ZZ Top Performs Greatest Hits on Day One of Stagecoach Festival, Amazon's Coverage of Event Is Sorely Lacking

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by Julian Spivey
​ZZ Top brought their Texas brand of blues rock to the Stagecoach Festival in Indio, Calif. on Friday night (April 28) with what amounted to a greatest hits set for the fine folks at the Palomino Stage.

You might be saying to yourself, ‘Wait, isn’t Stagecoach a country music festival?’ Yes, dear reader, it is, but if they have acts like Luke Bryan calling themselves country we might as well include a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame act like ZZ Top too. Hell, Nelly performed on Saturday night.
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ZZ Top is one of the few actively touring rock bands that I’ve wanted to see in concert, but every time they come to my neck of the woods I seem to have other plans that can’t be avoided. So, seeing their set streamed from Stagecoach via Amazon Primo Video (the festival can also be streamed for free at Amazon Music’s Twitch page) might be the closest I’m ever going to get.

As I previously said, it was pretty much a greatest hits set for the trio as a condensed version of their regular stage show, but when it comes to a legendary band like ZZ Top isn’t a greatest hits show basically what you want from them.

This was the first opportunity I’ve gotten to see the group since the passing of original member bassist Dusty Hill in 2021. Elwood Francis has taken over the bass and co-vocal duties with guitarist and lead vocalist Billy Gibbons. Frank Beard, as always, has the sticks at the back of the stage.

The trio began their set with a rocking “Got Me Under Pressure,” off one of their most famous albums Eliminator. The album just celebrated the 40th anniversary of its release last month. The trio would perform two more songs off that album during their 45-minute or so set on Friday night – “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Legs,” which was a top-10 hit for the band.

One of my favorite performances of the evening was a cover of the Merle Travis/Tennessee Ernie Ford country classic “Sixteen Tons,” which I believe the group breaks out fairly regularly on their tour. They said they had to do a country song for Stagecoach.

Other classics performed by the trio on the Palomino Stage were “I’m Bad I’m Nationwide,” off 1979’s Degüello, and “Just Got Paid,” all the way back from the band’s sophomore release Rio Grande Mud in 1972.

The trio finished off their Stagecoach set with the awesome one-two punch of “Tube Snake Boogie,” off 1981’s El Loco, and, of course, “La Grange,” which is likely their all-time greatest song from 1973’s Tres Hombres, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its release on July 26.

There were really only two sets on day one of Stagecoach that I wanted to see on Friday – ZZ Top’s in the evening and American Aquarium’s from early in the afternoon – and this is where I have some qualms about the coverage done by Amazon. Coachella, which takes place at the same location in Indio as Stagecoach, just happened the last two weekends and was streamed live on YouTube, as it has been for a few years or so. YouTube shows almost every set of the entire festival unless an artist explicitly refuses as headliner Frank Ocean did in his much-controversial performance two weeks ago. They also have different feeds showing the different stages and it all appears to be live. Well, Amazon claims their stream is live, but simply looking at the stream set times and the ones on the Stagecoach website shows it’s not true. I believe the headliners’ sets might be live, but even those may be delayed slightly.

That’s really the smallest issue I have with Amazon’s coverage of the festival, which I’m fairly curtained was also streamed by YouTube in 2022. My biggest complaints are there’s only one stream, so the service is basically stitching together performances from the Mane (it’s spelled that way intentionally as in “horse’s mane”) and Palomino Stages and if you like any performers on the other stages you’re out of luck. They’re also not showing every performance, which is why I didn’t get to see American Aquarium’s performance on Friday. Man, what that could have potentially done for that band’s music. Another major con to Amazon’s Stagecoach performance is unlike YouTube’s coverage they don’t allow you to watch non-live performances – there’s no rewinding and fast-forwarding to see sets you missed.

I know these are all trivial things and I am glad the Stagecoach Festival is being streamed in some form, but when we see as fans how it can be done better it’s head-scratching why one of the richest businesses in the world can’t give us what we want.  

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