ZZ Top walked back onto a stage on Saturday night for the first time since Frank Beard died, and they did it in Austin — at ACL Live at the Moody Theater, a room the band has called one of Beard’s favorite venues, in a city his bandmates say he treated as a second home. There was no minute’s silence. There was no eulogy. There was a new man behind the drum kit, and according to Billy Gibbons, Beard had picked him himself.
Gibbons told the story to the crowd after the opening number, “Got Me Under Pressure.” He said he and bassist Elwood Francis had taken “an unexpected call from our dear Frank Beard, our dear drummer for 50 years,” in which Beard admitted something he had never admitted before. “My bass drum foot’s a little weak,” Gibbons quoted him as saying. “Can you get my man to take over?” Gibbons said he replied that the man in question had been doing pretty well. Beard’s answer, per Gibbons: “Yeah, that’s what worries me.”
The man in question is Michael Monahan, and he played the whole set.
A band that keeps handing the seat over
If that arrangement sounds familiar, it should. ZZ Top has now done this twice. When bassist Dusty Hill died in July 2021, the band carried on with Elwood Francis — their longtime guitar tech — moving to bass, a succession Parade reports was in line with Hill’s own wishes. Gibbons is now the last man standing from the classic trio that formed in Houston in 1969 and stayed intact for five decades, one of the longest unbroken core lineups in rock.
Beard died on Monday, August 17, at 77. The band said he was in hospice care at his ranch in Richmond, Texas, with family beside him, and gave no cause of death. In his statement, Gibbons called him “one of the most naturally innovative drummers and a great and true son of Texas,” adding that “his signature backbeat was key to keeping ZZ on top” and that the band “is going to keep on keeping on as he had wished.”
The timeline of how Monahan got the job is where accounts diverge slightly. Parade reports that Beard stopped touring back in March 2025 over unspecified health issues, with drummer John Douglas filling in first and Monahan taking over later. Billboard and others framed Monahan’s arrival as a more recent development, tied to the band abruptly canceling an August 5 Hollywood Bowl date with Cheap Trick over what the band described as “unforeseen personnel matters,” before resuming in Fresno on August 7 with Monahan behind the kit. Both can be true — a long absence, then a formal handover — but the band has never spelled out the sequence in public, and Gibbons’ Saturday story is the closest thing to an explanation anyone has offered.
An unsentimental night
Whatever the paperwork, the show itself was not a memorial. Gibbons made that explicit. He told the audience they were all there for a celebration and to have a good time, and then the band got on with it.
Francis took the stage with the canary-yellow 17-string bass he has become known for, one of a rotation of absurd instruments that included fur-covered guitars and a Gibbons axe with the word “BEER” across the back. Gibbons introduced Francis at one point by deadpanning that it was a special night because the bassist had just got out of prison — a gag that ran straight into “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide.”
The set moved between the greasy early blues-rock and the sleek synth-era hits: “Waitin’ for the Bus” and “Jesus Just Left Chicago” from Tres Hombres, then “Gimme All Your Lovin'” from Eliminator, then “Pearl Necklace,” “Cheap Sunglasses,” “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Legs.” Gibbons also aired a new solo track, “Brown Paper Bag,” and made a passing reference to a new album without dwelling on it. The encore ran “Brown Sugar,” “Tube Snake Boogie” and “Thunderbird” before the inevitable “La Grange,” after which the three men took a bow and left quickly.
What happens next
ZZ Top canceled shows in Salt Lake City and Colorado Springs after Beard’s death, then chose Austin to come back. It was not an arbitrary pick — CultureMap Austin notes the band’s own statement called ACL Live one of Frank’s favorite venues, and the city has ZZ Top history stretching back to the notorious 1974 “First Annual Texas Sized Rompin’ Stompin’ Barndance & Bar B.Q.” at the University of Texas, where roughly 80,000 people did enough damage that the venue reportedly did not host another rock show until 1995.
The second Austin date was scheduled for Sunday night. After that, The Big One! Tour rolls on: Terre Haute, Indiana on August 29, then Kettering, Ohio, East Meadow, New York, Gilford, New Hampshire and a run of American dates, before legs in Mexico, Chile, Brazil and Argentina. It is currently booked to finish on November 24 in Buenos Aires.
Beard was the one member of the classic lineup without the beard, a joke the band never got tired of. He played on 15 studio albums, on a catalog that has sold an estimated 50 million records, and on the run that put ZZ Top in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. The last time all three original members shared a stage was July 18, 2021, at the Iroquois Amphitheater in Louisville — five years and a month before Saturday night in Austin.
