"Velcro Fly" is the fourth single off ZZ Top's 1985 album Afterburner. The song peaked at #15 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart, and #35 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1986, the band's last ever top 40 hit.
Release
For the single release the song was remixed in two versions: by Bill Ham and by Jellybean. Singles included both 7" and 12" edit versions of thore remixes with addition of Jellybean dub mix. A 12" Jellybean version of the song is featured on the box set Chrome, Smoke & BBQ.
The video was released on the DVD Greatest Hits: The Video Collection, along with other videos from the band's albums Eliminator and Recycler.
Reception
Robert Christgau called the song a "highlight" on Afterburner.[1]Cash Box called it a "seductive rocker that finds the 'Lil Ol' Band From Texas' in its usual tongue-in-cheek mode."[2]Billboard called it a "techno-boogie stomper buried in fuzz and percussion."[3]
In popular culture
The song appears in Stephen King's novel, The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands, where in the series's post-apocalyptic alternate reality of Mid-World, the song's looped percussion intro, played via a large PA system in the decaying city of Lud, is referred to as "the God Drums". The city's barbaric inhabitants believe it to be sacred, and sacrifice themselves to the drumbeat. In the book, Eddie Dean asserts that the song was never released as a single in his world. In the audiobook an actual sample of Velcro Fly is used to accompany the narration.
