If you see ZZ Top in action in 2025, you’ll witness bassist and former guitar tech Elwood Francis playing an absurd 17-string bass. The late Dusty Hill’s replacement brings out the yellow instrument for classic track Got Me Under Pressure – and surprisingly, he says, it gets the job done.
“It’s really not horrible,” Francis tells Bass Player. “But the guitar tech has had to deal with frets coming loose. It’s just your typical shitty, Chinese-made guitar!”
He continues: “My sound is big, thick and dirty, so you can hide a lot of impurities. We don’t do anything with them except use four strings: two on top and two on the bottom. Man, it gets through the fucking song!”
Ever a glutton for punishment, Francis has added another instrument to feature during Got Me Under Pressure: a black 15-string bass, which he calls his “B rig,” with a Teisco-badged headstock and a “High Selecta” inlay.
“It works,” he allows. “These things aren’t the best made – the nuts are made of wood! But cosmetically, they look right on. They play well enough to use as a stunt bass.”
The stunt started as a joke between Francis and Billy Gibbons, and quickly became a nightly ritual. Asked where he stumbled upon such basses in the first place, Francis says: “I found it through late-night internet surfing on the road.”
“I ran into the first one – the yellow one – and we bought it off a Chinese bootleg website. I don’t know which one; it was just randomly bought from whoever had it.”
“The first night we did, we said, ‘Let’s do it, get it over with, and forget it.’ The joke was just to amuse ourselves. We thought it would be the only time it got used, we’d laugh, and that would be the end of it.”
That wasn’t the case. “It wasn’t planned – I think that’s what makes it good and honest. But a lot of people don’t get it; it’s a polarizing thing.”
The Teisco logo on the 15-string’s headstock is “just an amp badge” which he applied because he’d “put a Fender logo on the yellow one, and we might as well go all the way with Teisco on this one.”
As for the “High Selecta” inlay, he explains: “That’s Lord High Selecta – a nickname Billy has for me. We need nicknames because Elwood isn’t enough! One of my friends said it, and the next thing you know, he’s having that put on the guitar! It’s a good slogan.”
Would Francies consider playing one of these massive basses for an entire show? “Oh, fuck no – absolutely not!” he replies. “I’m so happy to get that thing off. It’s so heavy, you know? It’s brutal. No, I couldn’t do that at all.”
It still beats playing the fuzzy guitars used elsewhere during the show. “The fuzzy sort of sucks – but in a totally cool way! When I was a guitar tech, I hated dealing with keeping the fur clean – we got little brushes for it!”
Francis has no clue if any more weird instruments will join the ZZ Top party. And anyway, he has his hands full dealing with the ones that already feature. “I barely messed with the 17-string bass before I played it for the first time,” he says. “I’m going, ‘Okay, I can make this work.’
“I could barely play it! I was like, ‘Oh, shit!’ because it was really confusing from the top – it wasn’t as easy as I expected. We didn’t do a soundcheck either. Soundcheck woulda been cool.
“But whenever I look down at that bass, I think, “Goddamn… of all the things to happen!”
- Catch ZZ Top on tour from March 5.
