Waitin’ For The Bus/Jesus Just Left Chicago

By the 1980’s Z Z Top’s new songs were almost novelty numbers. They still put down some pretty nice grooves and some hot licks, but most of their tunes were cutesy little ditties designed to work well with the goofy vidoes they were grinding out for MTV. If anybody looked down their nose at that, the band cried all the way to the bank, I guess. Back in the seventies, though, Z Z Top was playing playing some strange, serious electric blues. They wore cowboy hats and rhinestone getups and marketed their stuff as southern rock, but it was electric blues. And it was good. For my money, their best album from that time was Tres Hombres, and the best thing on the album was an original medley called “Waitin’ For the Bus/Jesus Just Left Chicago”, both songs funky and bluesy.

My brother, Doug, and I played that medley many a night ourselves…