Billy Gibbons

This article appeared in Talk of the Town in The New Yorker a few years ago and for some reason it has always stayed with me. It's about Billy Gibbons of the band ZZ Top. And it's about his eccentricities and, really, about his unanticipated eloquence:

For example, here is his answer to the question “Who was that?” after he’d talked for a while on his cell phone: “Elwood Francis, our guitar technician, took a brief absence from the tour in order to escort his wife to China, where they successfully adopted a baby girl named Joshi. In his absence, his post was attended by a talented technician named Sammy Sanchez, who introduced me to a guitar called the Turbo Diddly, which is made from an old wooden cigar box. It has what you call a resonator, and it sounds like a bad recording from 1949. The guy who makes it, Kurt Schoen, is a pilot for UPS.”

You should read it.



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