Dusty Hill 1949-2021: paying tribute to the bearded boss of bass guitar By Jamie Blaine published October 13, 2021 When the ZZ Top bassist left us on July 27, he left a legacy like few others. We look back at the career of a true bass original I grew up down Texas way, working summers at my father’s sawmill, and scraping together minimum wage to buy a beat-up SG bass. The fretboard pyrotechnics of Sheehan and Lee were beyond my reach, but inspiration came slithering across the yard one scorching afternoon through the screen door of a nearby rib shack. As I unloaded lumber from a boxcar, the bluesman growled about gold tooth displays and beauticians at the wheel of his V8 Ford, the backbeat matching the loping rhythm of our sawmill’s conveyor chain. Heat waves shimmied on the tracks from the percolating bass, laying a muddy groove wide as the West Texas plains, with a mind-blowing breakdown at the end that was both bad and nationwide. The band, of course, was ZZ Top – but copping bassist Dusty Hill’s parts proved to be a different kind of tricky. I dug into their back catalog, discovering that his approach wasn’t so much a matter of technique as attitude.