Jumping the Shark-ZZ Top.

[SAT-I need more room!!]

Kitty brought up a point on the last Shark post which I had thought about myself-that the jumping of the shark is subjective to individual fans. (Then again, that is the point of ALL our posts, isn't it? Our own opinions.) As a casual AC/DC fan, I felt they pretty much exhausted their best work by For Those About to Rock, whereas Pete is a big fan and said they kept right on making quality stuff through their most recent offerings.

There is gonna be cases where an artist kept right on making hits into late in their career (ie, Clapton, Aerosmith), but there are people who think that later stuff is not up to scratch. So while they may have been commercial, chart successes still, there may be individual fans that think they had already "jumped the shark".....


ZZ Top-

Here's a prime example. Almost without question, their most fruitful, successful period was the MTV era stuff. Eliminator and Afterburner both had 4-5 hits with videos in heavy rotation.

But I personally never warmed up to that era. The songs mostly annoyed me. I really prefer the early beer drinkin', hell raisin' era.

So for me personally, they jumped the shark after El Loco. (And see, it's even hard for me to say that because they were so successful on the charts!)

The album after Afterburner, Recycler, did not fare as well as the previous two, although I believe some stations played Give it Up. So in terms of chart success, I guess this is where the shark was jumped.


Opinions??

[H2IZCOOL]

I've never been a big fan of ZZ Top, but looking at allmusic.com, it shows that the album Afterburner peaked at # 4 or 5 (they list it as both for some reason) and Recycler Peaked at #6. That's not a whole lot of difference.

[SAT-I need more room!!]

h2izcool said:

I've never been a big fan of ZZ Top, but looking at allmusic.com, it shows that the album Afterburner peaked at # 4 or 5 (they list it as both for some reason) and Recycler Peaked at #6. That's not a whole lot of difference.

That may be true, but sales do not necessarily reflect the quality of the album. I'm sure there are tons of cases in music where fans will "blindly" buy a new album from an artist based on the strength of the previous album. Those 2 previous albums had like 4-5 big hits, so people who liked them were probably salivating over a new album.

I know I've bought just about every Collective Soul album without hearing a song, and I very well could have gotten stuck.

I just read a review of Recycler, and it said while it contained a couple of goodies (the aforementioned Give it Up being one), overall it was bogged down with overproduced beeps and such. I can't say for sure, but there may have been people kicking themselves hoping the album would have been better and were stuck with an inferior release. So they may not have bought the next album. Thus they jumped the shark here.

An example would be the Beatles. Most people probably decided early on they would be getting every Beatles album or not. But after Sgt Peppers, White Album, Abbey Road, people probably would have bought Let it Be without knowing a thing on it. But that album was not in the category of those other 3.

I guess when I said it "didn't fare as well", I should have mentioned I didn't mean on the charts, I meant in terms of overall reaction to it.

[Pete70s]

The irony here is that I was holding the new reissues of "Tres Hombers" and "Fandango" in my hands earlier today (I did a little mini CD spree), and ALMOST bought them, but didn't, at least for now..

I'm a big fan of the 70's stuff, and of course, Deguello is my favorite ZZ Top album. El Loco I absolutely hated, Eliminator had some VERY overplayed songs, and with it's use of synthesizers COULD have alienated a LARGE chunk of their fan base. But, the synths on Eliminator were done well and everybody loved it, so it worked.

However, with this new found success and this "new sound", somebody had the BRILLIANT ( ) idea to go back and re-record the bass and drum tracks on all the old albums, and THAT is how they appeared on CD for all these years (the new re-issues finally fix this, thank god!)

There are cuts on both Eliminator and Afterburner that I like a lot which don't get any recognition ("If I Could Only Flag Her Down", "I Need You Tonight"), but I really haven't heard much they've done since (I may have heard a cut or two from Recycler on rock radio at the time it came out, but nothing made much of an impression on me).

My belief is that they jumped when they started using electronic instruments and synthesizers, which would have been El Loco (one song on there sounds like DEVO, for chrissakes!! Nobody wants to hear ZZ Top do Devo...). Eliminator was a great album which turned things around and actually used the synths in a GOOD way, but going back and re-dubbing all the early albums with electronic drums was a BAD move...

[H2IZCOOLE]

sat said:

h2izcool said:

I've never been a big fan of ZZ Top, but looking at allmusic.com, it shows that the album Afterburner peaked at # 4 or 5 (they list it as both for some reason) and Recycler Peaked at #6. That's not a whole lot of difference.

That may be true, but sales do not necessarily reflect the quality of the album. I'm sure there are tons of cases in music where fans will "blindly" buy a new album from an artist based on the strength of the previous album. Those 2 previous albums had like 4-5 big hits, so people who liked them were probably salivating over a new album.

I know I've bought just about every Collective Soul album without hearing a song, and I very well could have gotten stuck.

I just read a review of Recycler, and it said while it contained a couple of goodies (the aforementioned Give it Up being one), overall it was bogged down with overproduced beeps and such. I can't say for sure, but there may have been people kicking themselves hoping the album would have been better and were stuck with an inferior release. So they may not have bought the next album. Thus they jumped the shark here.

An example would be the Beatles. Most people probably decided early on they would be getting every Beatles album or not. But after Sgt Peppers, White Album, Abbey Road, people probably would have bought Let it Be without knowing a thing on it. But that album was not in the category of those other 3.

I guess when I said it "didn't fare as well", I should have mentioned I didn't mean on the charts, I meant in terms of overall reaction to it.

OK. I see what you mean. Totally agree with your Beatles comparison. I was one of those people who went out and bought every Beatles album as soon as it came out, not even knowing what was on it. (Not talking about the decades after breakup Beatles albums, BTW.) And Let It Be might be my least fave of them all - except for Get Back, For You Blue and the Long and Winding Road.

[Ken]

Well let's see - do I think ZZ Top have jumped the Shark? well not completely.


In my opinion the albums after Afterburner (except for '96's Rythmeen (which I bought and think is quite good, they ditched the synthesizers) weren't necessarily bad just uneven and they weren't up to the standards of their 70's/ early 80's output.


I agree with Pete about the re - recording of the drums on many of the tracks that was just wrong. I remember around the same time that this was done to a few other tracks as well - KISS' Rock and Roll All Night, Free's Alright Now and Stories' Brother Louie.

[berjo]

I agree with (I forget their name ). "Degüello" is my personal fav and "El Loco" does nothin' either.

My one cent ;D