THE LITTLE OL’ SAGEBRUSH BOHEMIANS

“When we did our first video,” recalls ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill, “the director said, ‘Go over there and watch the car go by.’ And (drummer) Frank (Beard) said, ‘Well, let’s don’t just stand here. Why don’t we do one of these things?’ ” Hill makes a sweeping semi-circle with his hand in a familiar after yooou gesture.

“That’s about as uncontrived as you could get, you know? And of course that led to all that other hand-jive stuff. But if we’d just sat down and said we’ve gotta come up with some hand movements, this is all we’d’ve come up with.” Hill makes an even more familiar, one-handed motion that would never pass the MTV censors.

Lounging around their road manager’s hotel room following the first of two concerts at the McNichols Sports Arena here, the three 36-year-old members of ZZ Top burst out laughing.

It’s past midnight, and the self-described “little ol’ band from Texas” is slightly more than halfway through its latest, 220-date tour, which touches down at the Forum for shows Thursday through Saturday. And everyone’s just plain whupped.

No one wants to admit it, though.

Not guitarist Billy Gibbons, who sits there stroking his 20-inch beard, smiling like a Cheshire Cat. Not Frank Beard, who stretches out on the sofa, his hand wrapped around an omnipresent can of diet soda. And certainly not Hill, who grins through his 20-inch beard, lights another cigarette and launches into what has become a well-known litany of ZZ Top lore.

Sure, they get more girls attending the shows now. It’s all in the wake of the runaway success of the band’s 1983 LP “Eliminator,” which sold 5 million and is still climbing. (The latest album, “Afterburner,” just topped 3 million.) And abetted by the trio’s marvelous series of videos, starring cars ‘n’ girls ‘n’ sheepskin-upholstered guitars, with the members of the band playing supporting roles as wheezy, here ‘n’ gone mystics.

“See, that’s the secret,” injects Beard, who despite his name sports only a mustache. “We’ve never taken ourselves that seriously. Everything is like ‘step back and look for some humor and some degree of coolness.’ And although that was always there in the music, it took the videos to get that across.”

“Now we play well,” adds Hill. “We take that seriously. Our lyrics are not Dylan, obviously. We’re not gonna sit around James Dean-ing all the time. We’re here to observe.”

Lest anyone think that the Top is purely a Frankensteinian creation of video director Tim Newman, the 1933 Ford prominently featured was custom built at Billy’s request long before the first video was story-boarded; everything from the Southwestern low-rent locale to the goof-squat choreography is dreamed up by the band. Which is why the Top’s videos don’t fall into the trap of having bevies of beauteous belles tugging at their beards. “We’re too hip for that,” Beard agrees. “We know those girls wouldn’t look twice at us either.”

This relentlessly self-deprecating sense of humor, in which all members take turns being the butt of one another’s jokes, has been part of the trio’s appeal almost since ZZ’s formation in 1969, when Gibbons exited Houston’s top semi-psychedelic rock band, the Moving Sidewalks (of “99th Floor” fame), to join forces with Hill and Beard, who’d just quit the Dallas-based American Blues, an equally semi-psychedelic quintet notable for--yes--its members’ all dyeing their Beatlecuts blue. Way before their video superstardom, the now Houston-based band scored platinum albums featuring such gritty blues-rock classics as “La Grange,” “Tush” and “Arrested for Driving While Blind.”

ZZ also sported a down-home, screw-loose image, mounting a 1976 tour memorable for a Texas-sized stage that found the band surrounded by a coyote, four buzzards, a rattlesnake, a longhorn steer and a buffalo--all live .

The trademark beards were an outgrowth of a voluntary layoff that began after that grueling, four-continent tour and lasted for three years. The way Hill and Gibbons tell it, they just never bothered to shave. Meeting at the airport when returning from Europe, Gibbons recalls spotting Hill and thinking, “Why the hell not?”

Gibbons, perhaps more than his partners, embodies the sagebrush bohemian spirit that is the band’s signature. “I figure my off-time is spent on the road somewhere,” he says, glancing out the window of his limo on the way to the show earlier that night.

Gibbons interrupts his discourse on the vintage guitar he recently purchased (“Its pickup switch reads, ‘1-2-3- All ,’ ” he chuckles) to point out a pink 1960 Cadillac parked outside a restaurant. “Glory be . . . would you look at that?”

He continues his freewheeling discussion of topics ranging from a photo someone snapped of the seven security guards it took to pull a member of the audience out of the crowd at their Tacoma concert last week . . . to a new Krazy Kat reissue of San Antonio Chicano R&B; Bands with a picture of Mando & the Chili Peppers loading their equipment into an ancient Packard on the cover . . . to the awesome stutter roll in Sunny & the Sunglows’ version of “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” . . . and to his shock at discovering that Dan Penn, writer of the epochal soul ballad “Dark End of the Street,” was an Alabama white boy.

As the Rocky Mountain sunset reflects off the mirrored glass of Denver’s downtown business district, the limo descends into the bowels of yet-another municipal sports arena. Gibbons heads for the backstage bathroom marked “ZZ Top: Accounting,” waves his hand and just-like-in-the-videos . . . disappears. No sound check, no sleep, no sweat.

ZZ’s loopy life style seems inseparable from the band’s Lone Star upbringing. “That (connection) is true,” offers Beard. “There’s a story goin’ ‘round Houston about two socialite women who come upon a talking frog that tells ‘em, ‘Help me, help me. I’m really a Texas oilman; give me a kiss and turn me back.’ Well, they just shine him on, but one of the women turns around, picks him up and sticks him in her purse.

“The first girl says, ‘Aren’t you gonna kiss him?’ And the second girl says, ‘No. That’s a talking frog and those are rare--right now they’re worth a lot more money than a Texas oilman.’

“I’ve heard that joke as a West Texas farmer. It’s in Dallas as a Texas real estate developer. It’s all over Texas in whatever area people are hurtin’. That’s the way Texans are. Those old Texas oilmen have made and lost millions. They’re not gonna lose their sense of humor.”

Aren’t a lot of ZZ’s songs (all of them collectively written) autobiographical, though?

“Just like that frog story,” drawls Beard. “That’s a true story. Happened to a couple of friends of mine.”

But isn’t it true--as recording artist/disc jockey Jimmy Rabbitt, himself a native Texan, once said--that to grow up as an outsider in Texas, you had to be really out ?

“Oh yeah,” exclaims Hill. “Look at the 13th Floor Elevators. Everybody thinks psychedelia started in San Francisco, but the Elevators came out of central Texas and turned everybody on. Roky Erickson wearin’ a Band-Aid right here (points to the middle of his forehead) to cover up his Third Eye. And that was two years before the Summer of Love!”

Just get this trio started on the subject of Texas musicians and clubs and weird scenes lodged in their collective consciousness, and a veritable flood of names, tales and memories pour out:

Backing Jimmy Reed and Freddy King. Opening for Jimi Hendrix. Listening to Wolfman Jack on XERB out of Mexico. Going down to the Grass Menagerie, the Bamboo Hut, the Colonial Club, the Pladium, the Kay-Jon Club or the Green Parrot to see Count Dupree, Lou Johnson, the Boogie Kings, Dean Scott and a host of other black and white bluesmen, soulmen, gutbucket hipsters and psychedelic flipsters, both legendary and obscure, in a rock ‘n’ roll call of fame that reads like some strange beat poetry that’s all but impenetrable to those outside the know.

“It wasn’t goin’ to the black clubs and playin’ blues ‘n’ soul that made you an outsider,” notes Gibbons, whose father was a pianist and part-time conductor with the Houston Philharmonic, and who credits the family’s maid, Stella Matthews, with his earliest introduction to the blues. “That came when long hair and the drug scene kicked in.”

Hill, whose mother was a former “Kate Smith-type” big-band singer, seconds, “It’s true that most of the kids at school didn’t go to those places. But I was already an outsider ‘cause they came from over there. (He motions to indicate across the tracks). And I lived over here, so it wouldn’t have made any difference what I did.

“It wasn’t any problem going to black clubs ‘cause I was a musician. Once they saw me get on stage and play, I was welcome.”

Wasn’t this a uniquely Southern experience and isn’t it reflected in the region’s music? Certainly as opposed to the English bands who learned the blues via mail-order records?

According to Gibbons, the difference is that “the English cats got better when they became aware of themselves, while that same self-awareness made the Southern cats play worse. See, Southern cats are natural, and if they think about it too hard, their music becomes ungainly and forced.”

Muses Beard, a former high-school quarterback who admits his initial motivation for becoming a musician was to get more girls, “That’s good. I never thought of it that way before. Speaking of the blues, though, we play a lot more blues privately than we do publicly anymore. That’s all we play the first two months of any rehearsals before we do a new record.”

Explains Hill, “It loosens us up. Puts us in a good mood--everybody but Frank, that is.”

“Blues makes my butt hurt,” Beard complains mockingly, adopting a mush-mouthed mumble. “Makes me laid-back too fahhr . . . . Naw, seriously, that’s our first love.”

Is that what’s kept the three of them together for the last 17 years, then?

“Separate rooms is what’s kept us together,” jabs Hill, to an eruption of laughter all around. “From the beginning.” More laughter. “No. See, when you’re out on the road a long time, the only people that you really know, that you can trust and really relate to are the other guys. They’re the only ones who know what you’re feelin’, ‘cause you’ve all just been through the same thing. It’s something we’ve never had to even talk about.”

“Besides,” says Beard, “that always gives us somebody else to hate. The road manager--or the interviewer.”

After more laughter, they focus on the question of what they do when they’re not on the road.

“I’m a homebody,” Beard answers. “I have a wife and two little twin boys and I live on a golf course and play golf.”

“I’m a homebody, too,” claims Hill, “ ‘Cept I stay at other people’s homes.”