For a very brief period of my life, I wrote about popular music. I lived in Houston and attended the university of the same name. It coincided with the rise of several eventually famous artists, and one of them was ZZ Top. Their second album had just come out, I’d seen them live at local venues, and liked their sound. I thought they deserved a profile in the newspaper’s Sunday supplement. It was arranged, and that’s how I met Dusty Hill, who passed away this week.

This is not a story of a friendship. Back then journalists didn’t befriend their subjects. While I was still writing and frequenting clubs, however, I’d see Dusty and Frank Beard their drummer, usually together, drinking a beer in a quiet corner and we’d talk. The last time I saw them was backstage at a show in Rice Stadium. After that they were bad and nationwide and my career went in a different direction, too. I ran across a trace of Dusty many years later when I was playing a round of golf at local course in a Houston suburb and someone said, that’s Dusty Hill’s house. It made me feel good, for some reason, that he’d managed to survive the rock and roll lifestyle and become a suburban dad.

It likewise makes me glad, even in the sorrow of his passing, that he died in his sleep at home rather than some seedy hotel on the outskirts of town with a hooker at his side and a speedball in his arm. A small life victory, I guess. Meanwhile, he leaves behind a nice musical legacy that I share with my oldest son who called to talk to me after Dusty passed. We talked about their shows we’d seen, alone and together, and how their songs were part of our family soundtrack. And now I think I’ll put on Blue Jean Blues because there’s a really mournful note at the end of the song, that I need to hear right now.