Billy Gibbons celebrated his 76th birthday this past December. While most of his contemporaries who’ve hit the three-quarter century-plus mark are kicking back and enjoying retirement, the ZZ Top founding member is racing into 2026 with plenty planned.
The year opens with Gibbons embarking on a solo tour, backed by his band, The BFG’s, whose current lineup includes Hammond B-3 organ maestro Mike Flanigin and Chris “Whipper” Layton—one half of the Texas rhythm section Double Trouble, best known for holding the bottom down for the late Stevie Ray Vaughan.
While Gibbons’ full-time job remains leading ZZ Top, his solo career is now a decade old, yielding three albums. The most recent is 2021’s Hardware, following 2018’s The Big Bad Blues. The seeds for The BFG’s were planted when Gibbons was asked to assemble a group to honor the passing of B. B. King, which led to a performance at the Havana Jazz Festival during a rare thaw in relations between Cuba and the United States.
“One of our other musical component pals, BFG’s keyboardist G.G. Martine, called up out of the blue and asked how I’d like to go to Cuba,” Gibbons recalled. “I said that I didn’t think Americans could do that, but G.G. said for the Havana Jazz Festival, they made exceptions in certain cases. He said I was invited to go down and play the Havana Jazz Festival, and when I said I didn’t think my ZZ Top guys could be talked into going because they were pretty home-bodied, he said it was just me. I said I didn’t play solo—it’s more of a blues band approach. I told him that I had to think about it.”
Happenstance being what it is whenever you get knee-deep into a Billy Gibbons story, kismet had other plans for the bearded Rock & Roll Hall of Famer. While chewing on what to play in Havana, Gibbons stumbled across a newly opened Cuban restaurant between the Austin recording studio and the hotel where he was staying. Belly full of plantains, rice, and beans, Gibbons decided to record an Afro-Cuban-inspired record, which became his 2015 solo debut, Perfectamundo. As strange as that might sound at first blush, it makes more sense when you learn that a teenage Gibbons spent a summer learning percussion from El Rey de Los Timbales—Tito Puente.
“When I was 12, I was banging on a metal trashcan, knocking the sides off of it,” Gibbons recalled. “My dad said if I was going to continue banging on these things, let’s learn to do it right. Next thing I know, I’m on a plane to New York by myself at 12-years-old to see my pop’s older brother, who lived in Manhattan… I remember walking up the street, finding the address, knocking on the door—it swung open, and it was Tito Puente holding two timbale sticks. He told me to take them and show him what I wanted to play… He said we weren’t going to stop with timbales. He had congos, bongos, the pescado—the fish. By this time, we were off and running, and he kind of liked what I was doing. It was a real summer of intrigue.”
Fast forward to 2026, and Gibbons and The BFG’s are primed for a quick solo tour that promises nods to ZZ Top and some other surprises.
“We’ve got a little bit of the anticipated ZZ Top renditions—‘Sharp Dressed Man’ becomes ‘Sharp Dressed Everything’ and ‘Gimme All Your Lovin’ becomes ‘Gimme All Your Everything,’” he said with a laugh. “We got the guitars tuned up and the amplifiers ready to crank. Chris Layton is bringing out his famous Jungle Show drum set, which is something to behold. That in itself is a visual piece of art… It’s got the essence of an early ‘50s organ combo, as I like to call it.”
Another recent solo development finds Gibbons collaborating with old friend Billy Bob Thornton on Thornton’s Paramount series Landman, joined by co-star and country artist Mark Collie.
“Billy Bob called me up and said [creator] Taylor [Sheridan] wants some music,” Gibbons said. “…He wanted it to be the BFG thing, and I asked if he had any ideas. He said to give me a minute, and he’d send me a text. All I got was a text of a picture of an oil well engulfed in flames. He said, ‘Let’s write it to sound like this.’ It’s called ‘Livin’ It Up Down Texas.’”
Billy Gibbons and the BFG Band appear Feb 14. at the Patchogue Theatre for the Performing Arts, 71 E. Main St., Patchogue. For more information, visit www.patchoguetheatre.org or call 631-207-1313.
