ZZ Top's Eliminator - C/D?

Side-note: This, Pyromania and Thriller were my 4th grade soundtrack.

Side-note #2: How did Frank Beard all of a sudden become a great drummer for "La Grange"?

GODDAMN THIS SOUNDS SO GOOD TODAY especially the "she likes cocaaaaaine" line in "Got Me Under Pressure."

If you like this album and didn't pick up the remaster job from last year, do it. Unlike most of them, which are just crappy "pushing the levels into the red" hack jobs, this is a really good remastering job. The synths are pulled right up to the front and really sort of make these songs 3-D now. Also, it's got the original album version of "Legs" which disappeared altogether after the first pressing in 1983.

https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/559894_10152590339935327_1290916434_n.jpg

Ardent Studios reported yesterday on FB that TODAY marks the 30th Anniversary of the release of Eliminator. I recently rediscovered the album via the remaster Johnny wrote about above. I just love how (from a composition standpoint) "I Need You Tonight" could work as an amazing Hi-Records slow jam, just as "If Could Only Flag Her Down" could have a T-Bone Walker or Johnny "Guitar" Watson dance floor filler from the 50s.

Thanks for the heads up about the anniversary. I will now commence listening to this over and over for the next two days.

My wife, when "Legs" came on the radio: "I wonder if when they wrote this ZZ Top thought the radio would still be playing it in 30 years. I also wonder if they thought people would be listening to it in flying cars."

Your wife seem intersting.

(for real, tho, that's funny)

They were way ahead of y'all on the 'flying car' thing...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKJymx2KDWo

Can't stop looking up guys in their rec rooms recreating Eliminator on their synthesizers/sequencers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8dxbh5raak

(^ First 90 seconds or so..)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LlY6S6oSvc

Look out Donald!

And then there's this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLG85bgpjW4

I just want to project this on to the side of my house somehow.

THUG : track has a bass line worthy of love from any 80s era shriekback fan.

ohhh yeah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X1E33YtbbM

i want that painting to be the first thing people see when they walk into my home

due to a need to have something fun and groovy, i have been hammering the recent boxset the last few days.
have really enjoyed discovering both the early boogie grooves and the overplayed hi-tech 80s productions (hello sputnik !).
subsequently, i picked up the rubin produced album, la futura, today.
damn, it's good. really really good.
oh, and yes, the guitars on the mescalero album are seriously dirty.
bottom line : having denied myself for years re the simple pleasures of this band, i have had to accept that i love the bands use of old blues guitars-n-riffs and modern production.

This thread on the Hoffman forums is VERY ENLIGHTENING re: Eliminator. Gibbons fucked this guy over!

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/welcome-linden-hudson-of-zz-top-fame.1112917/

Also features a very funny antidote about ZZ Top's drum samples and Ministry!

Wow, that thread is nuts.

Hudson has dropped a couple of the demos he did with Billy in different spots on the web--they sound alot like Big Black!

Total dud. As I said in another ZZ Top thread, it's difficult to think of a band that jumped the shark harder than these guys.

ya wow these are awesome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QZ8WUTaS18

Just realized that Al Jourgensen borrowed Billy's vocal FX for a lot of Ministry.

this is like the 5th best top album but it aint no dud it kicks fuckin ass

It's not my favorite ZZ Top music but it's not a bad reinvention either, far from it.

The best I can say about it is that it didn't suck as much as the one after it did.

The irony is that the only member of ZZ Top who didn’t play on Eliminator is named Frank Eliminator.

... who also had a secretary named Bernadette!

(that was a good one, tteg. i can't compete.)

"Recycler? I hardly know her!"

Anybody who doesn't like Eliminator is out of their fuckin' mind.

Anybody who likes any of the albums they released between Eliminator and La Futura is also insane, of course.

My ranking:

tres hombres
tejas
rio grande
deguello
eliminator

i had to dig this up re: ministry, remembered reading it awhile back, Gibbons was asked to name ten records that changed his life

Ministry - The Land of Rape and Honey

Al Jorgensen is a guy whose commitment is total and this is the album where he really found his footing. It paves the way to the possibilities offered by it’s rich and dark, industrial approach. The wicked application of hands-on electronics on that excursion are most substantive. What can I say? I’m a fan.

https://www.loudersound.com/features/zz-tops-billy-gibbons-the-10-records-that-changed-my-life

Tarfumes, thanks for a huge lol on a grim election night.

Definitely grim news in their home state of Texas. I can't believe people keep voting for these people after all the shitty things they've done in the past term alone.

"We like sitting in the cold dark and getting shot at!"

Wow Billy's albums list is cool

Found this cool thread with alot of comments by Terry Manning from Argent Studios on working on all of the ZZ Top albums they recorded (which is really most of the really good ones).

http://recforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/mv/msg/3849/0/0/0/

― earlnash, Wednesday, 17 November 2010 22:09 (eleven years ago) link

This old thread thanks to the Internet Wayback Machine is still out there and kind of gives a look at the same record through Terry Manning's memory. I put it here as ILMusic does it's Roshomon look at ZZ Top's Eliminator.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110123215118/http://recforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/mv/msg/3849/0/0/0/