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ZZ Top - Today We Lost Dusty Hill

Photos & Words by Richard Roesler

July 28, 2021 - So I’m sitting here listening to my ZZ Top box set, going through images from 2015 when I got to photograph the band legally.  My girlfriend snuck my Canon F1n and a 75-200mm f4 lens into the Summit (now a Church) wearing maternity clothes in 1986 for the Afterburner tour.  I can remember pretty much where I was when each album was released, especially up though Afterburner! 

Dusty Hill passed away today, which sucks on several levels!  And I’m sitting here in week 3 of a retina detachment and retina tear following an eye a PVD, which is basically an old age thing.  And can’t do anything to shake this feeling, I quit drinking a few years ago, can’t go get any 100mph wind therapy on the bike due to the retina issue and even if this was Colorado I doubt that would be an option either with the eye.  While part of getting old is change, it sucks when the parts of your past that have special meaning begin to fade, ZZ Top is a big part of Houston!  ZZ Top is a big part of me!

Be it MJ’s boyfriend constantly telling us he and Billy grew up together and picking up the phone in the girlfriends place in the mother-in-law house out back of Maryjane’s (girlfriend had the only working phone) and hearing “This is Griz with ZZ Top, tell MJ to come to the back loading dock entrance tonight” and the phone going dead.  Then the next morning there was all this ZZ Top paraphernalia and information that us commoners don’t get.  That’s where I learned Master of Sparks is a true story!  Or the line from Under Pressure “She likes cocaine and filppin' out with Great Danes”, everyone soon as they heard the song said that’s MaryJane and Max her Blue Great Dane!  Heck I even spent some time one afternoon in I-10 traffic next to BillyG!  ZZ Top is That Little Ol’ Band from Texas, but ZZ Top is Houston first!

Prior to today’s news I have been pondering if I’d come Full Circle with the concert photography?  I had recently had Billy like and share an image from the 2015 tour I called Dashboard Jesus and The Reverend BillyG on his Instagram page!  Which to me was way frickin cool, seeing as they were the first concert I photographed from mine & Nurse GoodBody’s clandestine adventure!

And then sitting post covid, it seems all the folks I developed relationships with at Live Nation here in Houston since 2013 have moved on & I cant seem to get any type reply from the new contacts I’ve been given.  And then Dusty passed...

Till next time, maybe 

Richard 

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