Guest Post - "A Proposed Model for the Next ZZ Top Tour"

Here is what's on Senor Volto's mind this week:

---

Wouldn’t it be nice if ZZ followed this example?


A friend of mine was discussing a concert he recently attended by the band Primus. Primus is a rock band whose music falls over several genres (alternative, funk, progressive, experimental). The tour is called the Green Naugahyde tour and supports the album of the same name which was released in September 2011. Green Naugahyde is the first Primus studio album in 11 years. The playlist on the current tour has two sets and an encore. The first set on this tour is a constantly changing playlist of the band’s older hits and fan favorites as well as other obscure tunes. The second set is the entire Green Naugahyde album – the album is 13 songs in 51 minutes. The encore is usually two songs – usually both songs are fan favorites, sometimes it’s one hit and one obscure nugget.

Primus was on fairly exhaustive tour schedule from July to December of 2010 (sound familiar?). After about a two month break, they resumed touring and premiered the first two songs from the yet unreleased album at the end of February. This group of shows lasted about a month. Primus resumed touring in May of this year and salted in six more new unreleased songs during May and early June. This leg of the tour went until early August. When Primus started playing live again on 23 September, it was for the Green Naugahyde tour. Again, the entire new album is played as the second set.

It would really cool if ZZ were to debut new a new song or two in concert before the release of the new album. However, the current tour is scheduled until the end of October, and the new album is scheduled for release in March – April 2012, so this probably won’t happen. Perhaps the band will appear (maybe on a TV show?) sometime in between to play a new song or two. It would be very surprising if they followed a plan like Primus – playing a varied list of older songs every night and playing the entire new album. Maybe the different playlist every night is too much to ask, but some unexpected surprises would be cool. Expecting ZZ to play the entire new album as a set is probably unreasonable, but they used to play lots of new songs on the tours supporting new albums up to and including Rhythmeen. Only four songs were played in support of XXX. Only two songs were played live from Mescalero, but that whole album would have been a long set at just over 61 minutes.

I haven’t dug deeper to see if this is how Primus always supports their new music. I do feel that while playing an entire new album as one set is probably very uncommon, we should certainly hope for more than two live tracks from the new ZZ album.