Word: antennas
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...Antenna -- the 14th album for ZZ Top, and its first since signing a $35 million, five-album deal with RCA -- the band has returned to its roadhouse roots and emerged renewed and as bristly as ever. The album kicks off with the high-voltage Pincushion and never lets up. From the syncopated stomp of Fuzzbox Voodoo to the scrawl of searing guitar notes on Cherry Red, the trio, led by Gibbons' supple guitar work, rocks with earnest, no-frills intensity that harks back to ZZ Top's first hit, La Grange...
...stripped-down sound came only partly by design. "The day we were supposed to start recording, our equipment truck was late," Gibbons explains. He wound up jamming on a borrowed, primitive Fender Esquire guitar and a 1949 amplifier. The lyrics on Antenna also stick to the basics, concentrating on the pleasures -- and dangers -- of women and fast vehicles. Still, there are signs that the outlook of the band has mellowed and deepened since the days when it cranked out such adolescent anthems as Legs and Tube Snake Boogie. There's a brooding fatalism in Deal Goin' Down: "When the deal...
...Antenna's title was inspired by the band's collective memory of growing up in Texas when the only way to hear records by such guitar masters as B.B. King and Lightnin' Hopkins was to tune late at night to far-flung radio outposts like Chicago's WLS and pirate stations along the Mexican border. Twenty-four years and many albums later, that shared appreciation is still the glue that binds "the little ol' band from Texas." "We wanted to listen mostly to the blues and early rock bands that drove our parents crazy," recalls Gibbons. "They still stand with...
...lost in space. Gone with it is another chunk of NASA's eroding reputation for technological brilliance. This year alone, the agency has slipped its deadlines on 13 space- shuttle launches, forcing it to cut flights from the schedule. It failed, after multiple attempts, to free the stuck main antenna on the Galileo probe to Jupiter. And on the same day controllers lost touch with Mars Observer, the space agency also lost contact with a newly launched, $67 million weather satellite...
...guide, it probably won't. Space is a harsh and unforgiving place, where Murphy's Law is paramount. In fact, many of NASA's best public relations successes have come at the brink of failure. Engineers restored 70% of the Galileo probe's function after its main antenna failed to deploy; astronauts grabbed the Intelsat-6 satellite by hand when a less dramatic rescue technique proved useless; astronauts survived an explosion on Apollo 13 that could easily have been fatal...