ZZ Top had seemingly conquered every proverbial mountain, thanks to the worldwide success of 1983’s Eliminator album.
But they marked a surprising milestone off of the list when they performed on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on May 18, 1986. It was their first appearance ever on late night television playing their songs.
Though they were out promoting 1985’s Afterburner album, they didn’t perform any of the tracks from that record. Instead, they offered up unique horn-driven renditions of “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Tush,” backed by the program’s NBC Orchestra, led by Doc Severinsen. The bandleader got into the spirit of it all, as you can see in the below video of their appearance.
The charismatic musician played trumpet and wore a fake beard and sunglasses to properly align himself with ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill. Even Carson could be spotted having a good time at his desk, also wearing a beard and a ZZ Top hat as the epic smoke cleared at the end of the performance.
“I was glad to have that unique experience as a ZZ Top ‘member,'” Severinsen shared in an email to author Christopher McKittrick, decades later. “My sex life improved immediately,” he quipped. The Tonight Show legend was already well into his 90s at the time he offered the recollection to McKittrick.
“I just thought that [television performance] was so wild that I wanted to at least attempt to reach out to his publicist and see, does he even remember this moment and can he talk about it? And he just gave me the briefest quote about it,” McKittrick tells UCR now. “But I have to say, in all my years of writing, it’s my favorite quote that I’ve ever gotten from someone when writing a book. It says it all, with his humor.”
Watch ZZ Top’s Performance on ‘The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson’
It’s certainly one of the more unique moments that the author covered in his 2024 book, Gimme All Your Lovin’: The Blues, Boogie and Beard of Billy F. Gibbons. But it’s one he came to understand quite well.
Why ZZ Top Hadn’t Performed on Late Night Television Before
Some fans will know that ZZ Top’s manager and producer, Bill Ham, was legendary for keeping a tight grip on all aspects of the band — especially when it came to the interactions they had with the media — and the visibility of things like television interviews and performances. Most of the time, he preferred to say no to inquiries of that type, in an effort to maintain the mystique of the future Texas legends.
READ MORE: Why ZZ Top Went Behind Their Producer’s Back to Finish ‘Afterburner’
“Bill had this idea that he wanted to keep everything about ZZ Top kind of a mystery, from how they got their very unique band name to what the members even looked like,” McKittrick says. “If you look at a lot of the early albums, we see a lot of faraway pictures of them, but not really up close and personal, which is really ironic. Years later during the MTV era, when you couldn’t [miss them] on TV, they were all over the place.”
“But at the time, Bill Ham had this idea that, ‘I don’t want to have ZZ Top on the Midnight Special and other shows like that. I want fans to come to the concert, see what they look like and hear what they sound like live,'” the author explains. “And it’s a strategy that certainly worked at the time when they were playing sellout concerts. Of course, when MTV came along, times changed. They needed to really get with the times and become the video stars that we all know and love them as from the 80s.”
Still, the members of ZZ Top expressed in later years that they owed much of their success to the way Ham had handled their career. “I truly think the band would have broken [up] in three years if Bill hadn’t been involved,” drummer Frank Beard said in 2016.
How Fans Can See Other ZZ Top Live Performances
The 2021 death of bassist Dusty Hill and more recently, Beard, who passed away in August of 2026, naturally sent music fans searching, looking for live footage they haven’t seen before of ZZ Top.
Admittedly and frustratingly so, there’s not a wealth of official live recordings available from the classic era of the band. The most famous — and essential concert footage comes from their 1980 performance on the German television program Rockpalast.
Recorded during the time they were out on tour supporting 1979’s Deguello, the Rockpalast appearance (which is available on DVD and streaming) bottles 90 minutes of ZZ Top at their best, rolling through well-known staples like “Waitin’ for the Bus,” “Jesus Just Left Chicago,” “Cheap Sunglasses” and “Tush.”
But it also includes chestnuts like “Precious and Grace” from Tres Hombres, “Manic Mechanic” from Deguello and an epic version of “A Fool for Your Stockings” from that same album.
Watch ZZ Top Perform at Rockpalast in 1980
The 2019 documentary That Little Ol’ Band From Texas ferreted out a variety of additional performances when it came to home video, including 17 minutes of priceless pre-Eliminator concert footage sourced from the estate of Ham, who died in 2016. Additionally, the film also features the three members of ZZ Top performing at Gruene Hall in Texas without an audience, a unique and intimate gig that was filmed specifically for the purpose of the documentary.
Most of the rest of the currently available live performances from ZZ Top come courtesy of Live From Texas, which was filmed in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in 2008 and also, a 2013 gig at the annual Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Songs from the Gruene Hall jam were eventually released in audio form on the album RAW: That Little Ol’ Band From Texas.
So you’ve got some options, but boy, we’d love to see more classic stuff emerge from the ZZ Top vaults!
Ranking Every ZZ Top Album
From the first album to ‘La Futura,’ we check out the Little ‘ol Band From Texas’ studio records.
Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso
