Rough Boy

In a 1985 interview with Spin magazine, Billy Gibbons explained: "He's this fictitious character who was the only way that ZZ Top was going to get to play another ballad. The way he came up was, 'How would a ZZ Top fan allow such a beautiful, lush bed of sound into their realm?' The pretty music had to have a rough boy in it. He's there. On El Loco we did 'Leila' which is ZZ Top-meets-the-Beach Boys. I don't think it worked as well as, say, a synth programmer meeting a rap guy in an alley in New York. The only thing is, how long is it going to be before somebody says, 'Hey, man! You the rough boy?' How are you going to answer that?"