In April 2020, Billy Gibbons told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he, Hill, and Beard had “a lot in the can” and were “cooking up another round of wicked sounds” for ZZ Top’s 16th album, with a tentative late 2021 release date. This year, the ZZ Top documentary That Little Ol' Band From Texas was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Music Film. ‘Mother Goose Rock ‘n’ Rhyme’ (1990) One of the earliest times ZZ Top inhabited an on-screen world outside their own came when Hill and his bandmates embodied the Three men in a tub from the nursery rhyme Rub-a-Dub-Dub in the 1990 Disney Channel musical film Mother Goose Rock ‘n’ Rhyme. Hill also acted in Back to the Future Part III, Mother Goose Rock 'n' Rhyme, and Deadwood, and played himself on an episode of King of the Hill and in a Drew Carey Show sketch. Back to the Future III was removed from Netflix on June 30. ZZ Top remained screen stars over the years with a performance at the 1997 Super Bowl XXXI halftime show alongside James Brown and the Blues Brothers, a performance on the American Idol Season 7 finale with winner David Cook, and a career-spanning taping for VH1 Storytellers in 2009. The follow-up album, 1985's Afterburner, was also an MTV success, with the music video for “Velcro Fly” choreographed by future MTV star Paula Abdul. “Legs” won an MTV Video Music Award for Best Group Video, and “Sharp Dressed Man” won a Best Direction VMA. This crossover was largely thanks to high-rotation MTV airplay of those tracks’ cheeky, colorful Tim Newman-directed videos, which starred some of the channel’s earliest and most iconic video vixens. He played with his brother Rocky Hill and future ZZ Top drummer Beard in local bands the Warlocks, the Cellar Dwellers, and American Blues before he and Beard moved to Houston, where they linked up with guitarist/vocalist Billy Gibbons, then of psych-rockers Moving Sidewalks.
with a bank building as a stand-in for a tony nightclub. When ZZ Top was filming its legendary Sharp Dressed Man video in downtown L.A. I knew Dusty for more than 40 of ZZ Top’s 52 years, as the group’s publicist. Joseph Michael “Dusty” Hill was born May 19, 1949, in Dallas, Texas, and he started off playing cello before transitioning to bass. They were seen in the film Back To The Future, Part III playing a musical trio in the old west. At that time, the band released a statement saying their “fearless bass player” was on a “short detour back to Texas, to address a hip issue,” but they expected a “speedy recovery” and to “have him back pronto,” adding, “Per Dusty's request, 'The show must go on!’” This was reported to be the first time that ZZ Top had ever played without Hill since 1969. While no cause of death was given, the sad news comes just five days after Hill was forced to pull out of a ZZ Top concert in New Lenox, Ill., due to an injury (the group’s longtime guitar technician, Elwood Francis, filled in). This content is not available due to your privacy preferences.