La Grange
Celebrating a real-life Texan brothel, the visiting of which Billy Gibbons says was in its day “a rite of passage”, after 50 years it’s still one of the band’s best-loved songs and a must-play at shows.
Usually it’s a chorus, an individual performance or even a title that bestows immortality upon a particular song or track. In the case of ZZ Top’s La Grange, it was Billy Gibbons’s lascivious cry of “Have mercy!” followed by a deep a growl of “a how how how how”, delivered over a gently picked riff saucy enough to flavour a thousand barbecues, that handed the Texan trio their first significant hit; a track that has now racked up more than 170 million YouTube plays.
Now a well-aged 50 years old, La Grange first appeared on ZZ Top’s 1973 third album, Tres Hombres. The song celebrated a real-life brothel known as The Chicken Ranch, open from 1905 to 1973 and located on the outskirts of the Texan town after which the song was named. The Chicken Ranch went on to become the subject of a book called The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, which was later made into a film (coincidentally starring our cover star Dolly Parton).
Regardless of how much the bordello has now been absorbed into popular culture, when talking to Billy Gibbons about the song you have to wonder whether or not he paid a visit to the establishment.
“Unabashedly, the answer is yes,” he says with a chuckle. “For a young man in those days, it was a rite of passage. You had to go to the infamous Chicken Ranch of La Grange. You know, photos taken in its heyday still float around. It wasn’t much to talk about from an architectural standpoint, but the place was well kept and well-managed. [The Madam] Miss Edna was always ready to crack the whip, which tended to keep everybody in line. I’m told that during the Great Depression [from 1929 to 1939] you could claim house favours by bringing along a real chicken, and that’s where the place got its nickname.
“However,” Gibbons adds in an obviously mock-serious tone, “I may be saying all of the above in order to bring legitimacy to the song.”
Gibbons recalls that when he was growing up, the older guys he knew would talk about La Grange. “One of them even called it the eighth wonder of the world,” he states. So the place was firmly on his radar when ZZ Top began pr
