Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 87

ZZTop and the Regional Lyric Poetry of Texas

79

Like I told you, head out FM 92
roll in slowly, you'll be safer if you do
if you don’t know what I'm talkin' about
let me ease your worried mind
it's the place to go without a doubt
but it's a little bit hard to find
back in the timber, once you’re there you’ll
wanna stay
get loose and limber anytime night or day
just remember, ask for the Avalon hideaway.
Likewise in McDonald's Fishing the Brazos, the speaker takes a
temporary excursion into the hardscrabble to plug for bass in an area
full of rattlers and water moccasins. The speaker ventures beyond his
experience, as if a child again outside a "holy rollers" tent meeting,
"the congregation / speaking in tongues and quaking, some picking up
snakes / and writhing, on fire in the spirit, ignoring / us boys outside
and laughing." But the speaker as adult desires to move inside where
things are strange, different, frightening, and even dangerous. There
the fear can make the speaker "rise up and walk on water." The very
danger is enough to ignite the speaker's spirit and force him to act
beyond the norm, to "hit the switch" so to speak and "drive by
moonlight."
Interestingly, the speakers in "Avalon Hideaway” and
"Fishing the Brazos” address the audience in an instructional manner,
speaking to the "you" as if recommending their experiences. The
speaker in ZZTop's "La Grange" uses the same form of address;
indeed, he is "the man," the one who can arrange things: "just let me
know if ya wanna go." Once again the place spoken of in "La Grange"
is a sort of frontier locale, a place balanced between the deadliness of
the wilderness and the regimented order of civilization. "Rumor’s
spreadin' round in that Texas Town / bout the shack outside La
Grange." The "home out on the range" is of course the chicken ranch,
since made famous~or infamous—by the movie The Best Little
Whorehouse In Texas. "La Grange" again demonstrates how ZZTop
grafts a rather cliched Texas image—the home on the range-onto a
hard-core picture of reality to create an ironic balance between the
two.