came on the radio. Like the Doors, they get a lot of airplay on a lot of stations—though everything you hear is from one year, 1983, and one album, Eliminator. It’s hard, funny, with Billy Gibbons’s guitar as a guide to the network of caves that runs below the entire surface of the earth, even if Eliminator didn’t have ZZ Top’s best single, “My Head’s in Mississippi,” from 1990, which you never hear at all. That song seemed to have been conceived and sung—or, if the composer had already passed out, dreamed—with the singer’s head inside a toilet bowl in a bar inevitably called the Longhorn, where the guy whose voice you hear has gone to throw up. Whether he already has or not when he first opens his mouth to get his words out, the room is still spinning, but at least he’s spinning now too: he doesn’t really want to be anywhere else. A naked cowgirl drifts across the ceiling of the filthy little room like a cloud. He can’t believe how lucky he is. I switched to another station, right into ZZ Top’s “Got Me Under Pressure”—an Eliminator number a good ten times tougher than “Sharp Dressed Man.”
