ZZ Top’s Frank Beard, the One Without the Beard, Dies at 77

Frank Beard is gone, and I don’t mind telling you I’m a little broken up about it. The man played drums for ZZ Top for almost sixty years. Sixty years. In this country we can’t keep a marriage together for sixty months, and this man kept a band together for six decades. That’s not a career. That’s a covenant.

He died at his ranch in Richmond, Texas, with his family around him. Not in some sterile hospital with fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. At his ranch. In Texas. With his wife Debbie and his kids right there. That’s how a man ought to go out, and that’s how a Texas man did.

Now here’s the part that always made me smile. ZZ Top. The band famous for beards down to their belt buckles. And the drummer’s name was Frank Beard. And he was the one who didn’t have one. They called him “The Man With No Beard,” and bless his heart, he wore it like a badge of honor. That’s the kind of joke that writes itself, and Frank Beard was in on it the whole time. He didn’t need the costume. He had the chops.

Because here’s what nobody in the music press wants to talk about anymore. ZZ Top was three guys from Texas who played blues rock like their lives depended on it, and they did it without moving to New York, without moving to California, without asking anybody’s permission. Beard said it himself in that 2019 documentary: “That was back to that thing of, ‘You gotta go to California, you gotta go to New York.’ And we refused to do that.” They stayed right where they were. Houston. Texas. And they sold 50 million records anyway.

Adavyd (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

You know what we call that today? We call it staying in your lane, and the coastal elites would have you believe that’s a bad thing. Three Texas boys in cheap sunglasses playing a two-chord song about a brothel outside La Grange, and they packed stadiums from here to Japan. No synthesizers telling them what to feel. No focus group. No committee. Just a guitar, a bass, and a drum kit played by a man who knew exactly what a Texas shuffle was supposed to sound like.

Billy Gibbons said it about as well as it can be said: “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.” A great and true son of Texas. You don’t hear language like that much anymore because we’ve decided that loving where you’re from is somehow suspicious. But Frank Beard loved Texas, and Texas loved him right back.

He had his troubles. He’d tell you himself. Sold his original drum kit to buy drugs in the Seventies, pissed away money he’d earned, messed up relationships. Then he got sober, came back, and played for another forty-some years. That’s not a redemption story the way Hollywood writes them, with the swelling music and the courtroom scene. That’s just a man who decided to straighten up and do the work. We used to admire that in this country.

The band is canceling shows in Salt Lake City and Colorado Springs this week. They’ll pick back up in Austin, at ACL, one of Beard’s favorite venues. Gibbons says the band goes on because that’s what Frank wanted. And I believe it, because that’s the kind of man he was. He found the people he was meant to play with, and he never wanted to quit, and he never wanted to get fired.

He didn’t get fired. He went home. And there’s a drum kit somewhere in Texas that nobody ought to touch for a good long while.