Gimme All Your Lovin’: The Blues, Boogie, and Beard of ZZ Top’s Billy F. Gibbons

McKittrick (Somewhere You Feel Free) provides a colorful if uneven account of the 60-plus-year career of ZZ Top front man Billy Gibbons. Growing up in Texas, Gibbons played guitar in several bands as a teen before joining “locally famous Houston psychedelic rock” group the Moving Sidewalks in the mid 1960s. In 1969, he formed ZZ Top with bassist Lanier Greig and drummer Dan Mitchell, who were quickly replaced by Dusty Hill and Frank Beard. Capturing the band’s ascent during the 1970s and ’80s, McKittrick covers the evolution of the group’s “guitar-driven blues-rock” style; their stunts (a 1976 tour featured onstage appearances from two vultures, a longhorn steer, and other animals); and the video for 1983’s “Gimme All Your Lovin’ ” that garnered them MTV fame. Thanks in part to what McKittrick describes as Gibbons’s tendency to stretch the truth, the narrative is marred by a few odd moments where the author questions minor bits of trivia, including Gibbons’s claim that the Moving Sidewalks opened for Jimi Hendrix in 1968 by covering two of Hendrix’s own songs. Still, the sprightly characterizations of Gibbons entertain, and McKittrick gives welcome due to both the band’s early days and its work to remain relevant in more recent years, including after Hill’s 2021 death. Despite a few off-key moments, it’s a boisterous portrait of an American rock great. (June)