Bass Player: Dusty Hill
Joe Michael Hill (May 19, 1949 – July 28, 2021) was an American musician who was the bassist of the band ZZ Top. He also sang lead and backing vocals, and played keyboards. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of ZZ Top in 2004. Hill played with the band for over 50 years; after his death, he was succeeded by the band’s longtime guitar Tech Elwood Francis, in line with Hill’s wishes. In no way a flashy player, Hill had an flawlessly solid presence that allowed guitarist Billy Gibbons to do his thing and give the band one of the most distinctive sounds in Rock music.
The bass part featured here is Dusty’s line for the tune ‘Master Of Sparks’ from the 1973 ZZ Top album, ‘Tres Hombres’. A great exercise for the beginner reader. Bass learnin’ aside, there is another tale to tell.
The song tells the true story of Billy Gibbons and his friend R.K. Bullock who with a workman, welded together a steel ball cage with a seat and seatbelt fitted inside. They placed the cage into the bed of a truck and at night, after reaching a speed of 60 miles per hour (97 km/h), on Highway 6 near Houston (also known as Jack Rabbit Road), rolled the cage out the back with the hapless narrator and friend taking a ride inside. The cage generated a tail of sparks on the road but in its crushed condition stopped rolling. Still moving at high speed, the now egg shaped cage crashed into a fence. Both occupants survived relatively unscathed and were awarded the title “Master of Sparks” by the cheering crowd.
“I guess it’s safe to talk about it now … A good friend and I put our heads together one day and went out of town to his folks spread where we got the help of the black foreman there 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. Man it would tear you up to get in that thing. It was the most amazing spectacle I’d ever laid eyes on.
“‘Course we kept it a secret from everybody ’cause, if our folks had found out, we’d all been off to military school, but then my buddy went and printed up flyers and distributed them at school sayin’ to come and see the ‘master of sparks’ that night on jack-rabbit road which was Highway Six, our launch pad.
“Hell, sure enough, come sundown we got out there to find both sides of the road lined with cars waitin’ to see this. Some guy even had the back end of his pick-up truck loaded down with ice and cold beer, he was givin’ away free beer. So, after realizing what was coming down, both of us loaded ourselves in for the last ride and I guess we must of been going sixty miles an hour, drunk, laughin’ like hell and, when we rolled ourselves out, we hit the ground so hard it squashed the ball out like an egg. Needless to say, it didn’t roll too well and we spun off the road and hit a fence, tore bout a hundred yards of barbed wire down. I was screamin’, he was bleedin’, but, needless to say we were awarded the coveted title of having done the wildest thing.”