ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard dies at 77 after health issues, band cancels upcoming shows
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- ZZ Top’s longtime drummer Frank Beard has died after years of facing health-related issues. He was 77.
- The rock ’n’ roll band has called off multiple upcoming shows as a result.
ZZ Top is mourning the loss of longtime drummer Frank Beard, who has died at age 77 after years of facing health-related issues.
The band announced Beard’s death on Tuesday via Instagram, with founding member and frontman Billy Gibbons writing in a statement that he and fellow member Elwood Francis “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.”
The Fort Bend County Medical Examiner confirmed to The Times that Beard’s death was reported Monday. A cause of death was not revealed. He died at his ranch in Texas with family by his side after a stay in hospice, TMZ reported.
Last week, ZZ Top canceled its Hollywood Bowl show due to health issues with longtime drummer Frank Beard. Michael Monahan will replace the bandmember for the remainder of the Big One tour.
Beard died weeks after ZZ Top called off its Aug. 5 concert at the Hollywood Bowl, reportedly due to his health issues. In March 2025, the Texas trio also shared that Beard would temporarily step away from the band’s Elevation tour to address a separate health issue, later revealed to be foot and ankle problems. The veteran drummer had also missed shows because of an emergency appendectomy in 2002. Dusty Hill, ZZ Top’s longtime bass player, died in 2021.
ZZ Top said in Tuesday’s announcement that its concerts in Salt Lake City and Colorado Springs have been canceled in the wake of Beard’s death. The band will continue its the Big One! tour this weekend, including two shows at Austin City Limits, which it said had become one of “Frank’s favorite venues in a city that had been something of a second home” for the drummer.
Beard was born June 11, 1949, in Frankston, Texas, a small town outside Dallas, and grew up in Irving; he played in a series of bands with Hill before joining ZZ Top in 1969 after Gibbons broke up his psych-rock group the Moving Sidewalks. The trio performed for an audience for the first time in 1970 and released its debut album, “ZZ Top’s First Album,” in 1971. “Tres Hombres,” which came out in 1973, spawned the hit single “La Grange”; ZZ Top quickly followed that with another hit, “Tush.”
Ahead of the band’s show Monday night at the Hollywood Bowl, Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson reveals how their signature songs came to be.
In the 1980s, the band expanded its gritty boogie-rock sound to incorporate synthesizers and programmed drums and became an unlikely MTV sensation with songs like “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Legs,” the latter of which cracked the Top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100 thanks in part to a memorable video in which Gibbons and Hill showed off their 20-inch beards. (In an ironic twist, Beard was the only member of ZZ Top to go without.) “Eliminator,” the band’s 1983 LP, sold more than 10 million copies in the United States and earned a Grammy nomination — the first of the trio’s three — for rock performance by a duo or group with vocals.
In 2004, ZZ Top was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, where the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards hailed the band as “the heartbeat of the whole country” and said, “These cats know the blues, and they know how to dress it up.” The band’s most recent studio album, “La Futura,” came out in 2012; in 2019, ZZ Top told its story in an acclaimed documentary, “That Little Ol’ Band from Texas,” in which Beard spoke frankly about his experiences with substance abuse. The drummer’s survivors include his wife, Debbie, and three children.
Times staff writer Andrea Flores contributed to this report.
