Frank Beard, the Quiet Engine Behind ZZ Top, Dies at 77

For more than half a century, Beard sat behind Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill and supplied the groove that made ZZ Top unmistakable. He died Monday at his Texas ranch at the age of 77.

There was always a wonderful little joke built into ZZ Top. The two guys with the enormous beards were Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill. The guy named Frank Beard was the one without one.

But behind the joke was one hell of a drummer.

Frank Beard, the longtime drummer of ZZ Top and the rhythmic backbone of one of the most distinctive bands in American rock history, died Monday, August 17, while in hospice care at his ranch in Richmond, Texas. He was 77. His family was with him. A cause of death has not been publicly disclosed.

For anyone who grew up with rock radio in the 1970s and 1980s, ZZ Top didn’t require much introduction. You knew them within seconds.

Sometimes it was Billy Gibbons’ guitar. Sometimes it was that unmistakable Texas drawl. By the MTV years, it could be the hot rods, sunglasses, spinning guitars and those magnificent beards.

Underneath all of it was Frank Beard.

He joined Gibbons and Hill in 1969, completing the lineup that would remain remarkably stable for more than five decades. From the dirty Texas blues of the band’s early records through Tres Hombres, Fandango!, Degüello and eventually the enormous commercial success of Eliminator, Beard provided something great drummers understand instinctively: the song doesn’t need you to prove how good you are. It needs you to make it move.

And ZZ Top moved.

Listen again to “La Grange.” The guitar gets the attention, naturally, but listen underneath it. Beard gives the whole thing its swagger. “Tush” doesn’t lumber. It drives. Even when the band’s sound changed dramatically in the 1980s, adding synthesizers and electronic textures on records such as Eliminator and Afterburner, that sense of groove remained.

That’s probably why Beard could be easy to underestimate.

ZZ Top was an unusually visual band. Gibbons and Hill became instantly recognizable figures, particularly once MTV turned “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Legs” into cultural landmarks. Beard was behind the drum kit, usually looking considerably less ridiculous than the other two.

But take away that rhythm and ZZ Top isn’t ZZ Top.

The band sold tens of millions of records, played to generations of audiences and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. Through nearly all of it, Beard was there.

His death also makes the passage of time around this band particularly difficult to ignore. Dusty Hill died in 2021 at 72. Beard’s death leaves Billy Gibbons as the sole surviving member of the classic trio.

There are bands whose music belongs very specifically to an era. ZZ Top somehow escaped that. Put “La Grange” on today and it doesn’t really sound like 1973. It sounds like ZZ Top. Put on Eliminator and, yes, you can hear 1983 all over it, but those songs still come blasting out of a car stereo remarkably well more than four decades later.

That kind of longevity doesn’t happen accidentally.

It comes from three musicians who figured out exactly what they were, understood what each one contributed, and kept doing it together for an extraordinary length of time.

Frank Beard’s part was the groove.

He spent more than half a century sitting behind two of the most recognizable figures in rock and quietly making the whole machine run.

Not a bad seat in rock and roll history.