Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 83

ZZTop and the Regional Lyric Poetry of Texas

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stares too long: "makin’ eyes at me could not see just what was goin’ on
and then I took my first long look at the master of sparks on high."
The last few words are a subtle allusion to Slim’s identity as God.
The speaker, by staring too long, allows Slim to see into his mind, to
understand his weak spot, that is his fondness for fast cars. He is
seduced by the stranger’s ability to fulfill his fantasy of speed.
Slim's machine, his dragster or "hog” as it is called in the song,
suggests that dangerous frontier, that region to which both
McDonald's and ZZTop’s characters are drawn but over which they
have no control. The seductive power of Slim's machine, the beauty
of its speed, overwhelm the speaker's ability to remain indifferent,
to put on the street-hardened facade which would allow him to
swagger, shrug, and walk away: "I thought my oh my how the sparks
would fly / if that thing ever hit the ground." The result is that the
speaker finds himself trapped inside Slim's machine, unable to
control his own destiny: "Slim was so pleased when I had eased / into
his trap of death / he slammed the door but he said no more / and I
thought I'd breathed my last breath." The speaker ends by driving
the "hog" out of control, and as he is rolling through a fiery wreck, he
experiences an epiphany about Slim: "But through the sparks and the
flame / I knew that the claim of the master of sparks was God.”
Just as many of the songs of Tres Hombres and Tejas are about
living life on the edge where society's rules are easily skirted, so also
McDonald’s poetry is physically set on a sort of frontier between the
civilized and uncivilized as in "Black Wings Wheeling." Phrases
like "out here," "on hardscrabble," "on a range never green enough,"
are McDonald’s designations for the area where social rules become
blurred, where "killing's always in season." Although deadly and
confusing in its unmarked and unbounded condition, this range is
perhaps the place where "a man" can come closest to hitting the
switch, to driving while blind. The beauty of this landscape is as
extreme as its deadliness: "Skies are blue and vacant, / the earth is
white caliche." Indeed, the image of "hawks spiraling, / keeping a
delicate balance" suggests the almost absolute freedom and selfreliance of "riding on hardscrabble.” The hawk's balance on an
updraft of wind represents the lone man's precarious balance between
barbarity and civilized behavior. Certain values remain, though
pressed to the extreme of meaning. "The way to pray in the saddle /
is to ride slumped over, / spine bent like a question, / trusting horse