10 Overlooked Masterpiece Songs By Legendary Hard Rock Bands

10. ZZ Top - Master Of Sparks

"We could tell we had something special," said ZZ Top frontman Billy Gibbons of the band's 1973 album, Tres Hombres. Indeed, they had.

Tres Hombres remains one of ZZ Top's best-loved records for good reason. You could take your pick from any number of terrific songs here, including the group's first top ten US single, La Grange, and the wonderful blues rocker Jesus Just Left Chicago. Nestling no-so-innocently near the end of side one, the swaggering delight which is Master Of Sparks has arguably been overlooked.

There's an incredible backstory to this song, which perhaps sums up the wild humour of the band to a tee.

As Billy Gibbons told Sound Magazine in a 1976 interview: "A good friend and I put our heads together one day to weld a bunch of sucker gauge, which is the kind of pipe they use to build windmills, into a steel cage, a ball of sorts. We put a door on it, a seatbelt on a bucket seat. It even had shock absorbers to cushion the points of impact. Then we'd get drunk and roll this thing out of the back of a pick-up truck at 'bout fifty miles an hour and when it would hit the ground it'd send up a rooster tail of sparks a hundred feet in the air."