Every gas station in America used to have one: a spinning cardboard rack by the register, loaded with the cheapest, ugliest sunglasses ever manufactured — flimsy plastic frames, dark green lenses, a price tag that barely troubled a handful of change. For most travellers, those racks were invisible. For ZZ Top, three young Texans who spent the early 1970s touring the country in cars rather than jets, they were a way of life. The band bought the shades by the hundred, wore them on stage, and tossed them into the crowd as an offering. Then, in 1979, they wrote a song about them. Cheap Sunglasses was never one of the trio’s biggest chart hits — it stalled just inside the bottom of the Billboard Hot 100 — but it became something more durable than a hit: the moment the little ol’ band from Texas codified its own image, an anthem to disposable eyewear that ended up defining how the world pictures ZZ Top to this day.
Written on the Road, Out of a Cardboard Display
The song’s origin is pure ZZ Top folklore, and the band told it themselves. “We wrote that song when we used to tour in cars,” bassist Dusty Hill explained to Spin magazine in 1985. “And every gas station in the world had a cardboard display of the cheapest and ugliest sunglasses you could imagine. I have bought a thousand pair of them. The hip trip for us was to throw them into the audience as an offering.”
Billy Gibbons, the band’s guitarist and lead singer, has recalled that the lyric itself came almost as quickly as the purchases. Driving from the Gulf Coast toward Austin, Texas — straight through La Grange, the town the band had already made famous — he wrote all three verses in a single burst and never changed them. The words certainly sound tossed off in the best possible way. The song opens on a hangover: you wake up in the morning and the light has hurt your head, so the first thing you do is hit the streets running, try to beat the masses, and go get yourself some cheap sunglasses. The second verse is a small roadside romance — a girl with a West Coast strut that was sweet as molasses — and what really knocks the singer out is not her figure but her eyewear. The final verse lays out the consumer choice at the heart of the song: big black frames with glass so dark they won’t even know your name, in two classes only — rhinestone shades or cheap sunglasses. ZZ Top’s allegiance is never in doubt.
A Comeback, a New Label and a Pair of Beards
Cheap Sunglasses arrived at a genuine crossroads in the band’s career. After the marathon touring behind Tejas (1976), ZZ Top had taken a two-year hiatus — an eternity for a working rock band. Gibbons spent part of the break in Europe, soaking up punk and new wave, influences that quietly seeped into the comeback record. When the three men reconvened, Gibbons and Hill discovered, to their mutual amusement, that each had independently stopped shaving: both arrived sporting the chest-length beards that, paired with the shades, would become the most recognisable silhouette in rock.
The band had also changed labels, leaving London Records for Warner Bros. The comeback album, Degüello, was recorded between April and August 1979 with longtime manager Bill Ham producing, Terry Manning engineering at Ardent Studios in Memphis, and Bob Ludwig mastering. Even the title was a statement of intent: degüello refers to the bugle call of “no quarter” sounded by Mexican forces at the Alamo. It was the first ZZ Top studio album to include cover versions — Sam & Dave’s I Thank You and the Elmore James standard Dust My Broom — and its sound hardened the band’s boogie with a new economy and bite. Released in November 1979, Degüello reached number 24 on the Billboard 200 and eventually went platinum. Critics heard the sharpening immediately: AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine would later judge it the band’s best album since Tres Hombres, praise that places Cheap Sunglasses in the strongest company in the catalogue.
The Sound of a Blown Tube
If the lyric was written in twenty miles, the record’s grimy sound was partly an accident of failing equipment. In a Guitar World interview, Gibbons revealed that he cut the track through a Marshall Major — a slightly taller, 200-watt version of the classic Marshall head — with a Maestro ring modulator in the chain, and that the amplifier had a blown tube during the session. Rather than fixing it, the band kept the noise: the defect thickened Gibbons’s tone into the fat, sputtering growl that drives the song. Around it, the arrangement is classic late-seventies ZZ Top — a slow, funky, almost lurching groove, Dusty Hill doubling on keyboards, Frank Beard keeping the beat lean and behind the pocket, and that strange, talk-box-like guitar figure bubbling under the verses. The record’s architecture is part of its charm: the album version takes its time, stretching past four and three-quarter minutes and dropping down midway into a muttered, half-spoken funk vamp — Gibbons’s guitar squawking and stuttering through the ring modulator while the band leans back — before the riff hauls the song upright again for the final verses. It is a hit single designed by men who had never stopped thinking like a bar band: the groove is the hook, and the hook takes nearly five minutes to finish saying its piece.
For the single, Warner Bros. trimmed the 4:48 album version down to 2:40, backed it with the Degüello track Esther Be the One, and issued a promo version carrying a live take of the song instead. Cash Box praised the record as “smoldering, blues-rock” with humorous lyrics, while Record World noted its “wry wit and earthy rock riffs.”
A Modest Chart Run and a Public Health Warning
As the second single from Degüello, following the band’s cover of I Thank You, Cheap Sunglasses was a slow burner rather than a smash. It finally crept onto the Hot 100 in 1980 and peaked at number 89 — respectable, but hardly a prophecy of superstardom. Its real career was happening elsewhere: on stage, on album-rock radio, and in the band’s escalating relationship with actual sunglasses. The comeback tour carried ZZ Top to Europe for the first time — in April 1980 they made their first European appearances, performing for the German television show Rockpalast — and everywhere they went, the beards-and-shades silhouette that Cheap Sunglasses had just named for them went along.
The giveaway ritual that inspired the song now had a hit attached to it, and it became a liability of success. The band threw so many pairs into audiences that they kept running out. Worse, the medical profession took notice. Gibbons liked to tell of an optometrists’ convention in Hawaii where a poster warned the public, in so many words: don’t wear ZZ Top’s cheap sunglasses — they’re bad for your eyes. The concern was genuine enough (dark lenses without proper UV protection dilate the pupils and let in more harmful light), but as publicity it was priceless. The song had turned a five-dollar accessory into a controversy.
More importantly, it completed the band’s visual identity. Gibbons and Hill’s sunglasses — worn indoors, at night, everywhere — became as essential to the ZZ Top silhouette as the beards, a look so bankable that, as was widely reported, Gillette offered each man a million dollars in 1984 to shave the beards off for a television commercial. They declined: “We’re too ugly without ’em.”
Sampled, Covered, Immortal
The song’s catalogue life was equally secure. It was anthologised on ZZ Top’s Greatest Hits, on the four-disc box set Chrome, Smoke & BBQ — which also preserved the live version once issued on the promo single — and on Rancho Texicano: The Very Best of ZZ Top, the two-disc distillation of that box. For a number 89 single, Cheap Sunglasses has had an astonishingly long tail. Hip-hop found it early: EPMD sampled the song on You’re a Customer from their 1988 debut Strictly Business, Kid Rock lifted it for Cramp Ya Style on his 1990 debut, and Detroit rapper Esham built Nine Dead Bodies on it in 1992. Rock bands kept returning to it as well — the Warren Brothers covered it on the 2002 tribute Sharp Dressed Men: A Tribute to ZZ Top, Wolfmother cut it for 2011’s ZZ Top: A Tribute from Friends, and The Sword included a version on the deluxe edition of their 2012 album Apocryphon. The song remained a fixture of ZZ Top’s concerts for the rest of the classic line-up’s life together.
That is the real story of Cheap Sunglasses: a joke bought off a gas-station rack, written at highway speed, recorded through a broken amplifier, and rewarded with a number 89 chart peak — which then proceeded to outlive nearly everything around it. It gave the band its uniform, its mythology and one of its defining grooves. Rhinestone shades were for other people. ZZ Top chose the cheap ones, and made them priceless.