“Legs” by ZZ Top

"Legs" was already more than a year old when ZZ Top finally sent it out in May 1984 as the fourth single from Eliminator, their 1983 album, and it turned into their biggest pop hit, reaching number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100. It's ZZ Top gone electric in a new way: Billy Gibbons, hungry for new wave and synth-pop, pushed the sound toward machines, and engineer Terry Manning swapped out Dusty Hill's bass and Frank Beard's drums for keyboard bass and a drum machine. Linden Hudson came up with that pulsing synth line in rehearsals.

The video, the third in Tim Newman's run of Eliminator clips, has a shy shop clerk getting a confidence boost from three glamorous women while the band blinks in and out of view. MTV played it to death, and it won the Video Music Award for Best Group.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.