It is 5:10 a.m. and pouring rain so do poke back here later after the day has occurred. This trailer is on the block. The Urban Group got my final sales offer late y’day (give me twice what I paid for it and it is yours.) Acceptance of that offer changes most things. Jean never did call or write, so I’m going to a blues jam session tonight. Blues, where all bass players have the identical stance, stage presence and repertoire. They even sound, dress and weigh the same. Maybe born the same year, by the looks of it.Except for me. I wear totally black sleeveless outfits and a cowboy hat with the price tag still attached. Watch for two minutes and it is obvious I never took a bass lesson in my life. Guess I didn’t learn what could not be done. I use as many fingers per fret as it takes to make the dern thing sound right. I use a super-thin nylon plectrum, never muffling the sound of a good bass with “finger-picking”. I also play the goober role to a tee, duh-yuck, duh-yuck, learned all that in Florida.
The last blues jam I went to was in 1991. The house bass player was the antithesis of my style. Studio-trained, ex-guitarist, could he ever substitute jazz progressions, I believe I counted one that was 48 measures long. Where he was slap-damping 64ths, I rarely play more than 8 to the bar. Yet not until I started cranking did that audience came flooding onto the dance floor from all sides. Sigh, those were the days.
My aversion to guitar players who switch over to bass is ancient and well-founded. The muddiness of old stand-up bass lines results from the hand-plucked fretless design. It had an historic role, but I’ve seen contemporary players of the instrument stuck in the past because of the architecture. The electric bass, to me, has always represented a distinct instrument. Even the electric guitar was adapted from an acoustic model.
There is a wrong way to play any instrument – and that is to play it exactly the same as anybody else. Not covers, for only the deaf could suggest Chuck Berry’s bassist played the same tune anything like I do. The closest style I could be accused of is boogie piano riffs, not electric or standup riffs, thank you.
If you put 100 guitarists in a room, handed them each an electric bass and asked them pretend they were “kewl”, 99% would try to finger-pick. That is, they would choose the boring and unoriginal. It is a mass retarded thing among guitarists, I suppose. (Notice also, that you correctly imagined all 100 were men. Other than screaming latter day rockers, there are no female bassists of note out there.)
Except my hero, I’ll let you look up the details. She is from Everett, WA and wrote bass lines for such classics as “Feelin’ Alright”, “Good Vibrations” and “Come Together”. She has sold over a half million bass books (got that), four of them to me. Her bass material has been used by the Beatles, Beach Boys, Ray Charles, The Righteous Brothers, Johnny Mathis, Nancy Sinatra, Sam Cooke, Glen Campbell, Lou Rawls, Jan & Dean, Henry Mancini, The Lettermen, Paul Revere & Raiders, Monkees, Buckinghams, Sonny & Cher, Chris Montez, Andy Williams, Quincy Jones, Joe Cocker, Ike & Tina Turner, Mel Torme, Bobby Darin, Frank Zappa, Wayne Newton, Herb Alpert, Sting, and Don Ho. To name a few. Those who’ve read my earlier material know who I mean, so silence in the audience please. Finally, here was an electric bass player who treated it as a new invention.
You may recall some of her music in the following: MASH, Mission Impossible, Brady Bunch, Addams Family, Cannon, McCloud, Room 222, Bill Cosby (Hicky Burr), Ironside, Kojak, Hawaii 5-O, Wonder Woman, Soap; Thomas Crown Affair, Sweet Charity, Airport, In The Heat Of The Night, The New Centurions, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, and Walk Don't Run. To name a few more. (Yet the Hippie thinks she sells cosmetics. Mind you, that's the guy who wanted me to waste time studying Clapton.)
She alone developed most of the techniques in use today, including slap, string-popping and funk bass. However, she both recognized same as narrow styles, and also stayed away from finger-picking when it came to writing classics.
