Like Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, ZZ Top’s run of four decades with the same lineup is a record that’s likely to never be broken. During that phenomenal stretch, band members Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard have cranked out some of the best blues-rock ever recorded. This Saturday, the group brings its Texas boogie to Atlanta’s Chastain Park Amphitheater. In the following phone interview, guitarist Billy Gibbons reflects on the group’s career thus far.

Russell Hall: In the band’s early years, ZZ Top opened quite a few shows for Alice Cooper. Is that where you got the idea to present blues-rock in a theatrical way?

Billy Gibbons: Yeah, man. Not to be redundant or state the ridiculous, but traveling with Alice Cooper in the early days of ZZ Top was just outrageous. His passion for extremes within the realm of show-biz flair was really inviting. He taught us quite a bit. It was wonderful.

RH: People seem to think that showmanship dilutes the purity of the blues, but of course Howlin’ Wolf and other vintage blues performers were great showmen.

BG: They really were! That’s a really interesting observation, one that seems to escape people. The general consensus is that blues music is very serious, and that it’s all strictly about composition and content. But the presentation and the showmanship factors were zooming.

RH: In those early years, was there a particular song where you felt ZZ Top really hit its stride?

BG: “La Grange,” in ’73. That was a green light for us. We liked the tones, the richness of the instrumentation, and the simplicity of the composition. We just thought, “All right, this is us. We can do this.”

RH: Jumping ahead a bit, when you recorded “Eliminator” in 1983, did you have any sense that you had something really colossal on your hands?

BG: No, we had no idea. We brought the same energy and enthusiasm to those sessions as we had done always, in the past. I suppose that it was the lucky alignment of stars and moon that made the sun shine.

RH: Did the string of hits the band had in the ’80s change your approach to making albums?

BG: It did change, but I believe that was more a result of technological breakthroughs in studio gear and equipment. After all, we remained the same three guys playing pretty much the kind of material that we had based the band on since its inception. There’s a standing joke in the band about ZZ Top being new-genre inventors as a result of the inability to read a technical manual on how to operate this or that piece of gear. It was just a matter of turning knobs until something sounded right, and then hitting the “record” button.

RH: Pete Townshend’s use of synthesizers on the “Who’s Next” album springs to mind. It’s like discovering a new toy that leads to a different kind of inspiration.

BG: That’s right. The manufacturers were intent on finding utility for these crazy new inventions, which really had not been proven yet. No one quite knew if any of them would find their way into successful outings from a place of experimentation. It wasn’t unusual to see truck after truck making back-door deliveries to the studio, unloading equipment that in some cases didn’t even have names yet. As long as you could turn it up loud, that was our code.

RH: A totally off-the-wall question: do you think writing great guitar riffs is a dying art?

BG: It’s definitely taken a different complexion. The cosmetics of contemporary pop music have found less need to commence with truly memorable and dexterous guitar pyrotechnics. And that might be a good thing, because simply bashing out some rash chords can be quite a bit of fun. There’s less demand to jump through the hoops of the learning curve. I think the new name-of-the-game is “pick it up and go.”