Frank Beard, the drummer who anchored ZZ Top through every album, every tour and every lineup for more than half a century, has died at 77. Beard had been in hospice care and died at his ranch in Richmond, Texas, with his family at his side, according to the band’s longtime publicist Bob Merlis. No cause of death has been disclosed.
Billy Gibbons, now the last surviving member of the classic trio, announced the news with a statement that read less like a press release than a farewell between old friends. “Today, Elwood and I lost a great friend and collaborator, and the world lost one of the most naturally innovative drummers and a great and true son of Texas,” Gibbons wrote, in remarks carried by Newsweek. “His signature backbeat was key to keeping ZZ on top. The band of which he was part for six decades is going to keep on keeping on as he had wished.”
Accounts differ slightly on the timing. TMZ, citing the Fort Bend County Medical Examiner, reported that Beard died Monday, August 17, while the Associated Press account said Tuesday. What no one disputes is how the end came: quietly, at home, after a stay in hospice and a difficult stretch of health problems that had already taken him off the road.
The quiet engine of a loud band
Born in Frankston, Texas, in 1949, Beard came up through the Dallas club circuit in American Blues, the band he shared with a bassist named Dusty Hill. In 1969 Beard joined a young Houston guitarist called Billy Gibbons, and Hill soon followed him in. The trio that resulted never changed for the next five decades — no firings, no walkouts, no revolving door. Beard played on all 15 of ZZ Top’s studio albums, driving “La Grange,” “Tush,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” “Legs” and “Gimme All Your Lovin'” with the Texas shuffle that Rolling Stone remembered as the band’s hard-swinging heartbeat.
The numbers tell part of the story: more than 50 million records sold, six No. 1 singles on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart, seven Top 10 albums and three Grammy nominations, plus an MTV-era reinvention in the 1980s that made three middle-aged Texans unlikely video stars. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame called in 2004, and Beard’s acceptance speech ran a single sentence: “All I have to say is that most of my life has been a pleasant surprise, and so is this. Thank you.”
He was never the frontman and never wanted to be. “I’ve found the people I was meant to play with,” he said in the 2019 documentary “ZZ Top: That Little Ol’ Band from Texas.” “I never wanted to quit, and never wanted to get fired.”
The most ironic name in rock
Then there is the joke that followed him for 50 years: Frank Beard was the only member of ZZ Top without a beard. When Gibbons and Hill emerged from a late-1970s break with the chest-length whiskers that became the band’s trademark, Beard — who had a shorter one at the time — took one look and shaved. He liked to say the bare chin let him wander a supermarket or a shopping mall without being mobbed while his bandmates couldn’t leave the house. Pop culture writer Richard Crouse, in a tribute quoted by Newsweek, noted that the band joked about it for decades — Frank “had the name” and the anonymity too — until he finally grew a short “ZZ goatee” around 2013.
What happens to ZZ Top now
Beard’s final months were quieter than his fans knew. He stepped away from the band’s tour earlier this summer over unspecified health issues — outlets differ on exactly when, with GB News placing it weeks before his death and others saying months — and drummer Michael Monahan took over the stool. Newsweek reports Monahan is expected to remain with the band, alongside Gibbons and bassist Elwood Francis, who inherited the low end after Dusty Hill’s death in July 2021.
ZZ Top has canceled its immediate shows in the wake of Beard’s death, though ABC reports the band plans to keep its Austin dates — a city the statement described as something of a second home for him. And then, per Frank’s own wishes, the little ol’ band from Texas will keep on keeping on, as it somehow always has: same name, same songs, and now just one man standing from the trio that started it all 57 years ago.
Beard would probably have shrugged at the fuss. He spent his career seated behind two showmen in matching beards, keeping time so steadily that people forgot how hard the job was. The pleasant surprise, as he called it, lasted more than half a century. The backbeat stops; the band, as he wished, plays on.
