Frank Beard, ZZ Top drummer and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, dies at 77

NEW YORK (AP) — Frank Beard, the drummer for the Texas boogie-rock trio ZZ Top who kept the tempo for the band’s biggest hits like Sharp Dressed Man, Legs and Gimme All Your Lovin‘, has died. He was 77.

Beard was in hospice care when he died Tuesday at his ranch in Richmond, Texas, with family members at his side, according to publicist Bob Merlis.

Band co-founder and guitarist Billy Gibbons, on tour with bassist Elwood Francis, hailed Beard in a statement.

“Today, Elwood and I lost a great friend and collaborator, and the world lost one of the most naturally innovative drummers and a great and true son of Texas. His signature backbeat was key to keeping ZZ on top. The band of which he was part for six decades is going to keep on keeping on as he had wished,” Gibbons said.

ZZ Top sold more than 50 million records and had six singles that reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart. Seven of their albums have been in the Billboard 200’s Top 10 and they earned three Grammy Award nominations.

“I’ve found the people I was meant to play with,” Beard says in the 2019 documentary ZZ Top: That Little Ol’ Band from Texas. “I never wanted to quit, and never wanted to get fired.”

Billy Gibbons, from left, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard of ZZ Top, perform in Monaco on July 5, 2010. (AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau, File)

How the band came together

Beard, from Frankston, Texas, met Gibbons in a band called The Moving Sidewalks and later introduced bassist and vocalist Dusty Hill who had been in several bands with Beard.

The trio formed ZZ Top in 1969, naming themselves in part after blues singer Z.Z. Hill and influenced by the British power trio Cream and Jimmy Reed.

They maintained their original lineup for more than five decades. Their signature look — long, bushy beards on Gibbons and Hill, and dark sunglasses for all — didn’t change much, either.

When Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards helped induct the trio into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, he joked: “These cats know their blues and they know how to dress it up. When I first saw them, I thought, ‘I hope these guys are not on the run, because that disguise is not going to work.’”

ZZ Top songs — with their sly and humorous lyrics — were popular in Hollywood, which used Gimme All Your Lovin’ in Happy Feet, Sharp Dressed Man in Evan Almighty, Legs in Air, Sleeping Bag in  I, Tonya, Tush in  Dazed and Confused, Mexican Blackbird in From Dusk Till Dawn and  La Grange in  Armageddon.

“The best way to describe ZZ Top is we’re interpreters of a great American art form,” Gibbons told The Dallas Morning News.

Their debut release, ZZ Top’s First Album, came out in 1970. Their sound was described as a hybrid mixing elements of rock, blues and funk into a steaming-hot Houston stew. They called themselves a “Little Ol’ Band From Texas.”

Breaking through

Three years later, they broke through commercially with  La Grange, a funky blues song on the album Tres Hombres that paid tribute to the Chicken Ranch, a brothel outside of the Texas town of La Grange that operated from 1905 until 1973 and was immortalized in the Broadway show and the film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Gibbons has ascribed the power of La Grange to its simplicity — just two chords and a Robert Johnson-inspired guitar solo.

The band went on to have such hits as Tush and Cheap Sunglasses. But their 1983 Eliminator — named after one of Gibbons’ custom cars — added more production elements, synthesizers and drum machines to their stripped-down sound and yielded the hits  Gimme All Your Lovin’,  Legs and Sharp-Dressed Man.

The band toured with a Texas-shaped stage, live rattlesnakes and a longhorn steer.

Long beards weren’t always part of the band’s look. Gibbons said it happened by accident: In 1976, the trio took a long break and scattered. Beard went to Jamaica, Hill went to Mexico and Gibbons went to France.

“Although we were speaking by phone, this was pre-video phone. And Dusty and I did not know that we had gotten so lazy that we had decided to forget to shave,” Gibbons told The Tribune in San Luis Obispo in 2010.

“So after three years we returned and showed up, and lo and behold here was this sort of wacky-looking image. And it just kind of stuck with us.”

Dusty Hill, from left, Billy Gibbons and Frank Beard of ZZ Top appear at the “American Idol” finale in Los Angeles on May 21, 2008. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)

A boost from MTV

The band’s rock-chic cool played well on the nascent MTV crowd and their videos, featuring models in short skirts emerging from one of Gibbons’ custom roadsters, became a mainstay.

They kept the beards, hats and cheap sunglasses in the video trilogy of Gimme All Your Lovin’, Sharp Dressed Man, and Legs, made with director Tim Newman.

“ZZ Top revelled in the humour and ridiculousness of it all, busting their synchronized dance moves and spinning their white-fur guitars. These guys always got the joke, at a time when other bands were still just nervously lip-syncing in front of brick walls,” Rolling Stone said in 2021.

In 2012, superstar producer Rick Rubin helped update the trio’s sound with the band’s comeback album, La Futura. The album landed at No. 6 on the Billboard chart, their highest position since 1990’s Recycler, some 22 years previously.

Hill died in 2021.

In March 2025, the band announced via Instagram that Beard would temporarily step away from the band’s tour to tend to foot and ankle problems. Beard died weeks after ZZ Top called off its Aug. 5 concert at the Hollywood Bowl due to his health issues.

Beard is survived by his wife, Debbie Meredith, and three children.