These posts are about the songs that fell just short of crossing the key line of chart success, entering the Billboard Top 40. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 41.

When the Texas band ZZ Top were recording their third album, they spent some time noodling with a tune that had a gnarly blues guitar riff and a peppy boogie beat. They mostly used it as a means of warming up on their way to working whatever proper song was next to record, and the grimy little vamp got longer and more intricate bit by bit. Their manager insisted the was a full-fledged song ready to emerge; the band members — guitarist Billy Gibbons, bassist Dusty Hill, and drummer Frank Beard — were more skeptical. Then, one day during a lunch break, Gibbons sat in the studio and listened to the most recent recording of they’d made of the jam and he started singing along to it into a microphone, prompting the engineer on the other side of the glass to leap up and start waving his arms. Gibbons had cracked it, less with the lyrics and more with his burnt-molasses delivery of them. They had themselves a modern version of the sort of heavy, frisky blues music that John Lee Hooker played and perfected.

Years later, Gibbons wasn’t sure what the specific were that he sang the day of his breakthrough. For the finished song, ZZ Top paid tribute to the Southeastern Texas institution known as the Chicken Ranch. Located a couple miles outside of the city of La Grange, the Chicken Ranch was an illegal yet exceedingly well-known brothel. (Hill claimed he visited there when he was thirteen years old and that going to the Chicken Ranch was considered an important rite of passage in a lot of Texas families.) A few years later, it would also inspire an improbable stage musical which in turn became an even-more-improbable movie musical. ZZ Top titled the song “La Grange.”

The ZZ Top approach to singing about the place was basic as can be, fittingly down and dirty: “Just let know if you wanna go/ Take that home out of the range/ They gotta lotta nice girls. Have mercy.” As he worked on the lyrics to “La Grange,” Gibbons thought about one of the songs written and performed by Buddy Holly, another Texas boy. In the song “Peggy Sue Got Married,” Holly returns to the lovely girl who he’d dined after tunefully before, this time expressing lovelorn dismay about rumors that she’d gotten hitched. Perhaps giving the sense of the false hope the heartbroken boy singing the song might cling to, Holly introduced uncertainty to the lyrics: “You recall a girl that’s been in nearly every song?/ This is what I heard, of course, the story could be wrong.” Gibbons gave “La Grange” his own version of that meta backspin: “And I hear it’s tight most every night/ But now I might be mistaken.”

After “La Grange” was released, a few folks listened and thought it came too close to those old John Lee Hooker numbers that inspired the riff. Bernard Bessman, who recorded Hooker’s first single, “Boogie Chillen,” and worked closely with the bluesman for decades, sued ZZ Top for copyright infringement around twenty years after “La Grange” was released. Bessman claimed ZZ Top lifted their song’s riff directly from “Boogie Chillen.” After three years of grinding through the courts, the suit was dismissed by a judge, not because the aural resemblance wasn’t there, but because he determined the “Boogie Chillen” riff was in the public domain when ZZ Top recorded the song. They could us it if they wanted to.

Released as the first single from ZZ Top’s 1972 album, Tres Hombres, “La Grange” brought ZZ Top to a new peak on the Billboard singles chart, just missing the Top 40. After the release of the 2020 documentary ZZ Top: That Little Ol’ Band from Texas, “La Grange” took up some real estate on the Billboard charts again. Both “La Grange” and the 1983 hit “Sharp Dressed Man” appeared on the publication’s Hot Rock Songs chart. This time, “La Grange” peaked at #12, two places higher than “Sharp Dressed Man.”

Other entries in this series can be found by clicking on the “Top 40 Smash Near Misses” tag.