Geez.

ZZ Top
Gimme All Your Lovin’ (live)
Sharp Dressed Man (live)
I Got the Six (live)
TV Dinners (live)
Got Me Under Pressure (live)
Legs (dance mix)
Legs (Album Version)
All of these tracks are from the 2008 Collector’s Edition of Eliminator, which was released in 2008 and has been seemingly out-of-print ever since. For some reason (and whatever the reason is, it’s a bad one) all digital versions currently being sold only have the single edit of “Legs.” Some CD versions have the album version still, while others use the single edit. It’s pretty hard to tell which has which just from looking though. Both are perfectly fine versions, I don’t prefer one over the other, but it would be nice to have the album version on the album (duh).

Completely exclusive to this release is the dope as fuck super extended “Dance Mix” which really jacks up the sequencers. It’s basically “I Feel Love” with blues riffs. A great concept that I’m really bummed more people didn’t get behind in the 80s. The live tracks are decent, but let’s be honest, this is an album that was never made to be played live. It’s a studio creation through and through.

I recently bought the remastered vinyl of Eliminator. It came on cherry red vinyl to match the Eliminator car and it sounded great. That is, until it got to “Legs” and it just suddenly cut out near the end of the song. No fade, no breakdown, it just cuts out entirely. What I suspect happened was that they pressed the original album version on a groove that was allocated for the single edit, which is over a minute shorter.  Whatever the reason, it’s pathetic that Rhino, who released the disc, never issued any sort of public recall for the LP. I emailed them twice, with neither message getting a response. I eventually had to return it to my local record store.

Anyways, between the error-riddled vinyl and the out-of-print 2 CD edition, Rhino/Warner Bros. really need to get their shit together on this one. Eliminator is one of the greatest albums of the 80s. They should teach it in music school and the class should be called “how to sell out for cash and still make a kick-ass record.” Because, let’s face it, a Texas blues band adopting a synth-heavy sound in 1984 was about as hard a sell-out as humanly possible. But they made it work.