ZZ Top - VH-1 Storytellers, Congress Theatre, Chicago, IL, 3-31-2009

I just posted an album featuring Nanci Griffith, to mark her death today. That got me wondering why I hadn't posted something from ZZ Top to mark the death of ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill a few days ago. To be honest, I thought about it, but there's a surprising lack of quality rare material from them. For instance, the only truly excellent sounding concert recordings (meaning radio broadcasts or soundboards) I've found from them come from their 1980 tour. There's not much point in posting that, because their one really good live album, "Live in Germany 1980," also comes from that tour, as the name suggests. (If anyone knows of any really excellent live recordings of them from other years, especially the 1970s or 1980s, please let me know.)

So I wasn't going to post anything from them. But then I remembered I do have one other interesting bootleg recording, which is the concert they recorded for the VH-1 Storytellers TV show. It was recorded in 2009, and I would prefer something from their more popular and creative earlier part of their career. Also, this show is frustratingly short, at only 44 minutes. But it has one thing that makes it stand out, and that's the copious amount of banter between songs. ZZ Top are not known to talk much at all during their concerts, so it's interesting to hear them open up a bit.

There was one very frustrating problem with the song "Jesus Just Left Chicago." The editors of the show apparently decided the guitar solo in the middle of the song was boring, so they spiced it up by turning the volume down low on it then overlaying it with another one of the stories the band members told at some other part in the show. Up until yesterday, I would have been helpless to do much about this. But, as you may have noticed in my George Harrison "All Things Must Pass - Acoustic" album comments from yesterday, I've recently discovered a great, free program called Spleeter that allows me to separate different instruments out of a recording. I tried using that program on "Jesus Just Left Chicago." I was able to isolate the banter vocals, and I moved those to track 7. But the music minus those vocals sounded weirdly distorted, probably because the music was turned down so low and was dominated by the sound of the banter. So I considered just cutting out that section of the song altogether. But then I had another idea. I found an excellent sounding live recording of the same song from just one year later, done at the 2010 Eric Clapton's Crossroads concert. I edited that it, and it fit in remarkably well. So that's why tracks 6 and 7 have "[Edit]" in their names.

01 talk (ZZ Top)
02 Just Got Paid (ZZ Top)
03 talk (ZZ Top)
04 La Grange (ZZ Top)
05 talk (ZZ Top)
06 Jesus Just Left Chicago [Edit] (ZZ Top)
07 talk [Edit] (ZZ Top)
08 talk (ZZ Top)
09 Gimme All Your Lovin' (ZZ Top)
10 talk (ZZ Top)
11 Tush (ZZ Top)
12 talk (ZZ Top)
13 Sharp Dressed Man (ZZ Top)

https://www.imagenetz.de/hXFHm

For the album cover art, I was lucky to find a high quality photo from the exact "Storytellers" concert featured here, so that's what I used.