Obituary
ZZ Top Drummer (the one without a beard). He was 77
Frank Beard RIP
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Musings on the byways of popular culture
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https://www.tmz.com/2026/08/18/frank-beard-dead/
I see that Billy Gibbons has vowed to keep on keepin on.
🙁
Fine but he should tour as “Billy Gibbons”, but dollars …
Perhaps he could tour as his own tribute band ‘Uno Hombre’.
He already plays and tours as Billy W Gibbons, so I am guessing that name sells fewer tickets?
Ahem, F.
Saw him a couple of years back in a small theatre in Bournemouth that could never have booked ZZ Top.
Played a lot of ZZT and was very good.
To be honest, I know very little about the band apart from the obvious, it was just a chance to make a lame joke.
I thought it was pretty good one
I laughed, but – and I feel sorry for pointing it out – it would be “un hombre”. I am very dull (and married to a half-Spaniard).
Dai giveth and Fenton taketh away.
Hmm. Main songwriter, guitar, lead vocal. I wouldn’t complain if he carried on under the Top banner, particularly with Elwood in tow.
Shame, great drummer. In the ZZ Top Li’ll ole band from Texas he is most entertaining and very honest about his substance issues which he eventually overcame. RIP.
He shared his name with Charles Dickens’s personal physician. As I found out while reading a Dickens biography.
Quite off putting really, seeing as whenever he was mentioned I pictured him laying down a four on the floor to a fuzz drenched guitar.
‘Ow ow ow! Have mercy!’
We briefly had a local pizza shop that was staffed by just one man – who constantly moaned at customers about how busy he was.
So you go in and order and tentatively ask – “so…when will it be ready?”
(cheeks puff out, head shakes) “I can say twenty minutes if you like…but at this point it’s like asking how long is a piece of string!”
Reason why I mention it is that a bearded friend of mine said he waited so long for his order – that he was chased down the street by autograph hunters, thinking he was in ZZ Top!
He’s got legs, he knows how to use them!
I’ll take everything Billy Gibbons (whom I otherwise admire beaucoup) says about Frank Beard with a sack of salt. Apparently being “one of the most naturally innovative drummers” wasn’t enough to stop Gibbons replacing him with a drum machine during their Greatest Hits years. He just took the tapes and wiped Beard’s playing clean out behind his back. Rock and roll, business as usual.
They didn’t wipe them because they were subsequently restored after fan outage. For the remastered albums. But sure enough he did replace them with a hideous drum machine, to his shame.
Somehow I ended up with a zz top GH cd in my collection. I wondered why it sounds so shit.
*Fan outage.