On the other hand, King also gave him the best advice he could get: ‘Learn to play what you want to hear.’
However, guitar lessons and advice weren’t the only things Billy Gibbons owed to B.B. King. The blues legend also inspired Gibbons to name his band ZZ Top. Elsewhere in the interview, Gibbons said that they had a collection of concert posters for blues artists, and he noticed that their names had repeating initials. In the end, he thought of the name ZZ King, inspired by ZZ Hill and BB King. But he later changed it to ZZ Top as the former resembled BB King too much.
“We had a collection of posters for upcoming blues artists that were swinging through town,” Billy Gibbons recalled. “We’d go around and yank these posters off the telephone poles. And I kept noticing the repetition of initials in the names: BB King, OV Wright, ZZ Hill… We were going to call ourselves ZZ King, but it was too much like BB King. Then I said: ‘King is at the top; maybe it should be ZZ Top.’ And we went with it.”
Bearing in mind his early musical career, it is clear that Billy Gibbons discovered blues music with Elvis Presley and BB King and shaped his own sound after listening to these big names in the scene. However, BB King’s influence over Billy Gibbons wasn’t limited to his unique guitar techniques or musicianship. It seems like King also inspired him when he was naming ZZ Top.
