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This box set contains five of ZZ Top's very best albums – Rio Grande Mud, Tres Hombres, Fandango, Deguello, and Eliminator – each presented as a mini-LP in a cardboard sleeve within this small slipcase box…

ZZ Top is an American rock band formed in 1969 in Houston, Texas. The band consists of guitarist and lead vocalist Billy Gibbons, bassist and co-lead vocalist Dusty Hill, and drummer Frank Beard. The band and its members went through several reconfigurations throughout 1969, achieving their current form when Hill replaced bassist Billy Etheridge in February 1970, shortly before the band was signed to London Records…

With their second album, Rio Grande Mud, ZZ Top uses the sound they sketched out on their debut as a blueprint, yet they tweak it in slight but important ways. The first difference is the heavier, more powerful sound, turning the boogie guitars into a locomotive force. There are slight production flares that date this as a 1972 record, but for the most part, this is a straight-ahead, dirty blues-rock difference. Essentially like the first album, then. That's where the second difference comes in – they have a much better set of songs this time around, highlighted by the swaggering shuffle "Just Got Paid," the pile-driving boogie "Bar-B-Q," the slide guitar workout "Apologies to Pearly," and two Dusty Hill-sung numbers, "Francine" and "Chevrolet." There are still a couple of tracks that don't quite gel and their fuzz-blues still can sound a little one-dimensional at times, but Rio Grande Mud is the first flowering of ZZ Top as a great, down-n-dirty blooze rock band.