Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 79

ZZTop and the Regional Lyric
Poetry of Texas
"The local is the only universal, upon that all art builds."
Thus William Carlos Williams quotes John Dewey in talking about
his long poem Paterson. Williams's claim is that the poet must
discover the universal in the particular, that the artist's imagination
relies upon the local as a starting point, an inspiration for its creative
impulses. Williams's emphasis on the local has had a profound
impact on contemporary poetry, and the work of Walt McDonald is no
exception. Director of the creative writing program at Texas Tech
University in Lubbock, McDonald writes poetry which draws its
lifeblood from the physical and emotional harshness of the West
Texas and South Plains landscape with its sandstorms, rattlesnakes,
and monotony. Interestingly, the emotional harshness which is so
pervasive in the landscape of McDonald's Texas is present also in the
early music of the Texas rock 'n roll band ZZTop. Whether depicting
a farmer trying to raise cotton on the drought-ridden plains or a
laborer waiting all day for a bus crammed full of irritable fellow
workers trying to get home, there is in McDonald's collection Rafting
the Brazos and ZZTop's albums Tejas and Tres Hombres an over
whelmingly painful sense of the ultimate futility of all effort. But
coupled with this feeling of futility is a rather spartan tone of
celebration, a rejoicing in the stark, frontier-like beauty of the locale,
the Texas landscape. In neither ZZTop's music nor McDonald's poetry
does the pleasure, the celebratory tone, supplant the sense of pain and
suffering so that an easy optimism results. Instead the pain of
harshness and the pleasure of stark beauty are grafted together to
represent each artists' vision of the local, of what is his Texas.
The main difference between ZZTop and McDonald is the tone
of voice heard in their respective works. In ZZTop the prevalent
voice is that of the street wise survivor who knows about drugs,
prostitution, and the malaise of urban existence; McDonald, on the
other hand, gives us the voice of a rural pioneer living on a frontier
between the industrialized modern world and the rugged, desert-like
landscape of the south plains with its droughts, tornadoes, rattle
snakes, and sandstorms. For all the difference of tone between ZZTop
and McDonald, the end results of the songs and poetry turn out to be