Eliminator (album)
Eliminator is the eighth studio album by American rock band ZZ Top. It was released on March 23, 1983, by Warner Bros. Records, and rose high on the charts in many countries. Four hit singles were released—"Gimme All Your Lovin'" which reached the American Top 40, "Sharp Dressed Man", "TV Dinners" and their most successful single, "Legs". Eliminator is ZZ Top's most commercially successful release, with sales of 11 million and diamond certification in the US.
Since El Loco in 1981, the bandleader, Billy Gibbons, had been moving ZZ Top's boogie and blues rock style towards the popular new wave style. For Eliminator, he increased the tempo and used more synthesizers and drum machines, producing a "tighter" album with a steady, driving beat. The pre-production engineer Linden Hudson collaborated with Gibbons in Texas on the tempo and songs. The producer Bill Ham and the engineer Terry Manning joined Gibbons in Memphis, Tennessee, to edit the songs, replacing much of the contributions of bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard. Ham claimed the album was solely the work of ZZ Top, but in 1986 Hudson won a lawsuit establishing himself as composer of the song "Thug".
Music videos for "Gimme All Your Lovin'", "Sharp Dressed Man" and "Legs" received regular rotation on MTV and helped ZZ Top gain popularity with a younger base. A customized 1933 Ford coupe, depicted on the album cover, appeared in the videos. Following Eliminator release, ZZ Top embarked on a worldwide concert tour.
The video for "Legs" earned the band the MTV Video Music Award for Best Group. Rolling Stone named Eliminator number 398 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. It was listed at number 39 in The 100 Greatest Albums of the 80s, and it was also included in Robert Dimery's book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. A remastered version was released in 2008.
Background
In 1978, ZZ Top went on hiatus, weary of constant touring. Bandleader and guitarist Billy Gibbons traveled around Europe, and bassist Dusty Hill vacationed in Mexico; both grew their beards longer. Drummer Frank Beard checked into Palmer Drug Abuse Program, a Houston detox community, for his addiction to hard narcotics. To help finance Palmer, Beard organized a benefit concert and an album titled Freeway, working with engineers Steve Ames and Linden Hudson at Rampart Studios in Houston. After signing to Warner Bros. Records, ZZ Top released Degüello in 1979, which was certified platinum in early 1980.In 1979, Beard bought a large house in Quail Valley outside Houston, overlooking a golf course where he often played as a way to stay off drugs. The band wanted a private rehearsal studio, so Beard invited Hudson to move in and construct a recording studio in his home. Hudson designed the studio and oversaw its construction, centered on an isolation booth holding Beard's drum kit, with more booths for guitar and bass amplifiers. Microphone signals ran through the mixing console and some outboard gear to the band's semi-pro 1-inch 16-track Tascam tape recorder.
In 1980, ZZ Top used the studio to work on material for their next album, El Loco. Hudson played on several demos, including a synth line on "Groovy Little Hippie Pad" which was mixed into the album by ZZ Top's engineer Terry Manning. Hudson was not credited but was promised future compensation. Hudson also introduced Gibbons to drum machines during these rehearsals. Gibbons later called Hudson "an influential associate... a gifted songwriter... He brought some elements to the forefront that helped reshape what ZZ Top were doing, starting in the studio and eventually to the live stage."
From this point forward, the band was not able to reproduce certain songs in concert without using pre-recorded tracks. They carried a small tape player to each concert, with a technician hitting the "play" button to give Beard a click track cue in his headphones. The tape held synthesizer parts, drum samples and other elements. None of this was made public; Bill Ham, the band's manager, was closely controlling their image to create a "mystique" of self-sufficiency and authenticity.
Recording
Gibbons was inspired by British electronic acts such as Depeche Mode and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark to explore electronic music technology. He often spoke with Hudson about new ideas in music. A former radio DJ, Hudson presented Gibbons with personal research showing that many hit songs were clustered near a tempo of 124 beats per minute—faster than ZZ Top's normal practice. Gibbons followed suit with most of Eliminator, setting the new pace with drum machines. "Legs" and "Sharp Dressed Man" are both 125 bpm while "Gimme All Your Lovin'" runs at 120. Gibbons said in 2012 that he first used a drum machine on Eliminator—the first album on which ZZ Top "paid serious attention" to timing and tempo, which was "timed and tuned very tight".The first songwriting sessions for Eliminator were mainly Gibbons and Hudson working together in Beard's home studio while Beard was out playing golf. Beard and Hill sometimes participated, and Ham checked in occasionally. Hudson programmed a drum machine for the rhythm, and played keyboard bass. Gibbons and Hudson collaborated on lyrics and music, putting together a demo of "Got Me Under Pressure" featuring Gibbons's electric guitar work on top of the electronic sounds. Gibbons felt that the synthesizers "created a nice platform that allowed the guitar to stand on its own", and that as the synthesizers could play an octave lower than a bass guitar, they created "a nice full bed of sound" that contrasted with his guitar. Ham was initially unaware that Gibbons was building a new sound without Beard or Hill. While the band was off touring, Hudson wrote "Thug" by himself.
Carrying the demo tapes created by Gibbons and Hudson, ZZ Top traveled without Hudson to Memphis, Tennessee, to stay at the Peabody Hotel while they recorded basic tracks at Ardent Studios, with Manning once again at the controls of the custom-built SpectraSonics mixing console. For the majority of songs, Gibbons played Dean guitars with DiMarzio super distortion pickups, plugged into a Legend hybrid amplifier, and miked with an AKG 414B-ULS large-diaphragm condenser microphone. When recording rhythm guitar parts, the sound pressure level was set very high to satisfy Gibbons, but this made it impossible for him to lift his fingers from the guitar to change chords without feedback. Instead, each chord was played once and doubled again on a pair of tracks, then the next chord was played twice and recorded to two more adjacent tracks. These alternating pairs of tracks were blended seamlessly into each other by Manning punching the tracks in and out. A side benefit of this laborious process was the elimination of the usual squeaks from shifting the fingers to change chords. Hill and Beard laid down bass guitar and drums, recording their parts onto 2-inch tape. Hill sang his vocals for "I Got the Six". When they were finished, Hill and Beard returned home to Texas.
Gibbons, Manning and Ham continued to work on the album without Hill and Beard. Vocal harmonies were supplied by Manning and Jimi Jamison, the new lead singer of Cobra. To achieve Gibbons' desired clock-steady rhythm section, most of Hill's bass parts were replaced by Gibbons or Manning playing bass guitar or a Moog Source—a keyboard synthesizer. A Memorymoog was also used for supporting synth sounds. Most of Beard's drumming was replaced by drum machine or Simmons SDS-V electronic drums, keeping Beard's acoustic tom-tom drum fills and cymbal accents. The song "Legs" was not coming together for Gibbons, so Manning carried the tape home to his 24-track attic studio and reworked every part except the guitar and vocals from Gibbons. Manning also created a longer dance mix for "Legs". To replace the drums, Manning programmed his Oberheim DMX drum machine, then augmented the snare drum and hi-hat sounds by triggering more samples on an AMS DMX delay unit. Eight years later, Gibbons thanked Al Jourgensen because his early Ministry drum samples had been used to polish Eliminator.
Writing dispute
Hudson collaborated on the album tempo with Gibbons, and he co-wrote several songs. The band's longtime stage manager, David Blayney, wrote about the collaboration in 1994 in his book, Sharp Dressed Men. The demo version of the album that was prepared for Memphis was largely the product of Gibbons and Hudson. On "I Got the Six", Hudson helped write the lyrics, and on "Dirty Dog" he originated the shouted phrase, "Hey! Get that dog outta my yard!", which was exactly duplicated and replaced in Memphis. He added special effects to "Dirty Dog" and "TV Dinners", and the pulsing synthesizer effect on "Legs" was his invention. He helped compose and arrange "Got Me Under Pressure", including playing the synth bass line and programming the drum machine.Hudson's song "Thug" was taken in its entirety: on the album, "Thug" lists Gibbons, Beard and Hill as the songwriters. ZZ Top's management company—Lone Wolf—denied that Hudson was significantly involved, and said that the album concept was solely the work of Gibbons and Ham. After the album came out in late March 1983, Hudson moved out of Beard's house, cut his ties with the band, and sued Lone Wolf for $1 million, arguing that his December 1982 copyright date for "Thug" preceded ZZ Top's copyright date of April 1983. Ham claimed that Hudson sold the song outright, but no record of such a sale was brought forward, and in December 1986 the judge decided in Hudson's favor, awarding him $600,000. Hudson paid a third of this to his attorneys, and a third to his publisher, Huey P. Meaux. Blayney wrote that "Linden Hudson in a fair world should have had his name all over Eliminator and gotten the just compensation he deserved. Instead he got ostracized."