“Have you seen the Pyramid Building Syndrome these days? Seems to be the big thing right now. When there’s no seating, they just pile up on each other’s shoulders higher and higher. Some guy fell off the top of one last week and knocked himself a good one. They just passed him along overhead.. .1 saw him float off into the darkness, don’t know what happened to him. He must have eventually reached the end.” Guitarist Billy Gibbons was describing the latest activities of Lemming Nation at a Z.Z. Top concert, the band whose towering swastikas of sound are currently the number one draw on the search-and-destroy circuit. “When we headlined that show in Austin with 80,000 people, they started the biggest one ever. Some poor girl was stuck way up on top, must’ve been the 80,000th person. Never saw her again after she fell either.”

The Pyramid Syndrome is just a surface sign of the slavish momentum that’s been building up behind the Z’s,

"Everybody 13-14-15 years old heads right down for some action as soon as they figure they’re ready."

who are now being patted on the wallet as an overnight phenomenon after five long years of road sleaze and playing to zoned-out cowboys with branding irons in their eyes. Now they’ve broken over a dozen major records in just over a year, including Led Zep’s mark in New Orleans, Elvis’ record in Nashville (which they’ve topped twice), the Stones’ top draw in Long Beach, and Leon Russell’s record in Tulsa, his hometown. On top of that are stacked four gold and platinum albums, including Tres Hombres, which has spent more time on the charts than any other record by an American group.

It couldn’t have happened to three more regular guys unless somebody cloned Don Knotts, and therein lies their appeal. Not that any jerk could play like them — all three are experienced, accomplished musicians who chose this particular brand of slash and burn attack because it’s a good time that incidentally happens to put tortillas on the table and Rolls, Royces in the garage. Still, they come on as unaffected as the guy who works next to you on the line or fills your gas tank. Real American Dream food, or more precisely, Texan.

The Z.Z. Top miracle had typical enough beginnings in the quavering « ruins of the Texan psychedelic scene. * After going through the usual gearhead ® bands playing “Louie Louie” and" “Wine Wine Wine” with monosyllabic finesse, Billy found himself in a repugnant crew of bent impulses called the Moving Sidewalks, while bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard were with the American Blues, who purportedly dyed their hair purple and still managed to be a major threat to local women. “We did a lot of blues, R&B and Top 40 stuff,” says Dusty, “but then we got into the Mothers and weird shit like that and finally started writing our own songs. It was gettin’ a little...psychedelic around then. The people that listened to us were doing a lot of acid at the time but we didn’t go in for that stuff.” After a round of mutual groans and yukyuks, Billy cites the legendary 13th Floor Elevators as a major influence, a band whose lead singer was so flaked out that he usually had to be led onstage by the hand before he was finally committed to the funny factory. “They weren’t just the first in Texas, they were the first in a lot of places. It was actually them that went out to California and started teaching the Airplane and the Dead a few tricks.” In fact, their tinfoil reverb mutterings live on today in bands like the Blue Oyster Cult. “We even had one band called the Red Crayola,” adds Frank, “that had a guy in it who played electric shaver.”

After all this LSDeezyism twisted itself out like a blind donkey on locoweed, the guys found themselves, like many others, going back to their blues and R&B roots. “We all liked that kind of stuff anyway,” explains Dusty, “and when we finally got together that’s what came out. We’ve developed a pretty good sound, it’s clean, it’s simple, and directed right straight forward. Nice workin’ music.” Like for building leaning towers.

Another facet of their huge success is their whiz distillation of the “Southwest Experience.” Explains Billy: “We’re basically writing about things that happened to us in Texas when we were growing up. I’m not sure that people outside of that experience always understand what we’re talking about, but I think the basic thing of goin’ downtown and lookin’ for some tush is universal.”

Rollin’ for trim?

“Yeah, get some hide.”

Hairy faces?

“BEARDED CLAMS!”

The Southwestern teen punk experience is like no other in the country. The Beach Boys had their cars and girls, the Dolls their faggots and downs, and the Eagles their vans and weed. But what did you do for kicks down in those desiccated little cattle towns where the steaming, oppressive flatness stretches out past the landscape like some Einsteinian time blur? Mostly, they’d slip on down to Mexico, and not for any mescal mental television amongst benevolent cacti and cunning Indians either. Explains Billy: “Everybody 13-14-15 years old heads right down for some action as soon as they figure they’re ready. If you’re old enough and sneaky enough to reach the border and you’ve got the bucks, you can drink all night.

“The Tex-Mex border is definitely not like the Canadian border. There’s this whole string of border towns right over the bridge and they’re not like Mexico or Texas either. It’s the dirtiest and nastiest of both of ’em, nothing but nightclubs, beer joints, dance halls and whorehouses.”

Frank tells of the time he had just stumbled out of his tenth bar or so and saw an ice cream truck coming down the street: “It had speakers on top blarin’ out stuff in Spanish and I thought great, I could really dig an ice cream about now. So I go up to the truck and look in the back and there’s a mattress with three whores in it showin’ off their goods. A rollin’ fuck machine.” Kind of makes ya want to sit on a snow cone, doesn’t it?

When they weren’t south of the border carousing, there was always something low going on back home too. Their early hit “LaGrange” tells the story of the Chicken Ranch in LaGrange, Texas, one of the oldest whorehouses in the country and a place “so posh that customers couldn’t cuss or be visibly drunk” according to Billy.

“Master Of Sparks” is another song he lived to tell about: “We had this big round cage, like a ball, built out of round steel pipe called circle gauge. The thing had a door that could be chained shut and a bucket seat inside with a safety belt.

“A friend of mine had a ’49 Chevy pickup truck, and we put the cage in the back of it one night and headed to this long, deserted straight stretch outside Houston. Nothing around for miles and miles.

“We got that old Chevy goin’ as fast as it would go, and they strapped me in. 1 got the weirdest feeling I was gonna die! But it was too late, they wouldn’t stop, and when those rednecks kicked me out I thought it was all over. The jolting and screaming when it hit the pavement scared me even worse, and there was this big rooster’s tail of sparks flyin’ after it. It was the wildest ride of my life!

“Somebody quickly dubbed it the ‘master of sparks’ and it got so famous that there would be cars lined up on both sides of the road for miles whenever we took it out. Some dudes would even have their flatbeds filled with ice and beer.

“Then one night this one really crazy kid got off to a sort of sideways twist. It hit the pavement and then got off the road and started rolling up about half a mile of barbed wire fence. Man, we had to take a cutting torch and cut him out.”

Catching Z.Z. live is like having a dumptruck full of railroad ties dropped on your head and loving every thud. Although they include a couple of drowsier slow blues to give crotch-rot a chance to set in on the multiple damp seats, they basically stick to their lethal audience-beaters like “Just Got Paid” and “Thunderbird.” The My Lai response they inevitably get is incredible; people make kamikaze dives out of the upper tiers, ushers are gangbanged, and cherry bombs are swallowed painlessly.

Although they say that any calculated stage lurchery “looks cheap,” Dusty and Billy do seem to squeeze a bit of controlled flash and grind into their $erendipital choreography, including a few steps that Paul Revere is probably rehearsing right now in some darkened rec room. “They do some things together,” admits Frank, “but it’s just ’cause one night they happened to do it and it felt good so they do it again. But we don’t go ‘Okay, well on this part here Dusty; you spread your legs and Billy, ypu run through underneath on your knees and Dusty, you lift your left leg so you don’t piss on him.’ One thing they do that I don’t like is sit on my drums. They look like a couple of LaGrange whores.”

We've all been nailed by Beam bottles, but it's no big deal.

What kind of crowds do they like to play to, the standard cases of massinduced rabies or the baby-stomping bottle bombers? Dusty: “I like ’em to get excited if they feel like gettin’ excited, though I wouldn’t exactly want the other two to get hurt too bad. We’ve all been nailed by Beam bottles, but it’s no big deal. The kids just get carried away, you can’t get mad about it.” Ever want to step down and punch somebody out ofter you get beaned pointblank?

“I’m not jumpin’ out there!”

The concert that night in Detroit just missed selling out by a few hundred, the first less-than-fire-violation crowd they’d played for in months. The Z’s came on to a Frankenstein ovation and ripped right into “Mexican Blackbird,” another of their whore songs. With Billy in his white rhinestoned Nudie outfit and ten gallon hat, and Dusty in a similar outfit, only in black, it looked like the Last Guitar Shootout as they shadowboxed across the stage.

The killdomes seemed to have forgotten their table manners and immediately charged the front, annihilating everyone in the first twenty rows or so and warming all the local time bombs for the evening’s first brawl. The third tune, “Jesus Just Left Chicago,” set it off, appropriately enough, and it took all the cops and most of the brownshirted kid-stompers to break it up and drag off the more enthusiastic participants. It looked like a plot.

The “little ol’ band from Texas” really should be busted for crossing state lines with intent to boogie for the murderizing Southern stomp wads they’re perpetrating on the rest of the country. Temporary insanity will not acquit.

“Well, we are a little band — only have three pieces,” claims Billy with all the innocence of a rattlesnake. “,.. And getting older all the time,” adds Frank. “And definitely from Texas,” finishes Billy.