El Loco

This article is about a music album. For the Colombian goalkeeper see René Higuita , for the roller coaster model see El Loco (roller coaster model)

El Loco
Studio album by ZZ Top
Publication (s)	August 1981
Label (s)	Warner bros.
Genre (s)	Blues rock , southern rock
Title (number)	10
running time	36min 49s
occupation	Billy Gibbons : vocals , guitar Dusty Hill : vocals, bass Frank Beard : drums
production	Bill Ham
chronology Degüello 1979 El Loco Eliminator 1983
Single releases 1981 Leila 1981 Pearl Necklace 1981 Tube Snake Boogie

Chart positions Explanation of the data

Albums

El Loco   DE 52 08/24/1981 (2 weeks)   UK 88 08/08/1981 (2 weeks)   US 17th 08/08/1981 (22 weeks)

Singles

Leila   US 77 10/03/1981 (4 weeks)

El Loco ( Spanish for "the crazy") is the seventh album by the American blues rock band ZZ Top . It was released on Warner Bros. Records in August 1981 . The album reached gold status in the USA in 1981 for 500,000 units sold.

Emergence

The songwriting and the recordings for the album corresponded to the zeitgeist of the early 1980s. ZZ Top tried to incorporate style elements outside of the Texas blues into their music . Billy Gibbons named the pieces Party on the Patio with an unusual three- chord technique for ZZ Top and the bass lead in Ten Foot Pole as examples, and emphasized the role of producer Bill Ham as an objective observer. Overdubs were used in the studio recordings and for the first time in the band's history, the individual musicians recorded parts of the music alone and in separate rooms.

The album found an unexpected response in the punk scene , the song Tube Snake Boogie was played more by punk radios than by other radio stations. The song Party on the Patio is about an imaginary party in a courtyard and reflects the band members' idea of ​​a perfect party. The ballad Leila summed described Gibbons as "ZZ Top meets the Beach Boys" and that this just does not work like the interaction "between a synthesizer programmer and a rapper ." The piece Pearl Necklace has a suggestive character and is about the sexual practice of the same name .

In 1985 the album was re-edited for the CD version.

Track list

1. Tube Snake Boogie - 3:02
2. I Wanna Drive You Home - 4:44
3. Ten Foot Pole - 4:19
4. Leila - 3:13
5. Don't Tease Me - 4:19
6. It's So Hard - 5:12
7. Pearl Necklace - 4:01
8. Groovy Little Hippie Pad - 2:40
9. Heaven, Hell or Houston - 2:31
10. Party on the Patio - 2:48

All songs were written collectively by the band members.

reception

Frank Michael Goldmann said in the audio : “The ten original compositions of the Texas trio shine through their wealth of ideas, clean arrangements and sparkling rhythm.” The best pieces are Pearl Necklace and the Tube Snake Boogie , which reminds him of CCS in terms of vocals , that is exactly the pieces which also found their way onto the greatest hits album from 1992. Musically, the album was worth 17 out of 20 possible points. He classified the technical quality at 15. He set the collector's value high, at 16, but missed any information (0 out of 20 points).

Steve Braun from musikreviews.de described El Loco in connection with his review of the 2009 DVD Double Down Live: 1980 & 2008 as a disappointment. Stephen Thomas Erlewine describes the album as a further development of Degüello's boogie rock , the grooves are a bit smoother, the humor in the lyrics even crazier and dirtier. He emphasizes the rhythm of Pearl Necklace as characteristic of the album, which only paved the way for the "New Wave Boogie" of the later albums. Fred Schmidtlein from the online magazine Home of Rock sees El Loco as the "weakest record of the band so far" and attributes this to creativity problems that the band was only able to solve with the successor Eliminator .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Sources chart placements: UK / US DE
2. ↑ Certifications: ZZ Top - El Loco. RIAA, accessed March 24, 2010 . 
3. ↑ ^{a b} Steven Rosen: ZZ Top: From A to ZZ. (No longer available online.) Guitar World, October 22, 2009, archived from the original on June 19, 2010 ; accessed on March 20, 2010 (English). 
4. ↑ Jay Allen Sanford: The ZZ Top Story, Tales of the Palms Hotel Part 2: Rock Tattoos, TJ Bathrooms, The Vinyl Adventure. San Diego Reader, September 16, 2008, accessed March 24, 2010 . 
5. ^ ^{A b} Glenn O'Brien : Life at the Top . In: Spin Magazine . February 1986, p. 43 f .
6. ^ Frank Michael Goldmann: ZZ Top. El Loco . In: Audio . The magazine for hi-fi, music and video. September 1981, p. 216 .
7. ↑ Steve Braun: ZZ Top: Double Down Live: Live At Rockpalast 1980 & On The Road 2008 (Review). musikreviews.de, October 26, 2009, accessed on March 25, 2010 . 
8. ↑ Fred Schmidtlein: Eliminator - 25th Anniversary Collector's Edition. (No longer available online.) Home of Rock, September 30, 2008, archived from the original on March 13, 2016 ; accessed on March 13, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  

Web links

• El Loco at Allmusic (English)