ZZ Top

At the start of the ’70s, three dangerous-looking dudes rolled out of Texas with coal-black shades, waist-length beards — except for the guy whose name was Beard — and a down-and-dirty, blues-rockin’ roar that would eventually conquer the world. The amped-up boogie of ZZ Top’s first real hit, “La Grange,” comes off like John Lee Hooker with a Marshall stack and mud on his boots, and with the blues-baked shuffle of “Tush,” the Texan trio put the ranch in raunchy, for a tune that’s been covered by everybody from Kenny Chesney to Joan Jett. But it wasn’t until the ’80s that the Top turbocharged their sound with some sleek synth riffs and emerged as rock heroes of a new era, blending the greasy and the gilded for the multiplatinum sound of “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Legs.”

In Next Steps, ZZ Top digs deep into their bluesy bag of tricks.

ZZ Top may have soared to superstardom by adding an ultra-modern sheen to their raw, rockin’ sound, but their roots have always been deep down in the blues and soul they were raised on. Billy Gibbons’ sizzling slide licks on Elmore James’ signature cut “Dust My Broom” would’ve surely made the legendary bluesman grin. The Top transforms Sam & Dave’s soul smash “I Thank You,” giving the R&B stomp an almost sinister-sounding, snake-hipped groove. And the rude, rowdy riffs of “Thunderbird” may have originated with our hairy Houston heroes, but the tune still feels like it was pulled straight from the pages of the Chicago blues songbook.

Roam through the Top’s fuzz-toned, paisley past . . . in Deep Cuts.

Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, and Frank Beard weren’t born stompin’ the blues with those blackout shades and an aversion to the barber shop — well, maybe they were, but before starting ZZ Top, Gibbons got it on with the Moving Sidewalks, psychedelic rockers who turned heads in ’60s Houston. If you ever wondered what Hendrix would’ve sounded like if he’d been born a Longhorn, the Sidewalks’ trippy-but-tough “Crimson Witch” is your answer. But even on their fuzzed-out, organ-soaked hip-wiggler “You Make Me Shake” you can hear the Top sound taking shape. So when Gibbons sang “I got down with a fuzzbox” decades later on the rough-and-tumble stomp “Fuzzbox Voodoo,” you know it wasn’t just a passing fancy.

To millions, ZZ Top are the three cool cats moving as one in the videos that took over MTV in the early ’80s, but while their electronic update of ’70s boogie made them household names, they’d already been kickin’ up a blues-rockin’ storm for more than a decade. And today, the gritty Texas trio-turned-Rock and Roll Hall of Famers are still burnin’ it up, with four decades of nice ’n’ nasty rock classics in the rearview mirror. So where do you start catching up on the Top’s loud-and-proud Lone Star legacy? Right here, where we’ve run the gamut from A to ZZ, corralling all the band’s crucial cuts in one spot. So slap on some “Cheap Sunglasses” and take it to the Top.