I should be talking about music. Some of my weaker tunes are getting rusty because I’m not playing them every weekend. Mind you, with my 100+ song list, this is not as serious as it appears. Consider that I’m swapping many old numbers with more “complicated” music. By that, I mean tunes that have or can be made more elaborate by, er, “bass enhancement” or stage presentation as I get more daring with the process. Do I have an example? Hang on. Yes, I do.I used to play a 50’s hit, “Bye Bye Love”, a three-chord special. I replaced it with “This Kiss” (Faith Hill), a different class of music all together. Presentation is now a huge part of my act. Wanna hear something really rotten? I’ve also perfected tactics that draw a lot of stage attention away from the guitarist and onto my bass playing, especially during lead breaks. Moves that he cannot counter (unless he has brains but that has never been an issue with Florida guitarists). Yet never doing anything he could really accuse me of, “What, I’m just playing my bass, dude.”
I particularly accentuate moves that audience musicians would notice. I do this by pretending that as a bassist, I am musically “unschooled”, duh-yuck. I told you how I purposely finger bass notes below the nut; which is always good for a laugh. (Hardeehar, Zeke, lookit dat dum bass guy playin’ da notes he don’t haff ter.) In “This Kiss”, I go out of my way to over-dramatically pluck the entire piece on the E string. (It uses almost every note in a chromatic octave and a half). If you watch me, it looks like I don’t have a clue how to do it right, but it is right. Attention is attention in this game, provided you follow certain rules of professionalism. You don’t yank the other guy’s cord.
Often I intentionally make it look like I’m about to lose my place, dropping from high up the neck to a perfectly placed note that seems impossible to hit from that distance. Don’t confuse this with the old guitar slide, it isn’t the same. For openers, people are used to seeing slides, while on the bass the distance is half again as great and quite unexpected. It is a startlingly rapid movement and I totally milk it and that is a bassman's right--if he can do it. Most can't.
I used to do such things when the Hippie wasn’t looking. He never caught on. At our last gig, a woman stated I was the best musician on the stage. Does the Hippie back off and let me call the tunes? Hardly, he quickly switches over to music with so-so bass lines (such as “Tangled Up In Blue”, or that sucky “Mary Jane” thing) for the duration. As for stealing his show, I’d always play the innocent, “What, dude? You are too hyper-sensitive, man. You’re scaring me.”
So you’ll know, I use all these antics with Eddie, who is in complete agreement since he does not play lead guitar. He may even view prima donnas with much the same disdain. There you go. Recalling last New Year’s Eve at the Jamaican café reminds me another class of egomaniac: the blues harmonica player. (Like the goofs who’ll stand in front of the bassist or keyboardist like they are his underlings.) While everyone has an ego, I point out that competing for top billing via only showmanship is permissible. It’s called show biz. But any other tactic is beneath contempt. Naturally, none of the above applies to drummers, ahem, cough, cough.
I made my first tip at the shoe place. Ten bucks. Alfredo lasted out my weird learning curve and today we did a record 11 jobs, including a wetsuit repair. I use the equivalent-unit method to determine jobs, as an aside to any management accountants out there. I don’t learn like most people, I tend to make the same errors repeatedly until one day, ker-pow, I’m good to go and awful hard to catch. I may have a prosperous month after all. Alfredo is developing arthritis in the fingers, a frightful calamity for his line of work. I do most of the cutting and gluing but what happens if one day he cannot stitch?
In a similar setting, Eric the Red across the way is disappearing for days at a time, not answering his door. Concerned friends have been coming over and asking, but quite frankly I do not keep tabs on neighbors. Eric is pushing eighty and if he wants solitude, leave him alone. He is certainly sharp enough to understand the consequences if he croaks and nobody knows. Friends worry that he sits in his chair too much but has he not earned that right? The best I can do is engage him in short conversations when I see him, which is about once very second week.
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