Tejas
Tejas, released originally on vinyl in 1976 or 77 is ZZTop's best album. It is the one that established them as musicians and not just three guys trying to blow up amps... although their simultaneous detonation of "Backdoor Love Affair" on the live size of Fandango is among my top 2 or 3 openings in all of rock and roll. Tejas was a brilliant, dry, gritty album with some great hits - "It's Only Love" (does anyone besides me get flashbacks to "Brown Sugar" listening to this?), "Driving While Blind"... one of the best singalongs ever "She's a Heartbreaker", and the tight chording on "Pan Am Highway Blues". Unfortunately, Bill Ham remixed the first six ZZ Top albums for CD before anyone caught on that great things don't need to be re-invented. The CD version of Tejas is the worst CD re-mix ever, out of over 600 in my collection. It basically sounds as if the whole album has been recut with a drum machine (a bad one too) and fed through an echo box. It's nothing but an insult. At the time, one of the audio magazines reviewed it (after I already bought it) and declared it the worst CD remix of the year. Nice to see no one was listening. I suppose the other ZZTop six-pack remixes are just as bad, but Tejas was my favorite album so it stands out.
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