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How the Fender Bass Changed the World-Copiar Word-Copiar-Copiar

This document is a book titled 'How the Fender Bass Changed the World' by Marcus Miller, which explores the history and impact of the Fender bass guitar. It includes acknowledgments, a foreword, and a detailed table of contents outlining various chapters that discuss the evolution of the electric bass and its significance in music. The author emphasizes the transformative role of the Fender bass in popular music and its lasting influence on musicians and instrument design.

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Raphael Romano
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© © All Rights Reserved
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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
16 views194 pages

How the Fender Bass Changed the World-Copiar Word-Copiar-Copiar

This document is a book titled 'How the Fender Bass Changed the World' by Marcus Miller, which explores the history and impact of the Fender bass guitar. It includes acknowledgments, a foreword, and a detailed table of contents outlining various chapters that discuss the evolution of the electric bass and its significance in music. The author emphasizes the transformative role of the Fender bass in popular music and its lasting influence on musicians and instrument design.

Uploaded by

Raphael Romano
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 194

SAN FRANCISCO Pj£

3 1223 05890 8907

HOW

by Marcus Miller
a BASS book
SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY

3 1223 05890 89

How the
ENDER BA
Changed the World
*
Dedication
To James Jamerson,

who showed the world what could be done

with the Fender bass,

and Jack Bruce,

whose brilliant playing in Cream inspired me

to become a bass player.


.

«
Acknowledgments
A inspiração inicial para este livro veio quando Nicky Orta e MattBonelli
me convidaram para dar uma palestra na Jazz Bass Conference de 1993 em
Miami, Flórida. Sem saber sobre o que falar, comecei a considerar a história
amplamente não registrada do baixo elétrico. O esboço que desenvolvi para
aquela palestra foi posteriormente expandido em uma série de colunas da
revista Bass Player publicadas em 1998; elas se tornaram o ponto de partida
para este livro.
Na maior parte , este é um livro de análise e opinião , não de história
primária, então sou grato a todos os escritores cujo trabalho duro contribuiu
para meu conhecimento de instrumentos musicais e dos músicos que os
tocam . Eles estão todos listados em Fontes , mas devo agradecimentos
especiais a Chris Jisi, Richard R. Smith ,Mikael Jansson , Allan Slutsky e
Tom Wheeler . Agradecimentos especiais também a Christian Fabian , que
me contatou com a história do encontro de Leo Fender em 1952 com Lionel
Hampton , e Dan Lakin da Lakland Basses , que me ouviu dar uma breve
palestra sobre o baixo elétrico em um evento de feira comercial e disse: "Ei,
Jim, por que você não escreve um livro?" E, claro, devo muito à equipe da
Bass Player , passada e presente , e ao pessoal da Backbeat Books ,
especialmente Matt Kelsey e Dorothy Cox.
Como historiador do baixo, devo reconhecer toda a ajuda que recebi do
meu colega Tony Bacon. Trocamos informações sobre o baixo elétrico por
anos , e nosso diálogo contínuo melhorou muito minha compreensão do
desenvolvimento do instrumento. Também tivemos alguns jantares italianos
memoráveis ​juntos no improvável local de Frank Furt, Alemanha . Tony é
infalivelmente espirituoso e gentil, e sou grato a ele de muitas maneiras.
Muito obrigado a Tom Wheeler , Chris Jisi e minha esposa , Susan
Strahosky ,por lerem o manuscrito e oferecerem dezenas de boas sugestões
para melhorar o material. Estremeço ao pensar no que este livro poderia ter
sem a orientação deles. Também sou grato a Richard Johnston, por
ser um editor tão habilidoso e razoável; a Paul Haggard, que foi o
melhor diretor de arte possível para o projeto; e à equipe de produção da
Backbeat Books que juntou tudo, especialmente Amanda Johnson e Gary
Montalvo.
Acima de tudo, quero agradecer a Susan e nossos filhos, Miles e Nadia,
por demonstrarem muita paciência e compreensão durante as muitas
noites, fins de semana e feriados em que trabalhei neste livro.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Marcus Miller 11

Overture 13

Chapter 1: Long Before Leo 17

Chapter 2: Just Before Leo 21

Chapter 3: A Bass Is Born 31

Chapter 4: Butterflies Sr Basses 39

Chapter 5: Jail Break 45

Chapter 6: Ride the Wild Bass 52

Chapter 7: Carol Sr Joe 60

Chapter 8: St. James 68

Chapter 9: All You Need Is Bass 78

Chapter 10: The Big Boing 85

Chapter 11: S.F. Giants 92

Chapter 12: Jack It Up 104

Chapter 13: Thumbslingers 112

Chapter 14: The World's Greatest Bass Player 1

Chapter 15: Battleships Sr B Strings 132

Chapter 16: Dance, Dance, Dance 140

Chapter 17: Miles Ahead 150

Chapter 18: Forward Into the Past 168

Finale 180

Sources 183

Photo Credits 188

Index 189
Foreword by Marcus Miller
Em 1971, o baixo era o instrumento mais legal da música . Todos os caras
legais tocavam um. Larry Graham tocou um com Sly & the Family Stone, e
Jermaine Jackson tocou um com o Jackson 5. Se você quisesse ser legal
como esses caras , deveria tocar baixo . Uma banda popular até se batizou
com o nome do baixista . Qual era o nome dele? "Kool", claro! No início e
meados dos anos 70, bandas como Kool & the Gang , Sly & the Family
Stone e o Jackson 5 criaram músicas que incendiaram o mundo — e cada
música tinha uma linha de baixo carregava a música e ficava sua cabeça o
a
tempo todo. Isaac Hayes até revolucionou o mundo cinematográfico naquele
ano com seu "Theme from Shaft", que tinha a linha de baixo mais legal de
todos os tempos.
12 ■ Foreword

As a 12-year-old in 71,1 decided I had to play bass. My buddies Brian,

Tony, and Ferg all decided the same thing: "We're gonna play bass!" We

called it "bass," not "bass guitar," because—to be honest—we didn't know

any other kind of bass existed. As long as we'd been aware of music (six

or seven whole years!), the bass had been played on a bass guitar. Sure,

we'd seen the acoustic bass standing in the orchestra room at school, but

it never occurred to any of us that anybody really played that thing

(except maybe Snoopy in the "Peanuts" cartoons!). No, for us 12-year-

olds, "bass" meant "bass guitar," the coolest instrument in the band.

Little did we know that the instrument we were so drawn to was really

a baby, not much older than us. It's amazing that in the short time

between when the instrument first appeared on records in the early 1950s

and when I decided to play it in 1971, the bass guitar literally took over.

Yeah, the electric guitar turned a lot of heads in those same years, but the

bass guitar was the instrument that let you know the '50s were over and

music was going to some new places.

In this book, Jim Roberts tells the story of the electric bass guitar. After

reading it, I felt fortunate to have been able to witness an instrument's

coming of age. The '60s and 70s were amazing years for the bass guitar.

It was a new instrument and there were no rules. The piano is, what, 300

years old? There aren't many new ways to play a piano. You might think

you've discovered something new, but there's a good chance some Aus¬

trian cat figured it out on harpsichord a couple hundred years ago. But

the bass guitar—it really was a new instrument. Cats were free to discover

its possibilities. They strummed it, plucked it, thumped it—whatever. And

the creative atmosphere of those times fueled their discoveries. What we

have now, in the year 2001, is a mature instrument played by thousands

of people all over the world.

Check out the story of the bass guitar, the coolest instrument in the
band!
13

Leo Fender with the

original Fender Precision

Bass, introduced in 1951.

Overture
When radio repairman and inveterate tinkerer Leo Fender invented the

instrument he called a Precision Bass, he had modest goals. As he later

told Tom Wheeler: "We needed to free the bass player from the big dog¬

house, the acoustic bass. That thing was usually confined to the back of

the band, and the bass player couldn't get up to the mike to sing.

And...guitar players would have an advantage if they could have an

instrument with frets that would make doubling on bass easier for them."
14 ■ Overture

Leo Fender did not invent the electric bass. The credit for that goes to

Lloyd Loar, who conceived of an amplified "stick" bass in the 1920s. Leo

Fender did not even invent the electric bass guitar, although he has often

been credited with doing so. It now seems clear that Paul Tutmarc had the

idea first. Tutmarc designed and produced a horizontally played, fretted

electric bass in the mid 1930s. His instrument did not gain much accept¬

ance and soon disappeared from sight. (A Tutmarc bass is on display at

the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle.)

What Leo Fender did do was invent the first commercially successful

electric bass guitar, which was introduced in 1951. Its acceptance was by

no means a sure thing. The history of music is littered with seemingly

impressive new instruments that were either ignored or, at best, played

for a short time before being discarded. (Remember the telharmonium?

Neither does anybody else.) A few new inventions became popular and

eventually changed the course of music—the pianoforte, for instance—

but these have been the exceptions. Leo Fender's Precision Bass is, with¬

out question, one of these notable exceptions.

When I first started to gather material for this book, my working title

was "How the Electric Bass Changed the World." But as I learned more

about the instrument's history—and especially after I investigated the

work of Loar and Tutmarc—I realized it was the Fender bass that had trig¬

gered the revolutionary changes I wanted to write about. I find this

remarkable, and I doubt there has ever been another mass-production

musical instrument that has had such a singular impact. So, to be accu¬

rate, I revised the title of the book.

I mention this, at least in part, to allay any suspicions that this is

somehow an "endorsed" or "commissioned" work the Fender Musical

Instruments Corporation asked me to write. Nothing could be further

from the truth. Our relationship is one of journalist and subject (and also

musician and instrument)—nothing more.

In addition, my definition of "Fender bass" goes beyond the instru-


Overture ■ 15

The Fender factory in

Fullerton, California, as it

looked in 1952, shortly

after the introduction of

the Precision Bass.

ments made by the Fender company to include other basses Leo Fender

designed. The most important of these is the Music Man StingRay Bass,

which Leo created (with some help from Forrest White) in the 1970s, after

he had sold the Fender company to CBS. Leo also designed some good

basses at G&L, his last company, before his death in 1991. These "post-

Fender Fender basses" represent a continuation of the legacy that began

with the original Precision Bass.

Leo Fender's basses have had a powerful influence on both musicians

and musical-instrument designers, and that influence continues to this

day. Thus, this is a tale of both technological and musical developments,

of instruments and players—and of the greater world around them. I have

tried to show how all of this is connected, because I believe that focusing

on either the instruments alone or the musicians who played them ulti¬

mately produces a distorted and incomplete picture.


16 Overture

As I write this, the Fender bass is about to celebrate its 50th anniver¬

sary. While its musical capabilities are generally accepted today, its role as

a powerful agent of change has been largely overlooked. As much as any

other modern instrument, the Fender bass transformed the sound of pop¬

ular music—and, in doing so, had an effect that reverberated beyond the

bounds of popular culture.


17

Chapter i: Lonj Before Leo

We think of the bass guitar as a new instrument and the double bass (the

upright acoustic bass) as an old one. That's certainly true if we consider

the electric bass as the primary example of the bass guitar family. There

were some antecedents, but the electric bass as we know it traces its direct

lineage back to the Fender Precision Bass of 1951. It's a mere babe, as

musical instruments go.

The upright—the double bass—has a history that stretches back more

than 500 years. There is evidence of upright stringed bass instruments

from the late 1400s, and the earliest known illustration dates to 1516.

These early basses were members of the viol family. Viols have fretted fin¬

gerboards and bodies with sloping shoulders; violins, which came along

a little later, are fretless and have a different body shape, with rounded

shoulders. (The terminology used at the time can be somewhat confusing.

For instance, the word violone sometimes refers specifically to a bass viol

but was loosely applied to just about any stringed bass instrument.)

As noted, viols have frets. These are pieces of gut tied around the fin¬

gerboard at the lowest five to seven half-steps. Most of the early bass

viols had six strings, so the true origin of the fretted 6-string bass can be

traced back several centuries. (And you probably thought it was Anthony
A bass viol from 1701.
Jackson's idea.)
Notice that this beautiful
The early stringed basses came in all sizes, from ones so large they
6-string instrument has
required two men to play them to chamber instruments not much big¬ frets, which were pieces of
ger than a cello. Regardless of the instrument's size, finding adequate gut tied around the finger¬

strings was a major problem. The oversize gut strings required to play board to provide more

low E were criticized for being slack and indistinct. The problem was precise intonation.

even worse when the lowest string was tuned to C.


18 ■ Chapteri

To overcome some of the problems poor strings cause, bass players

used dozens of different tunings. We know that some of the early bass

viols were tuned GCFADG while others were tuned DGCEAD. Tunings of

5-string instruments included the familiar EADGC as well as FADGC,

DADFttB, FADFttA, and lots of others. Bach's music has markings for

basses in several different tunings, including the violone grosso (tuned

CGDA like a cello, but an octave lower) and the contrabass da Gamba

(tuned either DGCEAD or GCFADG). When 3-string basses became popu¬

lar in the eighteenth century, they were tuned ADG, GDG, GDA, or maybe

even CGC. The 4-string tuned EADG did not become the standard orches¬

tra bass until early in the twentieth century. There were many other tun¬

ings, some of them scordatura: temporary retunings of one or more strings

to suit a particular piece of music—a technique that Michael Manring has

recently explored on electric bass with high artistry.

Vertical vs. Horizontal


There's no doubt that the upright bass, as played in orchestras, jazz

groups, bluegrass bands, rockabilly combos, and various other settings, is

an old instrument. But consider this: the antecedents of the modern bass

guitar may be even older.

To understand this, you have to accept this assumption: Stringed bass

instruments can be divided into two general groups, vertical basses and

horizontal basses. The upright acoustic bass is the leading example of a

vertical bass. The electric bass guitar is a horizontal bass (unless it's being

played by Bill Wyman or Fieldy), and there are other horizontal bass

instruments, including acoustic bass guitars—and some very old forms of

bass lutes.

The lute is an ancient instrument. There's evidence it existed in prim¬

itive form as far back as the ninth century, and it was at the height of its

popularity in the sixteenth century, when the earliest bass viols were
Lon<? Before Leo ■ 19

being built. Lutes and guitars have much in common, including a hollow

body with a soundhole, a fretted fingerboard, and a peghead with tuning

machines. The term luthier, now applied to guitar builders, originally

referred to the makers of lutes. Even so, a lute is not a guitar—but it does¬

n't require a huge leap to think of the bass lutes of the Renaissance as

forerunners of the modern bass guitar. It's also interesting to note that the

lute was a vehicle for songs and other "popular music," and lute music

was written in tablature—so the ancient lutenists might be thought of as

the rock guitarists of their day.

In the middle of the sixteenth century, the desire for stronger bass

accompaniment led to the development of bass instruments known as

the theorbo and the chitarrone. These bass lutes had larger bodies and

longer strings than standard lutes. As you can see in the photo on page

20, some of them had an extra set of bass strings, played open, that were

attached to a separate peghead. On some "contrabass" chitarrones, these

bass strings were more than five feet long. These huge lutes, it's safe to

assume, must have sounded as impressive in the lower register as the bass

viols of the day.


In his work The Baroque Double Bass Violone, musical historian Alfred

Planyavsky cites a 1623 text that says: "The large body [of the theorbo]

was fitted with two fingerboards in order to be able to be strung with

double bass strings." This is a clear indication that the theorbo was capa¬

ble of producing notes deep in the lower register and that it functioned

as a bass, not baritone, instrument. Planyavsky's book draws from the

work of seventeenth-century scholar Michael Praetorius, who frequently

mentioned the theorbo and the chitarrone, spelling the latter ghitaron.

This spelling suggests a kinship to the guitarron, the large acoustic bass

guitar used in Mexican music. (Chitarrone is an Italian word; Harper's Dic¬

tionary of Music lists "bass guitar" as one of its meanings.)

In the baroque period (circa 1600-1750), the basso continuo (accom¬

paniment indicated by bass notes only) of many pieces was provided by


20 Chapteri

A seventeenth-century

chitarrone. In many ways,

this bass lute can be

thought of as an ancestor

of the modern bass guitar.

a trio often comprising a harpsichord, a theorbo, and a double bass. This

pairing of two stringed bass instruments might be the earliest known

example of "tic-tac" bass (see Chapter 6), with the bass lute providing

punch while the bass viol, with its thick gut strings, filled out the bottom.

The basso continuo "rhythm section" was a staple of musical performance

well into the eighteenth century.

All of this suggests that the history of the bass guitar, if stretched to

include other horizontal basses, goes back a lot further than we might

have thought. We could even conclude that the horizontal and vertical

approaches to building stringed bass instruments have developed in par¬

allel over the past 500 years—so perhaps we should think of the double

bass and the bass guitar as "cousins" rather than "father and son."

Attempts to build better upright acoustic basses and other types of

acoustic bass instruments continued into the early twentieth century. But

then a new factor entered the picture: electricity.


21

Chapter 2: lust Before Leo

Early in the twentieth cen¬

tury, mandolin orchestras

sometimes included over¬

size "mando-basses" to

provide the low end. These

fretted instruments were

usually played vertically,

although this 1924 shot of

the "Gibsonians" shows

one in a semi-horizontal

position with a special

body support. (That's pio¬


Volume is the problem. That's why stringed bass instruments have been neering engineer Lloyd

made in so many different shapes and sizes: builders have been trying to Loar on the far left.)

make them louder. Instrument designers from the fifteenth century right

up to today have experimented endlessly to build a bass that produced

strong, clear, low-frequency sounds that projected well.

The first half of the twentieth century was a particularly fertile period

for instrument development, and there were many attempts to build a

better bass. One particularly loony idea was offered by a German inven¬

tor named Augustus Stroh, who created a whole line of mechanically

amplified instruments. His bass had a solid body, with a bridge that rested

on a flexible diaphragm. To the bridge he attached a large horn that

looked like the ones found on early phonographs; the horn amplified the

vibrations from the bridge, in the manner of a cheerleader's megaphone.

A more conventional approach to the volume problem involved tak¬

ing an existing acoustic instrument and simply making it bigger: the


22 ■ Chapter 2

The Biggest Guitar In The World!


The
REGAL BASSOGUITAR
The BASSOGUITAR is just what the dance orches¬
tra man or string band bass player is looking for.
This beautiful instrument combines the vast depth
and resonance of the double bass with the brilliant
tonal quality of the finest guitar! Strings and
tuning are the same as the double bass.
Novelty value of the BASSOGUITAR is very im¬
portant. It is bound to be the talk of any night
club, tavern or stringed group . . . because it is the
biggest guitar in the world! It is a "Natural for
small guitar groups using the double bass!
The BASSOGUITAR is played to best advantage by
slapping, plucking or picking (leather pick).
The BASSOGUITAR is a perfect instrument —
perfect in volume — in tone — and in attention
value!
BASSOGUITAR STRONGLY EUILT.
The BASSOGUITAR is strongly built, so that it can
stand up under the strain of constant travel.
Each ^ ^ $75.00
Mackintosh Cover—Snap Buttons 9.00
Covert Cover—Leather trimmed
Slide Fastener 15.00
{38}

The Regal Bassoguitar of the


"mando-bass," for example, was the largest member of the mandolin
1930s was conceived as a

cross between an acoustic family. Gibson, Vega, and other manufacturers offered these fretted bass

guitar and an upright bass, instruments, which supplied the low end in the mandolin orchestras that
as the company's sales litera¬ were popular in the early 1900s.
ture made clear: "This beauti¬
One of the most interesting instruments in this respect was the Regal
ful instrument combines the
Bassoguitar. Introduced in the early 1930s, it was a gigantic acoustic gui¬
vast depth and resonance of
tar that stood over five feet tall (not including the 10" endpin) and was
the double bass with the
played vertically. It had a flat fingerboard, like a guitar's, but the 42" scale
brilliant tonal quality of the

finest guitar!" length of an upright acoustic bass. The frets were filed flush with the fin¬

gerboard, making the Bassoguitar what would now be called a lined fret-
lust Before Leo ■ 23

less. It didn't have much of an impact on the music scene, although one
The Dobro company
was played (and endorsed) by Israel Crosby in the Fletcher Henderson offered a fretted bass

Orchestra. version of their famous

The Dobro company offered a similar instrument that was an oversize resonator guitar. This 1931

version of its metal-resonator guitars. Like the Regal, it was so big it had promo photo shows one

that belonged to the


to be played standing up. (And wouldn't you just love to hear what that
Rancho Revelers. Why they
sounded like?)
were hanging out next to
In the late 1930s, Gibson took the idea a step further with its Electric
the airplane is unclear.
Bass Guitar. (The name was certainly prophetic.) Like the Regal Bassogui-

tar, this instrument was a huge hollow-body guitar equipped with an end-

pin for vertical playing. But, unlike the Regal, the Gibson had a magnetic
■ Chapter 2

pickup (although the only amplifiers available

at the time were designed for guitars). Accord¬

ing to vintage-guitar authority George Gruhn,

two of these unique upright bass guitars were

made between 1938 and 1940. One of them

ended up in the hands of Wally Kamin, Les

Paul's brother-in-law, who used it to accom¬

pany the pioneering electric guitarist in his

trio. The other was played by the teenage

female bassist in a Hawaiian-music group

called the Tropical Islanders.

Electric Sticks
While some builders were creating oversize

instruments to get better bass sounds, Gibson

engineer Lloyd Loar had a different idea:

build a small instrument and use electricity to

make the notes louder. In 1924, Loar report¬

edly built a prototype of a "stick" bass that

was, in concept at least, quite similar to the

upright electric basses of today. The pickup

was an electrostatic transducer mounted in a

Bakelite box under the bridge (and we can


Just before World War II, Gibson built two of only wonder what Loar might have used for
these beautiful instruments, know simply as
an amp). When Gibson was less than enthusi¬
Electric Bass Guitars. Nearly five feet tall,
astic about the idea, Loar formed his own
they were played vertically (notice the

endpin). One of them was used by Wally company, Vivi-Tone, to market the bass and

Kamin in the Les Paul Trio. his other electric instruments. There is no evi¬

dence that Vivi-Tone electric basses ever made

it into production, although one of Loar's


lust Before Leo 25

Introduced in 1936, the

Rickenbacker Electro Bass-

Viol had a metal body and

horseshoe-magnet pickup.

It could be attached to the

top of its amp, and the

endpin-to-amp connection

also included the output

jack. Only a handful of

these instruments were

made before production

ended in 1940.
26 ■ Chapter 2

ELECTRIFIED DOUBLE BASS!


NEW - STARTLING - LONG-NEEDED!

Here is ihe answer to the Bass player s dream. It is light

It is quickly portable—Full size bass scale,- may be

bowed, plucked or slapped. Special speaker reproduces

true bass tone. It is novel -— It is unique It is very

practical. Be the first to show this startling new instru¬

ment in your locality.

Specially designed electric pick-up with volume control.

Special amplifier to be used only with this instrument.

Every bass player a potential buyer. Fine for all fretted

groups as well as orchestras. Operates on 110 volt 60

cycle alternating current.

Complete outfit consisting of instrument,


carrying case for instrument and amplifier
Complete $180.00

{25}

The Regal company of


apprentices, Bruno Joseph, later built several electric uprights under his
Chicago also offered an

electric upright in 1936. own name.


Like the Rickenbacker Elec¬ During the 1930s, upright electric basses were offered by several musi¬
tro Bass-Viol, it came with cal instrument companies, including Regal (who seemed to be deter¬
a companion amp. mined to do something different in the bass market). The best known was
probably the Rickenbacker Electro Bass-Viol, designed by George
Beauchamp. Introduced in 1936, it was a metal "stick" that plugged
directly into the top of its amp. Equipped with the familiar Rickenbacker
horseshoe-magnet pickup, the Electro Bass-Viol had gut strings that were
wrapped with metal foil where they passed through the pickup. In the
late 1930s, Columbia released a recording by Mark Allen & His Orchestra,
lust Before Leo ■ 27

\Oom, ZOOM, ZOOM,

ZOOM, ZOOM,

-lidien ,t& Mie ^mudic /bj

Mte Hicj, Badd Vial

fi Ft—
dg> K ct;
&L-=-&
w ■..c ;

And while you’re listening, just imag¬


ine standing close to this majestic in¬
strument, your fingers slapping the
strings, bringing forth deep, resonant
tones—WHAT A THRILL!!!

The majestic beauty of this Bass stands unrivalled by the most expensive imports, No. 240KAY
The top is of spruce and the back of grained curly maple carefully selected and fully
swelled. It has a maple neck and ebonized fingerboard and trimmings. It is extremely No. 240KAY—-Orchestra Model Bass
Viol .$120.00
durable, fully guaranteed and highly recommended for orchestra or school work, where
quality, durability, and price are the prime considerations. This instrument can be bowed No. 261K—Leather Carrying Strap.. 3.25
No. 241K—Bass Viol Canvas Weather¬
as well as picked and slapped.
proof Bag (equipped with pockets
for bow and strings) . 10.75
An Oahu Course of Bass Lessons has No. 321K—Bass Viol Stand. Made
been written for the new student. Write of brass and steel, heavily nickel-
for information to Dept. C-25 of the Oahu plated. Adjustable to pitch and
Publishing Company, Cleveland, Ohio. angle, permitting Bass to be held
on stand in correct position. Folds
compactly . 15.00

VEGA ELECTRIC BASS VIOL AND AMPLIFIER


Modern science together with modern streamlining has created a new,
slim Bass. An easily portable instrument whose smooth, full tones can be
made to rise and fall at the player’s command.

Its wood body is only 6 inches wide; Neck and fingerboard are regulation size; Pull plate
machine heads; Volume and Tone controls conveniently located on side of body. Body
is attached to a plate which slips into a bracket on a heavily-nickel-plated floor stand and
is then adjustable for height and tilt. Only a second is required to attach or remove the
instrument from its stand; Included is a weatherproof bag with pockets for stand and bow;
Gut, metal wound or, in fact, any type of
strings may be used.
The 18-watt amplifier used with this
Bass is supplied with special rubber
mounting to handle the heavy bass vibra¬
tions and is recommended for perfect re¬
sponse and clarity of tone.

No. 133K—Complete outfit for 110


volt, 50-60 cycle A.C. operation .. $232.00

Complete outfit for A.C.-D.C.


operation . 265.00

Bass Viol only, with bag, cord


and stand .. 155.00

13

The Vega electric upright from the 1930s had a

curved body and a vibration-sensing pickup. It

came with an amp that offered 18 watts of power

for "heavy bass vibrations."


28 ■ Chapter 2

featuring the Rickenbacker bass. It may not have been a hit, but it was

probably the first record ever made with an electric bass.


In the early 1930s, a steel

guitarist named Paul H.

Tutmarc built a solid-body The Tutmarc Bass


electric upright with a
By the time the United States entered World War II in 1941—which effec¬
magnetic pickup. This
tively halted all musical instrument research and development—there
cello-sized instrument was
were gigantic bass guitars and upright electric basses, all of them played
never actually produced by

Tutmarc's Seattle-based vertically. But the idea of a horizontally played electric bass guitar had to

company, Audiovox wait for Leo Fender...or did it?


Manufacturing, but it was In the early 1930s, a steel guitarist named Paul H. Tutmarc built a
an important stepping solid-body electric upright with a magnetic pickup. This cello-sized
stone to an even more rad¬
instrument was never actually produced by Tutmarc's Seattle-based com¬
ical instrument.
pany, Audiovox Manufacturing, but it was an important stepping stone

to an even more radical instrument. Years later, Paul s son, Bud Tutmarc,

told Mikael Jansson that his father's compassion for bass players spurred

the idea: "My dad, being a bandleader and a traveling musician, always

felt sorry for the string bass player. The instrument was so large that once

the bassist put it in his car, there was only enough room left for him to

drive. The other band members would travel together and have much

enjoyment, while the bass player was always alone. That is the actual idea

that inspired my father to make an electric bass."

In 1935, Paul Tutmarc had another bright idea, one that would free

up even more space in the bass player's car. Why not build a really small

electric bass that could be played horizontally like a guitar? This idea

became the Audiovox Model 736 Electronic Bass, which was a truly star¬

tling innovation: a solid-body, fretted 4-string equipped with a magnetic

pickup. The scale length was 30V2" (close to the short-scale standard that

Gibson and other bass manufacturers later favored), and the instrument

had a mirror-steel pickguard and a metal bridge. Tutmarc built his steel
lust Before Leo ■ 29

The Audiovox Model 736

guitars from black walnut, and he used the same wood for the bass. List Electronic Bass and its

price was $65. inventor, Paul Tutmarc of

Seattle. Introduced in
About 100 Audiovox Model 736 basses were made, and their distribu¬
1936, the Model 736 was
tion was apparently limited to the Seattle area. In 1947, Bud Tutmarc
the first solid-body electric
revived the idea with a similar instrument he called the Serenader Electric
bass guitar designed to be
String Bass, but that didn't catch on either. (One of Bud's innovations was
played in a horizontal posi¬
the unusual choice of purpleheart wood for the fingerboard. This exotic tion. Unfortunately, it was

hardwood has only recently come into common use in guitarmaking. The ahead of its time and had

Tutmarcs were ahead of the curve in many ways!) no commercial or musical

impact.
The big question is, of course: Did Leo Fender know about the Tut¬

marc basses? A 1999 article by John Teagle in Vintage Guitar magazine

speculated that Leo may have at least seen some of the Audiovox ads.

Richard R. Smith, the author of Fender: The Sound Heard 'round the World—
30 ■ Chapter 2

the definitive work on Leo Fender—doesn't think so. Smith, who inter¬

viewed Leo extensively over a period of years, said: "He never told me

about it, although Leo and [Fender co-worker] Don Randall were aware of

the Rickenbacker Electro standup and the Gibson Mando Bass. This

whole case is probably just parallel evolution, like bats and birds. They

both have wings but completely different origins."

There's certainly not much resemblance between the Audiovox Model

736 and the original Fender Precision Bass, and the different specifica¬

tions—especially the scale lengths—tend to support Smith's "parallel evo¬

lution" explanation. But we must give Paul Tutmarc credit for conceiving

a horizontally played electric bass guitar and building what now appears

to be the first functional version (barring any further discoveries of

primeval instruments).

It should also be noted that James Thompson, the father of well-

known bass builder Carl Thompson, made a one-of-a-kind electric bass

guitar in 1942. James Thompson modified a broken Kay archtop guitar by

attaching a long neck and crude pickup, and he used this "Frankenstein

bass" on his home recordings. On these tapes, the instrument sounds

much more like an electric bass guitar than an upright bass.

Clearly, the idea of a fretted electric bass that could be played hori¬

zontally like a guitar was a good one. Somebody just had to build one that

worked well and that musicians would accept.


31

Chapter 3: A Bass Is Born

If Leo Fender wanted to "free the bass March 24, 1953 C. L. FENDER De*. 169,062
GUITAR

player from the big doghouse," he also Filed Not. 21. 1952

had another constituency in mind.

Richard R. Smith told the story in

Fender: The Sound Heard 'round the

World: "As dance bands downsized in

the late 1940s, some [guitar] players

lost work because they could not dou¬

ble on stand-up bass. According to Leo,

they came complaining to him because

they did not want to take the time to

learn upright techique. They needed a

bass they could play like a guitar—a

fretted bass."

Leo Fender was not a musician him¬

self, but he always listened closely to


INVENTOR.
the musicians who were his customers CLPBENCC L. rCNDZB

BY -f*
and friends. After hearing the guitarists'
PTTOBNBVS

problem, he began to ponder a solu-

tion. Leo had already built and marketed the Broadcaster guitar, later The design patent for the

Fender Precision Bass was


known as the Telecaster. Following the "bigger for bass" approach of the
not filed until almost a year
Gibson mando-bass (which he knew about), all he had to do was take his
after the instrument was
solid-body electric guitar and make it bigger. And so he did.
introduced. Apparently,
The original Fender Precision Bass was very much like a big Telecaster.
Leo Fender was not too
It had a square-sided ash body and a bolt-on maple neck. Figuring out concerned anyone would

how long, to make the neck was one of the more challenging engineering try to steal his idea.
32 ■ Chapters

Based on the Telecaster


problems. According to Smith, Leo Fender used information in a physics
guitar, the Fender Precision
textbook that belonged to secretary Elizabeth Nagel Hayzlett, a UCLA stu¬
Bass had an ash body and

a bolt-on maple neck. The dent, to come up with a 34" scale length. But George Fullerton, who

chrome covers concealed a worked with Leo for many years, said it was more a matter of trial and

single-coil pickup and a error: "We tried some shorter scales like 30" and 32", but they didn't seem
two-saddle bridge equipped
to get the resonance we needed. We may have even tried something like
with a string mute.
a 36" scale, but when we got to that length the distance between the frets

was too wide to be practical for a player."

However they did it, 34" was an uncannily accurate choice. It has

proven to be the standard for 4-strings ever since. It also fit nicely

between the 25 V2" scale of the Telecaster guitar and the 40-42" scale

lengths of most upright basses.

Leo chose the name "Precision Bass" largely because the instrument
A Bass Is Born ■ 33

was fretted and therefore had more precise intonation than an upright

with its fretless fingerboard. Smith says the name also refers to the "pre¬

cise" (focused) tone of the instrument and the accuracy of the Fender fac¬

tory's machines, which were more precise than traditional guitar builders'
hand tools.

The prototype had tuning machines adapted from an upright and

steel-wrapped gut strings. (For the production instruments, Fender ordered

flatwound steel strings from the V.C. Squier company.) Because the body

was so large, Leo gave it cutaways for better balance, creating a shape that

foreshadowed his 1953 design for the Stratocaster guitar. The pickup was a

simple single-coil design, with one polepiece directly below each string.

There were two knurled control knobs: volume and tone. Anticipating that

musicians would pluck the strings with their thumb, Leo included a finger

rest mounted below the strings on the large black-plastic pickguard. The

bridge had two saddles made of pressed fiber. Chrome covers concealed

both the pickup, and the bridge. These were not merely decorative: the

pickup cover provided electronic shielding, and the bridge cover con¬

tained a rubber string mute.

It's easy for contemporary bass players, accustomed to the sustain of

high-fidelity instruments with roundwound strings, to forget that the

Precision Bass was intended to mimic the sound of an upright. Leo

Fender knew that if his odd new instrument were going to be accepted,

it would have to serve the same function as "the big doghouse." Even

though the flatwound strings sounded incredibly dead by modern stan¬

dards, they still sustained longer than the gut strings players used on

uprights. That's why Leo included a mute to deaden the sound and pro¬

duce short, thumping notes.

The second part of the equation was the amplifier. Leo Fender knew

that the Rickenbacker upright electric bass had been sold with a com¬

panion amp, and he quickly determined that his standard guitar amps

could not handle the low frequencies his new bass generated. So he set to
34 ■ Chapter 3

work creating a new amp, which became the first Fender Bassman. Espe¬

cially designed for bass reproduction," the Bassman had a single Jensen

15" speaker and a 26-watt tube amp with enough power to produce a rea¬

sonable bass sound at low to medium volumes.

Not many people have heard what the original Precision Bass

sounded like when it was introduced, but one person who has is guitar

and bass designer Rich Lasner. "I took an original P-Bass, with flatwound

strings as it would have been delivered and set up to the specs that they

used, with the mute in the cover," he told me. "I played it through an

original Bassman amp at medium volume and listened to what it was sup¬

posed to sound like. It's the loudest upright bass you ever heard."

Surging Undertow
Fender introduced the Precision Bass late in 1951, to little fanfare. Many

in the music industry loooked upon Leo's solid-body electric guitars with

skepticism, and they saw his strange bass contraption as further proof he

was crazy.

The first real sign of acceptance came in an unexpected area: jazz.

Leo Fender had thought his bass would be looked upon favorably by gui¬

tarists in country-western music (his favorite style), but few country

musicians showed any interest in it. One exception was Joel Price, who

reportedly bought the first Precision Bass sent to Nashville and played it

at the Grand Ole Opry in 1952. While Leo may have noted that event

with some satisfaction, it's safe to assume he didn't think one of his new

basses would be publicized for its use in a well-known jazz group. But life

is full of surprises.

After he introduced the Precision Bass, Leo Fender actively pro¬

moted its use, often going to concerts and nightclubs to show it to

musicians. Sometime in early 1952 he was in New York City, where he

encountered jazz vibraphonist and bandleader Lionel Hampton. Many


A Bass Is Born ■ 35

years later, Hampton related the tale

to bassist Christian Fabian. According

to Fabian: "Lionel told me that he was

at a jam session with his bassist, Roy

Johnson, where they met 'the guy

who invented that thing/ meaning

Leo Fender. Roy went up on the band¬

stand and tried it. Lionel said that

people booed him, because he was a Hamp off the now ba&» u* Billy May and tho Johnnie Ray*.

New instruments
jazz bassist playing this electric bass.

But Lionel really liked the sound, and


Hamp-Iified Fiddle May
Leo Fender told him he could keep
Lighten Bassists Burdens
By LEONARD FEATHER
New York—Do you happen to be a i»a»* player, or tyrnpe
the bass. Right after that, they took it thlre with anyone who i»?
Have you <r>er lugged your Instrument from iho hit*, up
five flights of stairs, or neross o crowded street on a hoi
on a tour of the South. Lionel said summer tiny?
Have you ever had to submit to up a little above normal, cut
those corny gags nhoat the near* through tee whole bottom of ths
sighted inmihtJy «ho s«y» you band like a surging undertow.
that everywhere they played, it got a earth take that girl to your roam? It wasn't the first time an »lec-,
Well, maybe your worrying ii#>« trie bass had been heard, of cents*.
wiH soon be over. Many years ago, in the IPSOs, Moss
A bass-ic revolution has been Alien in the aid Jimmie I.unceforc
lot of attention. People would come f ofttg On quleiiy {« msnte circles. band started toting aiound wh«i
t ilm became apparent some looked like a bodiless bass, a *kel»
months ago when Lionel Hamp¬ ton instrument, but the regulation
ton’s band played a gig in town. length. At that time bass ampli*,
up afterwards and ask about it. Leo Suddenly we observed that there fication had trot attained its prea-
was something wrong with the ent degree of finesse, and tee
band. 3t didn't have a bass player. suits were little, if any bet
And yst—we heard * bass. than those produced by the t
Fender had given Lionel his phone On a second giance we noticed ditionai wooden bass violin, Ctu
something even odder. There, were by Jackson and other* hav* ad<
two lusters—hut w* only heard an amp to the regular buss t
one. And then the Pieter* became to Chubby's five-stringed i
number, and he gave it to the people clearer. Sitting .next to the guitar¬ tion).
ist was someone who held what
looked like » gutter at first glance, Wee Whale
who were asking about the bass. He but on closer inspection revealed But Roy Johnson has hims
a tang, fretted neck and a pecu¬ whale of a plaything—a s
liarly shafted body, with electric built like a sprat, to boot,
controls and a wire running to a and Lionel have the only two
said that after a month, Fender must speaker. els available at this writing,
“Sure, mail," said Hump excited¬ the inventor, a Los Angeleno,
ly when we asked him later, “that's !>*ct» to put them on ths
aur electric boss WeVo bad it for 600 »,
have had 100 orders for the bass." month* I’* '‘Not only that," savg
He introduced o* to flay John¬ “hot wo*re going feo fmv«
son, tire Kansas City bassist who make some supersonic vibes
tor all these months bed been work like an accordion* m ym
In the July 30, 1952, issue of Down trudging around the country, un¬ mftxo chord* without stHkin*
heralded, playing this sensation*; the notes. K*R hev« softer m
instrument*! innovation. because thare'll b« all kind
Beat, Leonard Feather reported on an Easy Going tone control. Walt’H you see !
We le on tenterhooks. And
“it’s no troabie at ail,” he tie.
day now, we expect to see a
eiared. “i teamed to play It right
print for *n BB-ksy. super
wfi In fact i used ft on Ihc
unusual occurrence at a Lionel Hamp¬ efe m mm day 1 got it. Time*
portable piano.
tee same a* s regular ba**,“
“But," said Uontl, “it sounds
ton gig: "Suddenly we observed that two octaves steeper!” Date With Dickens
And an the »axt set, listening Now York—Vie Dickenson,
mors ausfeliy, wi listened and
T&txezs •*»f
there was something wrong with the
The Fender Precision Bass got a boost from publicity
band. It didn't have a bass player. And
in the July 30,1952, issue of Down Beat. In an article
yet—we heard a bass. On a second
✓ entitled "Hamp-Iified Fiddle May Lighten Bassists'
glance we noticed something even
Burdens," noted jazz critic Leonard Feather praised
odder. There were two guitars—but we
the new instrument for its "deep, booming quality."
36 Chapter 3

only heard one. And then the picture became clearer. Sitting next to the

guitarist was someone who was holding what looked like a guitar at first

Fender offered the Preci¬ glance, but on closer inspection revealed a long, fretted neck and a pecu¬
sion Bass with a matching
liarly shaped body, with electric controls and a wire running to a
Bassman amplifier. The
speaker."
combination produced a
What Down Beat called a "Hamp-lified fiddle" was a Fender Precision
bass sound that was close
Bass. Lionel Hampton had gotten one of the first production models and
to that of an upright—

but louder. decided it was just the thing he needed to draw attention to his band. Roy

Johnson told Feather that he had had

no trouble adjusting to the new

instrument because it "tunes the same


| as a regular bass."
.-..Li
Feather went on to praise the Pre¬

cision's "deep, booming quality," not¬


AMAZINGLY
* * DIFFERENT
ing that "the bass, its volume turned

up a little above normal, cut through

FRETTED NECK the whole bottom of the band like a


SUPERB TONE
EASILY PLAYED surging undertow." Those words
MODERN DESIGN
HIGHLY PORTABLE
would prove prophetic. That ability
EXTREMELY RUGGED
FASTER CHANGES
to "cut through" and provide "surg¬
A NEW PLAYING
SENSATION

I
ing" power to the bottom end would

eventually start a revolution in music


LIGHT WEIGHT
1/6 SIZE REGULAR BASS that would resonate outward into all
NOW IN USE BY
MANY OF AMERICA'S
of popular culture.
LEADING ARTISTS
tWM1
Later in 1952, Monk Montgomery
BASSMAN AMPLIFIER
• Especially designed for bass reproduction replaced Roy Johnson as Hampton's
• Custom designed Jensen; 15" Jensen speaker
• True fidelity bass reproduction bassist. The brother of well-known
• Excellent volume characteristic
• Bugged construction jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery, Monk

DISTRIBUTED EXCLUSIVELY BY had been strictly an upright bass


. .-..——

RADIO & TELEVISION EQUIPMENT CO. player—until then. "Hamp handed

207 OAK STREET SANTA ANA, CALIF. me the Fender and told me he wanted
A Bass Is Born ■ 37

Monk Montgomery's play¬

this electric instrument sound in the band," Monk later told Mike New¬ ing in the Lionel Hampton

man of Guitar Player. "The electric bass was considered a bastard instru¬ band helped to publicize

the Fender Precision Bass


ment. Conventional bass players despised it. It was new and a threat to
in the early 1950s.
what they knew.... At first I freaked out, because I was in love with my

upright bass...[but] I made up my mind to do it and did it well."

The new Fender basses turned up in a few other places. Early Fender

ads featured Shifte Henry, a New York bassist who played with jazz and

jump bands, praising his new P-Bass as "the most." But Leo Fender's quest
✓ ’ v

to free bassists from the doghouse wasn't going to be easy. Most of them

were nob about to adopt this "bastard instrument" (an attitude that pre-
38 ■ Chapter 3

New York bassist Shifte

Henry was an early

endorser of the Fender

Precision Bass. (He also

turned up in the lyrics of

the Elvis Presley hit

"jailhouse Rock.")

vails, to some extent, in jazz to this day). And the guitarists Leo was try¬

ing to help didn't jump at the chance to play the new instrument, either.

But that didn't matter. The Precision Bass would soon assume a promi¬

nent role in another style of music that would push it into the fore¬

ground—a brand-new kind of music called rock & roll.


39

Chapter 4: Butterflies 8 Basses

In Chaos: Making a New Science, James Gleick wrote: "The modern

study of chaos began with the creeping realization...that quite

simple mathematical equations could model systems every bit as

violent as a waterfall. Tiny differences in input could quickly

become overwhelming differences in output—a phenomenon

given the name 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions.' In

weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jok-

ingly known as the Butterfly Effect—the notion that a butterfly

stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next

month in New York."

Or, perhaps, a Fender Precision Bass stirring the low end in the

1950s could be the "butterfly" in a musical system that would

deeply affect many Americans (especially young ones) and con¬

tribute to profound changes in culture and society. To understand

how this may have occurred, it's necessary to reconsider a widely

accepted notion: that the invention of the electric guitar led

directly to the rock & roll era.

For one thing, electric guitars had been around since the 1930s.

The Rickenbacker "frying pan," generally considered to be the first

electric guitar, was introduced in 1932. Spanish-style guitars with

magnetic pickups followed within a few years, and Fes Paul created

his famous "Fog" (an early solid-body electric guitar) in 1941. By

Introduced in 1932, Rickenbacker's A-25 "frying pan" guitar

was the first production electric guitar equipped with a


magnetic pickup. It was a lap steel; Spanish-style electric

guitars followed a few years later.


40 ■ Chapter 4

1951, the electric guitar and the guitar amp had benefited from numerous

technological improvements for nearly 20 years, but rock & roll was just

beginning to stir. The modern drum kit—the other key ingredient of a

rock band—had also been around since the 1930s.

The prototypical rock & roll bands usually featured one or two elec¬

tric guitars, a drum set, and an upright bass. (Keyboards were unusual,
Butterflies 8 Basses ■ 41

The modern drum kit

developed after World


except in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis—who tended to treat his piano as a
War I and was a key
percussion instrument.) The "doghouse" bass could lay down a rudimen¬
element of the sound of
tary foundation, but it suffered as the music got louder, often sounding
the big bands of the 1930s.
more like lower-register percussion than a pitched instrument (especially By the mid '30s, both the

played in the slap style employed by bassists such as Bill Black, who electric guitar and the

backed Elvis Presley). As Elvis showed, you could get pretty "gone" with drum kit were available to

this instrumentation, but there was still a need for an instrument that musicians, but the birth of

rock & roll was still almost


could assert a well-defined bass sound and enable the music to get louder
20 years away.
(and therefore more powerful). Some of the small groups of the early
42 ■ Chapter^

In early 1955, the


1950s hinted at this, and it's no coincidence that Samuel "Jay" Guy played
polepieces of the Precision

pickup were set to a Precision Bass in Louis Jordan's popular jump band. It made a big dif¬

staggered heights to ference in the impact of the music.


balance the volume The power of a strong, loud bass instrument seems remarkably obvi¬
between the strings. Leo
ous (at least to bass players), but most of the histories of popular music
Fender continued to tinker
focus on the electric guitar as the crucial instrument in the evolution of
with his design, hoping
rock & roll. It played an absolutely essential role, to be sure—but it was
that by improving its
really the Fender bass that made possible the forward progress of this new
sound and playability it

would receive more wide¬ genre. Without it, rock & roll might never have moved beyond the crude

spread acceptance among (if captivating) sound of the young Elvis on "That's All Right" or Chuck

musicians. Berry on "Maybellene."

The Fender bass arrived at a crucial turning point in the saga of

American popular music. In 1951, tastes were changing: the big bands

were dying out and small groups were ascendant. Jump tunes—which

would prove to be a bridge to rock & roll—were becoming more and


Butterflies 8 Basses 43

more popular, and the climate was right for a strong new sound in the

rhythm section.

If we pull back and look at the wider picture, we see that the Ameri¬

can public was enjoying the domestic calm (and renewed production of

consumer goods) of the post-World War II era, but international relations

were tense. The United States was engaged in a nerve-racking Cold War

with the Soviet Union and Communist China. Schoolchildren held drills

in which they "prepared" for nuclear attack by kneeling in the hallway

and covering their heads with their hands. In 1952, army general Dwight

D. Eisenhower was elected president, and his secretary of state, John

Foster Dulles, soon announced a U.S. policy of massive retaliation in

response to any Soviet threat. The specter of annihilation always loomed

in the background.

Despite this tension, popular culture in America had reached new

heights (or depths) of blandness and conformity. Art was a Norman

Rockwell painting on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, and the cin¬

ema was dominated by overblown Hollywood epics like The Ten Com¬

mandments. Fashion was defined by the man in the gray flannel suit

(and his wife in her housedress). Television was showing some promise

as a new popular artform, but it would soon be condemned as a "vast

wasteland." In music, the Pop charts assembled by Billboard magazine—

which reflected mainstream listening tastes—were filled with light¬

weight tunes cranked out by an army of faceless studio musicians. In the

recording studios, the upright bass still reigned supreme—but that was

about to change.
44 Chapter /,

In 1954, Leo Fender altered the design of the

Precision Bass and gave it the contoured body style

featured on the newly introduced Stratocaster guitar.

The standard finish was a two-color sunburst, comple¬

mented by a white-plastic pickguard. The Bassman

amp was also upgraded to a 4x10 configuration that

became legendary—as a guitar amp.


; ;
45

Chapter 5: lail Break

In 1957, Leo Fender once


There has been a great deal of debate about what was the first rock & roll again redesigned the

song, but one thing is clear: the bass players on all of the early rock & roll Precision Bass. The new

recordings were using uprights. Whether it was Bill Haley on "Rock version featured a

redesigned headstock and


Around the Clock" or Elvis Presley belting out "Heartbreak Hotel," they
a gold-anodized aluminum
were backed by guys slapping away furiously on doghouses.
pickguard. This proved to
The Fender Precision Bass made modest inroads after its introduction,
be the "final" version of
but it remained something of a curiosity in the mid '50s. There are pho¬
the instrument, which has
tos and accounts of players using P-Basses in a few country and rhythm changed little since then.
46 ■ Chapter 5

One of the most important

changes on the '57

Precision Bass was a new

pickup that had a double¬

coil humbucking design.

(A humbucking pickup

cancels electromagnetic

noise by using two coils

wired out of phase and

two magnets oriented with

opposite polarities. The

result is quieter sound.)

The new pickup featured

two polepieces for each

string, a design Leo Fender

believed offered a less

harsh attack transient and

would save speakers.

& blues bands, and a film clip of a Fender bassist backing a young Jerry

Lee Lewis on "Great Balls of Fire" appears in the documentary The Golden

Age of Rock & Roll. But Jerry Lee was the exception, even among rockers.

Elvis Presley apparently recognized the potential of the new instru¬

ment, and he worked hard trying to convince his bassist, Bill Black, to use

a Fender bass. In Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, Peter

Guralnick described the 1957 recording of the Jailhouse Rock movie sound-
lail Break ■ 47

track: "Bill Black was feeling

increasingly frustrated not

just at the indifference with

which he saw himself and

[guitarist] Scotty [Moore]


£

being treated but by his own

difficulties in trying to learn

how to play the electric bass. .

. . Bill had only recently got¬

ten a Fender bass of his own,

and he couldn't get the omi¬

nous, rhythmic intro to

Leiber and Stoller's 'You're So

Square (Baby, I Don't Care),'

one of the highlights of the

film score. He tried it again

and again, got more and more


Although he had some
pissed off and embarrassed by his failure, and finally just slammed the problems switching from

bass down, slid it across the floor, and stormed out of the studio, while upright, Bill Black brought

everyone watched in disbelief." the sound of the Fender

Precision Bass to millions of


Guralnick goes on to report that Presley himself picked up the Preci¬
listeners on Elvis Presley's
sion and played the song's bass line—including the intro, with its "omi¬
"Jailhouse Rock," a big hit
nous" repeated hammer-on. This tune is worth a listen, because it's one
in 1957.
of the earliest rock & roll songs where the sound of a Fender bass plays a

featured role. And the fact Elvis himself played the part makes it that

much more intriguing. (It's available on various collections, including the

monumental RCA box set Elvis: The King of Rock 'n' Roll: The Complete

50's Masters.)

Bill Black eventually became more comfortable with his Fender bass,

which is important because it brought the sound of this still-new instru¬

ment to .the ears of millions of Elvis fans. (Most of whom, admittedly, were
48 ■ Chapters

not focusing on the bass player.) "Jailhouse Rock/' with Black on P-Bass,

was the No. 3 Pop song of 1957, and it probably deserves credit as the first

major hit featuring an electric bass. This breakthrough was reinforced by

the movie, where Black was seen playing—or at least holding—his Fender

bass in the famous dance scene that has been called the first music video.

Bill Black has received little credit for his role as one of the pioneers

of the electric bass, but it's worth noting that his post-Elvis group, the

Bill Black Combo, had a 1959 instrumental hit called "Smokie, Part 2."

(It's on Hi Times: The Hi Records R&B Years, a three-CD anthology on Right

Stuff/Capitol.) The tune went to No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 17 on

the Pop charts—and it featured the unmistakable punch of a Precision

Bass.

Rhythm & Bass


In rhythm & blues, the sound of the Fender bass was accepted somewhat

more readily than it was in mainstream pop. In his book The Death of

Rhythm & Blues, Nelson George provided a thoughtful analysis of the

impact of the Fender bass on '50s R&B: "The electric bass forever altered

the relationship between the rhythm section, the horns, and the other

melodic instruments. To Quincy Jones, who at the time was splitting his

arranging skills between big band, jazz, and pop, 'It really changed the

sound of music because it ate up so much space. Its sound was imposing

in comparison to the upright bass, so it couldn't have the same func¬

tion. You couldn't just have it playing 4/4 lines because it had too much

personality. Before the electric bass and the electric guitar, the rhythm

section was the support section, backing up the horns and the piano.

But when they were introduced, everything upstairs had to take a back

seat. The rhythm section became the stars. All because of this techno¬

logical development. The old style didn't work anymore and it created a

new language.'"
lail Break ■ 49

Guitarist Dave Myers

picked up a Precision Bass

in 1958 and changed the

sound of Chicago blues.

Within a few years, large

horn bands had been

replaced by small, highly

amplified groups in most

of the city's nightclubs.

George went on to say: "The electric bass had a punchy, dynamic

range that would become identified with rhythm & blues. Moreover R&B

musicians' willingness to integrate new technology into their vision

would make their sound, despite its many detractors, as consistently

innovative as any genre of American music in the coming years. The

[bass] patterns of [songwriter Jesse] Stone and others, in conjunction with


50 ■ Chapters

the increased use of the electric bass in the '50s, would turn this country's

ears around."
One of the musicians who accepted the "new technology" of the
Fender bass—after some initial reluctance—was the Chicago blues gui¬
tarist Dave Myers. Since the early 1950s, Dave had teamed with his
brother Louis in a popular group called the Four Aces. Louis played lead
guitar while Dave backed him using a style that combined chords with
bass lines played low on the E string. In 1958, Dave Myers encountered a
Precision Bass on a visit to a music store, where "this fellow named Harry"
encouraged him to give it a try. "I looked at that thing in that freak case,"
Myers told Bill Milkowski, "and it looked like some antique in a coffin or
something! I asked Harry what it was. 'A bass? There's a bass over there.'
I was pointing to an upright in the back. He said, 'No, no, no—this is the
same. It's just something you have to get used to.' I said I didn't think I
could ever play it. The strings were too big."
Harry eventually convinced Myers to take the P-Bass home with him.
His first attempt at playing it wasn't successful—he immediately blew the
speakers in his guitar amp. He borrowed another amp and tried again,
with the same result. "Finally, the Fender peoples came out to my house
to check the bass," recalled Myers. "They asked me what did I think of it.
I told 'em it had done blown up two amplifiers for me, so they came back
about a month later with an amplifier called a Bassman. That's when I
really got a load of this thing. I hooked that amp up, and boy, did the
sound come out beautiful. Man, when I heard that I knew good and well.
The sound was so deep and beautiful, it was amazing. And it was twice as
loud as an acoustic."
Myers immediately began to play his Precision Bass on gigs in
Chicago and throughout the Midwest. It electrified audiences. ("They
would be standing up on their chairs and going wild. That's when I knew
I really had something going with that Fender bass.") With Dave Myers
leading the way, the Chicago blues groups began to adopt Fender basses,
lail Break ■ 51

and small ensembles that featured amplified instruments soon domi¬

nated the scene. "Word got around in Chicago," said Myers, "and the

club owners in the big joints began saying, 'What's the use of hiring 18

or 25 pieces when four pieces can do the job?' And they dropped the big

band like a hot potato. That damn Fender Precision Bass knocked them

out of the pocket."

It was a sign of things to come. But this was well before the civil rights

movement, and the divide between black and white music remained deep

and wide. Young African-Americans might drop into a nightclub to see a

blues band with a Fender bassist or dig the "imposing" sound of a P-Bass

on an R&B record, but white teenagers were still hearing mostly acoustic
/

bass on the pop tunes that dominated the mainstream airwaves. "Jail-

house Rock" had made its mark, though—and the tide was turning.
Chapter 6: Ride the Wild Bass

Soon after Elvis Presley's "Jailhouse Rock" hit the charts, another impor¬

tant electric-bass advance occurred during the sessions for Duane Eddy's

"Rebel Rouser." An instrumental hit in 1958, this memorable rocker fea¬

tures two bassists; as Tony Bacon explained in The Bass Book: "Jimmy Sim¬

mons plays double bass to give depth and tone to the bass line, while

Buddy Wheeler plays the same notes on electric bass guitar, adding a per¬

cussive, attacking edge." Duane Eddy has confirmed that Wheeler was

playing a Fender bass; this song is probably the first example of the two-

bass system later used on many recordings in Nashville, where it acquired

the name "tic-tac" bass.

Although "Rebel Rouser" had a standard Fender 4-string doubling the

upright part, another electric bass became the preferred axe for tic-tac: the

Danelectro UB2 6-string (tuned like a guitar, EADGBE, but down an

octave). Introduced in 1956, the UB2 was essentially a solid-body guitar

with an extra-long, two-octave neck. (The scale length was 29 V2"—well

short of Fender's 34").

For the tic-tac sound, the percussive attack of the Dano 6-string was

used to double the thump of an upright, creating a bass part that was

both deep and well defined. While heard occasionally on rock & roll

songs, it became a staple of country sessions. (As David Hungate noted in

Bass Player, the tic-tac Dano, usually played by Harold Bradley, was "an

integral part of most Nashville rhythm sections throughout most of the

[late] '50s and '60s.")

In addition to Danelectro, several other companies brought electric

basses on the market in the mid to late '50s. These included Kay, which

offered a bargain-basement model for folks who found the original Preci-
Ride the Wild Bass ■ 53

(L) Nathan Daniel of

Danelectro came up with a

different kind of bass guitar

in 1956: a 6-string instrument

tuned like a guitar (EADGBE)

but down an octave. It was

used on some early rock &

roll records, but its most

important role was in the

"tic-tac" two-bass system

heard on many Nashville

recordings of the late '50s

and '60s. This distinctive

Long Horn version of the

bass was introduced in 1958.

(R) One of the most impor¬

tant early competitors to the

Fender bass was the

Rickenbacker Model 4000.

Introduced in 1957, it was

the first electric bass to

employ neck-through-body

construction, a design inno¬

vation that would prove to

have lasting impact.


54 ■ Chapter 6

sion Bass a bit too pricey at $199.50, and Gibson, with their violin-bodied

Electric Bass. The most innovative competitor was Rickenbacker, whose

first electric bass, the Model 4000, showed up in music stores in 1957.

Roger's Idea
What set the Rickenbacker Model 4000 apart, even more than its distinc¬

tive body shape or massive horseshoe pickup, was its construction

method: it was the first neck-through-body bass.

Before the Rick 4000, electric basses had been assembled from sepa¬

rate necks and bodies. Fender used the bolt-on approach, while other

companies preferred to glue the neck to the body. But when Roger Ross-

meisl sat down to design his first electric bass, neither method appealed

to him. Rossmeisl was a German luthier who had immigrated to the

United States in the early '50s, originally to work for Gibson in Kalama¬

zoo, Michigan. By 1954, he had moved on to the Rickenbacker plant in

Southern California, where he soon had primary responsibility for

designing the company's electric guitars. Rossmeisl's creations included

both hollow-body instruments inspired by the jazz guitars he had learned

to build in Germany and solid-bodies that would compete with the new

Fender and Gibson models. In 1956, Rickenbacker introduced his Combo

400, a guitar that featured neck-through-body construction.

The idea of building a guitar with a neck that ran the full length of

the body did not originate with Rossmeisl. Steel guitars were one-piece

instruments, and the Slingerland company offered a "Spanish neck" ver¬

sion of one of its Hawaiian guitars as early as 1939. The best-known pre-

1950 example of a neck-through guitar is probably the instrument Cali¬

fornia luthier Paul Bigsby built for Merle Travis in 1947 or '48. (This was

a highly influential guitar, with a body shape that would reappear almost

unchanged in the Gibson Fes Paul and a peghead design that showed up

on the Fender Stratocaster.)


Ride the Wild Bass ■ 55

Rossmeisl was proud of his status as a gitarrenbaumeister (master guitar

builder), and one of the things he liked about neck-through construction

was the high degree of craftsmanship it required. With separate necks and

bodies, production problems are easy to correct—but the unified structure

of a neck-through has less margin for error. Rossmeisl also saw practical

advantages. The 1957 Rickenbacker catalog touted the 4000's "full-length

neck with two double metal adjusting rods" and noted that "the fact that

the tailpiece, bridge, nut, and patent [tuning] heads are mounted on the

same piece of wood assures the player of maintaining a straight neck."

Interestingly, there was no mention of sustain, clarity, or other sonic

advantages in the early product literature. This isn't too surprising; sus¬

tain was not a design goal in an era when the indistinct thump of a gut¬

string upright was considered the ideal bass tone. And the crude ampli¬

fiers of the 1950s were not yet ready for the demands of high-fidelity bass

instruments. It would be years before all the advantages of Rossmeisl's

design could be fully appreciated.

Surf's Up
The Rickenbacker 4000's innovative design would eventually prove to be

influential, but in the late '50s the Fender Precision Bass led the way. In

fact, the term "Fender bass" was used generically for years to describe any

electric 4-string, regardless of manufacturer. And the musicians' union

lumped all electric bassists together under the heading "Fender bass."

As the 1950s drew to a close, the low end was getting more and more

attention. Quite a few hit songs from that era were based on twangy licks

played on Fender or Danelectro basses—or, sometimes, just by whacking

the low E string of a standard electric guitar. That's what Eddie Cochran

did on "Summertime Blues" (1958), which has sometimes been described

as a song with electric bass. Not true—but clearly lots of low-end presence

didn't hurt.
56 ■ Chapter 6

Nokie Edwards gave the

BEACH BOYS punchy sound of the Precision

CONCERT
THIS IS TH£ MACH BOYS' FIRST "UVF* ALBUM HER! ARE THE GREAT SONGS. THE UNBEUEVABlE EXCITEMENT
OF AN ACTUAl BEACH BOYS CONCERT BEFORE THOUSANDS OF SHOUTING. SCREAMING BEACH BOYS FANS!
Bass a big boost on the immortal

instrumental "Walk—Don't Run/'


INSIDE: 4 PAGES OF EXCITING ON-STAGE PHOTOS, PLUS NOTES ON THE CONCERT.

a hit for the Ventures in 1960.

(Edwards, originally the group's

bassist, later switched to lead gui¬

tar.) The tune was highly influen¬

tial, especially among 1960s Cali¬

fornia surf bands—many of

which were equipped top to bot¬

tom with matching Fender

Surf music was the first


instruments.

style in which a Fender In a 1997 article in Vintage Guitar magazine, Peter Stuart Kohman
bass was an absolute wrote: "The surf/instrumental rock genres of the early 1960s were crucial
requirement. And it didn't proving grounds for the still-newfangled electric bass, and many of the
hurt that Brian Wilson of
seminal records in these two interrelated styles are also showcases for the
the Beach Boys usually
Fender bass sound. You can't really imagine surf music without a Fender
appeared onstage with a
bass—this is not true of any earlier rock & roll style. During this era, the
white Precision Bass.
bass guitar went from optional to essential equipment and set up the elec¬

tric bass for its dominant role in the British Invasion, folk rock, and all

that followed [italics mine]."

Kohman goes on to point out that the bassists in budding surf bands

played different types of electric basses, including Harmony and Danelec-

tro instruments, but it was a sign of success to have a shiny new Fender

bass, usually in a custom color like Candy Apple Red or Fake Placid Blue.

The musicians who played these flashy Fenders approached them like gui¬

tars rather than uprights, playing downstrokes with a flatpick and going

for a tighter, more focused sound than the thud of an acoustic bass. The

instrument's potential was just beginning to be tapped.


Ride the Wild Bass ■ 57

Fender offered a few custom-color basses as early as

1954. Originally chosen for a practical reason—solid

colors masked the flaws in wood unsuitable for blond

or sunburst finishes—exotic colors like Foam Green and

Shell Pink became very popular, especially with the surf

bands of the early 1960s.


58 ■ Chapter 6

A Word from Keef


No less an authority than Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones—a man

who knows an awful lot about rhythm—has remarked on the revolution¬

ary impact of the Fender bass in the late 1950s. In a 1989 Guitar Player

interview, he evaluated the evolution of rock & roll rhythm: "It suddenly

changed in '58, '59, '60, until it was all over by the early '60s. The drum¬

mers were starting to play eight to the bar, and I thought at first maybe

they were just going for more power. Then I realized that, no, it was

because of the bass, the advent of reliable electric bass guitar. The tradi¬

tional double bass went bye-bye, this thing that's taller than most guys

that play the goddamn thing [laughs]. The guitar players were being rele¬

gated to bass. If you didn't even have a bass, you could tune down a gui¬

tar and play four strings; once you had an actual bass, it was much louder

than an acoustic pumping eight to the bar. And the natural inclination of

the drummer is then to pick up on what the new bass is doing, because

that's what you've got to follow."

Much louder. That was the key. The Fender bass gave bass players a

new, assertive identity in rock & roll. They could take a more prominent

role in the music and use different bass patterns—and this would have a

huge impact on how music was written and performed.

As the "new bass" was gaining its foothold, the U.S. was moving into

an era of profound social change. In 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected

president, signaling an abrupt end to the conservative complacency of

the Eisenhower years. In contrast to his predecessor, Kennedy was young

and vigorous, and he launched the space program that would send Amer¬

icans to the moon by the end of the decade. Jacqueline Kennedy, the First

Lady, brought a new sense of style and grace to the White House. The

country was infatuated with Jack and Jackie, and few Americans were

concerned when their popular president began to increase U.S. involve-


Ride the Wild Bass 59

ment in the faraway country of Vietnam. That decision would prove to

have dire consequences.

Despite the continuing Cold Wap the future seemed brighter with

JFK in charge. The Billboard Top 40 was still more schlock than rock—

the No. 1 song of 1960 was "Theme from 'A Summer Place"' by Percy

Faith—but Top 40 tunes by artists such as Elvis Presley ("It's Now or

Never"), Roy Orbison ("Only the Lonely"), Jackie Wilson ("Night"), and

Duane Eddy ("Because They're Young") indicated a big new sound was

making waves.
60

Chapter 7: Carol 8 loe

Carol Kaye, a guitarist,

began to play Fender bass

in 1963 as a last-minute

sub for a bassist who didn't

show up for a recording

session. Within two years,

she was the No. 1 studio

bass player in Los Angeles.

Her standard setup during

the '60s was a Precision

Bass with medium-gauge

flatwound strings, which

she played with a pick.

Kaye's solid sound can be

heard on dozens of hit

records, including the

Beach Boys' "Good Vibra¬

tions" and Simon &

Garfunkel's "Homeward

Bound."
In the recording studios of the early 1960s, the dominance of the upright

was slipping. The use of tic-tac, with an electric bass doubling the acoustic

part, was becoming more common—and sometimes producers wanted

three basses: an upright, a Fender 4-string, and a Danelectro 6-string. (Rec¬

ognizing the popularity of the Dano bass, Leo Fender came up with his

own version, the Fender Bass VI, in 1961.)

A few producers, though, dared to call for a Fender bass alone—espe¬

cially if it was being played by studio ace Carol Kaye. She explained why

to G. Brown: "1 played with a pick, and my sound accidentally put the
Carol 8 joe ■ 61

Like Carol Kaye, Joe Osborn

was a guitarist who picked

up the Fender bass as a

second instrument—and

quickly became a first-call

studio bassist. Osborn got

an early Jazz Bass in 1960,

and he subsequently used

the instrument on hundreds

of sessions. In 1974, he

began to collect signatures

on the back of the bass:

"The requirement was that

I had played on one hit

record with that person."

other adjunct bassists out of work—unfortunately. It was more versatile; I

could get a deep bass sound or add a bit of 'click' with the pick, enough

to make it sound like a Dano at times. That changed the whole thing. The

producers started to figure, 'Instead of three bassists, we can hire that one

Fender bass player.'"

Kaye was a Los Angeles guitarist who had picked up a Precision Bass

in 1963 when the contracted bassist didn't show up for a Capitol Records

session. She soon realized that a guitarist who doubled on Fender bass

could get more work, just as Leo Fender had hoped when he created the

Precision Bass.
Kaye is quick to note that the Fender bass had been used on sessions
62 ■ Chapter/

This 1959 Jazz Bass

prototype has a three-knob

setup. The first production

models featured two

"stacked" knobs, but

Fender later returned to

the three-knob

arrangementl.

The '59 Jazz Bass prototype

had two unusual pickups: a

five-pole pickup in the neck

position and a four-pole at


for several years before she began
the bridge. Leo Fender
to play it. "Since 1955, Ray
eventually decided to use

two eight-pole pickups,


Pohlman had been doing about

with a pair of polepieces 90 percent of the recording on


for each string. Fender bass in the L.A. studios.

He played mostly with his

thumb—that's Ray you hear on

the Righteous Brothers' 'You've

Lost That Lovin' Feelin"; I played

rhythm guitar [on that track].

Ray gave up playing bass to direct

the band on the Shindig televi¬

sion show. There were a few

string bassists who could play

Fender bass—Buddy Clarke and Red Callender—but the guitar players

usually didn't have the feel of the bass."

Kaye's considerable skill as a sight-reader, combined with the tape-


Carol S loe ■ 63

The Fender Jazz Bass was

introduced in 1960. It had a

slim neck that was narrower

at the nut than the neck of

a Precision Bass. The two

stacked knobs had a tone

control above a volume

control. The J-Bass was not

actually popular among jazz

bassists, at least at first, but

many converted guitarists

found its easy-playing neck


friendly sound she got by playing
inviting. Leo Fender was
with a pick, soon made her much
probably pleased by that,
in demand as a session bassist.
since he had invented his
Her early work included pop hits electric bass with guitarists
like "Spanish Eyes" by A1 Martino in mind.

and "Whipped Cream" by Herb

Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. By

1965, she was the first-call bassist

in L.A. Her strong playing was fea¬

tured on dozens of tracks made by

famed producers Phil Spector and

Quincy Jones, and her studio log

includes the Beach Boys, Ray

Charles, Frank Sinatra, Simon &

Garfunkel, and a bevy of Motown groups. While she was unknown

outside of a small circle of studio players and producers, Kaye was

instrumental in bringing the sound of the Fender Precision Bass to the

ears of millions of listeners.


64 ■ Chapter/

In late 1961 and early

1962, Fender began to pro¬

duce Jazz Basses with three

knobs rather than the

"stack knob" configuration

used on early production

models. The two large

knobs are separate volume

controls for the pickups;

the smaller knob is a

master tone control that

provides passive treble cut.

A year after the Jazz Bass was introduced,

Fender offered the Bass VI. Patterned on the

Danelectro 6-string bass, the Bass VI was

usually tuned like a guitar but an octave

lower. (A baritone tuning was sometimes

used.) It was never very popular, either with

guitarists or bassists, and the model was

discontinued in 1975. A Japanese-made reissue

was briefly available in the late 1990s.


Carol 8 loe ■ 65

CAR LEASING *j
m it

Published by V.I.P. Car Leasing Corp. Max Bennett was another L.A.
8701 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles 48, Calif
Telephone: OL 5-9391 studio musician who adopted
OCTOBER J 965

the Fender bass. Although he

had early training on guitar,

m he had played the upright

bass since high school. After

buying a '62 Precision,

Bennett discovered he could

get more work—and have

more fun doing it. "I immedi¬

ately felt the electric was

more versatile," he later

explained. "It allowed me to

be heard, so I could concen¬

trate on what I was playing.

Plus, after years of walking

bass lines, I'd grown weary of

traditional jazz forms. There

were many more interesting

max Bennett, a musician s rhythmic concepts happening


musician, gives son Adam, 3,
some instruction on the finer
points of the Pender bass.
on the electric."
(See story, page 3.)

Joltin' Joe
Joe Osborn was another key figure in the burgeoning Fender bass revolu¬

tion. Like Carol Kaye, Osborn was a guitarist who had switched to bass,

so playing his Fender bass with a pick came naturally to him—and it gave

him an edge in the studio.


As Osborn told Chris Jisi, he became a bass player out of necessity:

"Roy Buchanan and I were playing guitar in Bob Luhman's band at the
66 ■ Chapter 7

Showboat Hotel in Las Vegas in 1959. While we were there, we borrowed

an electric bass and Roy started playing it, since Bob liked the way I played

his country licks. Later, Bob added a female vocalist who sang a lot of pop

standards; I didn't know all the chords, so I told Roy he'd have to come

back to guitar. I went down to the local music store and bought a Precision

Bass. The next night, I was the bass player—same amp, same settings, same

pick and technique. I played it just like I played the guitar."

Osborn didn't think much of it at the time, but his approach gave him

a distinct advantage over other bassists. "Eventually, I realized that my

bass, played with the pick, had its own frequency space. Instead of com¬

peting with the kick drum at the very bottom, there was more of a blend.

Plus it held up on any kind of record—even if the bass was EQ'd different,

there was an attitude about it, a certain tone that you couldn't lose."

Joe's clear, distinct sound was greatly appreciated. He soon found

steady work as the bassist in Ricky Nelson's band, where he was intro¬

duced to a new Fender model. "We were going on an Australian tour with

Ricky in 1960, and Fender wanted us to take their equipment," Osborn

recalled. "I asked for a Concert, which was their biggest amp, and a bass,

thinking they made only the Precision. When they sent the Jazz Bass

instead I was pretty annoyed, but I fell in love with it because the thin¬

ner neck was perfect for my short fingers."

Leo Fender had decided to keep the Precision as his only bass during

the 1950s, preferring to modify and improve it rather than introduce an

alternative model. (A '57 Precision Bass was quite different in almost

every important way from its '51 predecessor, yet it still carried the same

name.) In 1959, Leo finally changed his mind, probably with some prod¬

ding from the company's sales office.

The Fender Jazz Bass was developed in 1959 and introduced the fol¬

lowing year. Its name is an interesting misnomer. It was probably

intended to send the message that this new instrument was a "high-end"

model for advanced players with jazz technique, because it had a slim
Carol l loe ■ 67

neck that was narrow at the nut: only l7/i6" compared to l3/4" on a Pre¬

cision. Of course, most jazz musicians played the upright—which has a

much bigger neck than the P-Bass. The Jazz Bass also had a more elabo¬

rate two-pickup configuration and a sleek, offset body shape. As it turned

out, it would not be used by any notable jazz players for quite a few

years, but it was adopted in other styles by bassists—including Joe

Osborn.

Armed with his new Jazz Bass, Osborn quickly built a reputation as an

innovative player who always got a great sound on tape. By 1963 he was

a top L.A. session man, and he would contribute his distinctive tone and

creative fills to a long string of hit songs by the Mamas & the Papas ("Cal-

ifornia Dreamin'," "Monday Monday"), the Carpenters ("Close to You,"

"We've Only Just Begun"), Johnny Rivers ("Memphis"), Glen Campbell

("Gentle on My Mind"), the Fifth Dimension ("Up, Up and Away"), Scott

McKenzie ("San Francisco"), and many others. Joe also has the dubious

distinction of having played his Flagstrom 8-string bass on Richard Har¬

ris's overblown version of "MacArthur Park." But that's another story.

By applying a pick—and considerable talent—to their Fender basses,

Carol Kaye and Joe Osborn took a leading role in transforming the way

popular music sounded. Rock & roll was coming of age, and the Fender

bass was the catalyst in an explosive reaction between that nascent musi¬

cal style and the lives of a generation just reaching their teen years at the

dawn of the 1960s.


But there was one more key ingredient. Just as Kaye and Osborn were

starting to send their low-end messages from California, the full range of

expression made possible by the Fender bass was being revealed by a

bassist working anonymously in a small studio in Detroit. His innovative

playing on a series of hit records in the early '60s assured that this new

instrument, barely ten years old, would play a huge role in the years to

come.
68

Chapter 8: St. lanes

The commercial viability of

the Fender bass was by no

means guaranteed, even after

ten years on the market.

There are no precise records

of Fender's Precision Bass

production in the 1950s, but

we know the numbers were

low. According to Richard R.

Smith, who has scrutinized

the early Fender sales orders,

it appears that fewer than

200 P-Basses were made each

year in the early '50s, with a gradual increase to annual production of per¬

haps 1,000 by the end of the decade.

By 1961, a few players (most of them converted guitarists) had begun

to define a sound and an approach that distinguished the Fender bass

from the upright. But the instrument was awaiting its first virtuoso—the

player who would expand the range of creative possibilities and firmly

establish the position of the electric bass in the musical world. He would

arrive in the form of an unassuming studio musician working for a fledg¬

ling record label in Detroit: James Jamerson.

Jamerson was a bass player, not a guitarist. After dabbling with the

piano as a child, he studied acoustic bass in high school. He was a quick

learner, and before long he was playing jazz on the upright and trying

to emulate such heroes as Paul Chambers and Ray Brown. Jamerson's


St. lames ■ 69

James Jamerson played the bass lines for dozens of

Motown hits on one instrument: a sunburst '62 Fender

Precision Bass known as "the Funk Machine." The

instrument was completely stock and still had its

chrome pickup cover and bridge cover (with foam

string mute) in place. The strings were LaBella

flatwounds—the older and deader, the better. The

action was very high, probably because of Jamerson's

background on the upright. The bass was stolen shortly

before Jamerson's death and has never been recovered.

After Leo Fender sold his company to CBS in January

1965, the new management introduced a number of

unusual instruments, including this 5-string bass. It

added a high C string to the usual EADG and had only


15 frets. James Jamerson owned a Bass V and may have

experimented with it occasionally in the studio.


70 ■ Chapter 8

Chuck Rainey credits james Jamerson as his primary

creative inspiration: "In terms of me playing bass,

Jamerson gave me the keys to get into the house."

A busy session player since the mid '60s, Rainey

played his '57 Precision on hundreds of sessions

with artists such as Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke,

King Curtis, Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, and

Roberta Flack. Some of his best work was done with

Steely Dan, especially on the classic album Aja,

which Rainey cites as a personal favorite.

ability as a club musician came to the attention of several local produc¬

ers, including Motown's Berry Gordy, and James began to get calls for

session work.

Jamerson started to work for Motown in 1959. He played his early ses¬

sions on the upright, but his approach was dramatically different from

that of the era's other bassists. Allan "Dr. Licks" Slutsky, the author of the

authoritative Jamerson biography, Standing in the Shadows of Motown,

described his impact: "Although his early Motown bass work was

nowhere near the mature late-'60s style that would ultimately evolve in
St. lames ■ 71

masterpieces like 'Bernadette' and 'I Was Made to Love Her,' James was

quickly setting himself apart from most of the bassists in the R&B indus¬

try. Gone were the stagnant two-beat, root-fifth patterns and post-'Under

the Boardwalk' cliched bass lines that occupied the bottom end of most

R&B releases. Jamerson had modified them or replaced them with chro¬

matic passing tones, Ray Brown-style walking bass lines, and syncopated

eighth-note figures—all of which had previously been unheard of in pop¬

ular music in the late '50s and early '60s."

Sometime in 1961, Jamerson began to play a Fender Precision Bass.

A friend and fellow bassist, Horace "Chili" Ruth, had urged him to try

the new instrument. Resistant at first, James eventually decided he liked

the Fender well enough to try it in the studio. Although Motown's stu¬

dio records do not provide any definitive information, Slutsky says he

believes that "Strange I Know" by the Marvellettes was probably the

first Motown recording Jamerson made with a Fender bass. It was

released in 1962.
The first track where you can hear Jamerson's unique style begin to

emerge is Marvin Gaye's "Pride and Joy," which was released in April

1963. (It went to No. 2 on the R&B charts and No. 10 on the Pop charts.)

The tune begins with a walking bass intro over handclaps, and the bass

line under the verse is a standard blues pattern. Although simple, it's

played with great feel, and there are subtle embellishments and accents

that give the groove life and energy. For the final chorus, Jamerson

returns to the walking line, playing it with a relaxed, infectious swing and

tossing in surprising cross-string rakes and melodic fills. The entire part

builds and develops, as if it were a two-minute bass concerto (and the

singer isn't bad, either).


Jamerson's style continued to evolve, and Motown's producers gave

him increasing freedom to shape his parts. He took full advantage of the

opportunity, and by the mid '60s Jamerson had elevated pop bass playing

to an art form. As Slutsky explained it: "Through 1965, James probably


72 ■ Chapter 8

While James Jamerson and

his colleagues were making

history in Detroit, another

great rhythm section was

doing groundbreaking

work for Stax Records in

Memphis. Duck Dunn was

the bassist, and his name

was better known than

Jamerson's because the

Stax rhythm section

recorded on its own as

Booker T. & the MG's.

Dunn's stark, earthy lines

are the driving force

behind many great tracks

by Otis Redding ("I've Been

Loving You Too Long") and

Sam & Dave ("Soul Man")

as well as Booker T. instru¬

mental hits like "Boot-Leg"

and "Hip-Hug-Her."

A talented guitarist as well as bassist. Tommy Cogbill was a

mainstay at the legendary Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals,

Alabama, during the 1960s. His style blended Carol Kaye's


%

studio savvy with Joe Osborn's great sound—and he had a

deeper in-the-pocket feel than either of them. Cogbill's con¬

sistently inventive lines, played on a Precision Bass, propelled

such hits as Aretha Franklin's "Respect" and Wilson Pickett's

"The Land of 1,000 Dances" and "Funky Broadway."


St. lames ■ 73

Memphis Boys Mike Leech

(second from left) and

Tommy Cogbill (third from

left) hangin' out in the stu¬

dio with a Fender bass

wannabe named Elvis.

Although the bassists changed regularly, the mid-'60s

rhythm sections of James Brown set the standard for

gutbucket grooves. Bernard Odum had one of the

longest tenures and contributed to the recorded

version of "Cold Sweat." Charles Sherrell, Tim

Drummond, and Bootsy Collins also had significant

stints with the Godfather of Soul. Their work has had

an enduring influence on many styles, including

contemporary hip-hop.

Like Booker T. & the MGs, the top late-'60s/early-'70s

rhythm section in New Orleans also recorded under its

own name. They were known as the Meters, and the

bassist was the supremely funky George Porter jr., whose

potent lines anchored instrumentals like "Cissy Strut" and

"Look-Ka Py Py." Porter's favorite basses included a Preci¬

sion with a 70 body and a '"60-something" neck. He also

used a Fender Telecaster Bass, a model introduced in 1968

that echoed the design of the original '51 Precision Bass.


74 ■ Chapter 8

had the funkiest and most melodic

eighth-note bass style in the uni¬

verse, but for some reason toward

the end of the year, he exploded in

a completely new direction. Six¬

teenth-notes, quarter-note triplets,

open-string techniques, dissonant

non-harmonic pitches, and synco¬

pations off the 16th seemed to

enter into his style almost

overnight. It closely paralleled the

change in the jazz world from

Charlie Parker's eighth-note bebop

style to the evolution of John

Coltrane's 16th-note 'sheets of

sound' approach. There is a distinct

Just about any Atlantic break from the bass lines Jamerson

Records soul session from was playing in '64 and early '65 on tunes like 'Dancing in the Street' and
the late '60s that didn't 'Stop! In the Name of Love' to '66 and '67 masterpieces like 'Reach Out'
have Chuck Rainey or and 'I'm Wondering.' Out of nowhere, James started playing almost as if
Tommy Cogbill on bass fea¬
he was the featured soloist."
tured the impeccable
Slutsky's book has transcriptions of 50 Jamerson bass lines, almost all
grooves of Jerry Jemmott
of which are amazingly creative, even by contemporary standards. In a
on his '65 Jazz Bass. Jerry's

work graced classic albums chapter called "An Appreciation of the Style," Anthony Jackson offers a

by Wilson Pickett, Aretha detailed analysis of three songs, showing how Jamerson used unusual
Franklin, King Curtis, B.B. melodic and rhythmic devices to make his lines strong and distinctive.
King, and many others. In
While influenced by Jamerson's knowledge of jazz, many of these ideas
a 1984 interview, Jaco Pas-
would be difficult to execute on the upright. They are truly electric bass
torius said, "He was my
lines, and they demonstrate the expressive capabilities of the instrument.
idol, making the sounds I
"Perhaps the key word that sums up [Jamerson's] techniques," wrote Jack-
wanted to make."
son, "is unpredictability. It was impossible to foresee what he would
St. lames 75

David Hood and drummer

Roger Hawkins have been

the backbone of the

Muscle Shoals studio

rhythm section for more

than 30 years. Hood, who

began his career playing a

'61 Jazz Bass, has nailed

the groove with everyone

from Wilson Pickett to the

Staple Singers to Paul

Simon.
play." In contrast to the formulaic bass playing in pop music before then,
Jamerson's work was a revelation.
And, because it was a vital component of a long string of hit records,
Jamerson's playing reached the ears (and feet) of millions. It helped to
break down the line that supposedly separated "Pop" (white) music from
"R&B" (black) music. It is not an exaggeration to say that the immense
popularity of Motown changed the course of American popular music
and, in doing so, had a huge impact on the development of an entire gen¬
eration. Certainly, there were many reasons for Motown's success—from
Smokey Robinson's voice to Berry Gordy's business savvy—but much
credit must go to James Jamerson and his '62 Precision Bass (known as
"The Funk Machine"), as well as his colleagues in the great rhythm sec¬
tion known collectively as the Funk Brothers.
It is hugely ironic—and there were many ironies in Jamerson's life—
that all of this happened without anyone knowing who this great bass
player was. (Motown, like many other labels of that era, did not list the
backing musicians on its records.) James finally received a credit in 1971,
on Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, a landmark album that broke all of

Motown's sales records.


76 Chapter 8

Veteran Chicago bassist

Jerome Arnold was a

founding member of the

Paul Butterfield Blues

Band. The strong, punchy

tone of his Jazz Bass was a

key ingredient in the suc¬

cess of the band's 1965

debut album, which took

the exciting sound of the

amplified Chicago blues

bands to a wide audience.

But it would be years before Jamerson would be properly acknowl¬

edged for his accomplishments. Plagued by alcoholism and self-doubt,

victimized by the shifting fortunes of the music industry, he died lonely

and embittered in 1983. Years later, his Motown colleague Smokey Robin¬

son paid tribute to him, saying: "He's really the father of the modern-day

bass player. He had the purest fingering—all his notes were pure and true.

No matter how fast he was playing them or whatever rhythmic pattern

he was doing, you could hear the whole note. That was a big part of his

sound. Even today, nobody plays like that."

Although he was known for many years only as "the Motown bass

player (or the Tamla bass player," as the label was named on U.K.

releases), Jamerson was highly influential among his fellow bassists. Now

that we know his name, he has taken on the status of a patron saint—a

player inspired by a vision of his instrument's potential whose work

showed the way to those who followed, and who shared his gift in a self¬

less and almost self-sacrificing way.


St. lames 77

Bob Babbitt began to do

session work at Motown in

1967 as a "pinch hitter" for

James Jamerson. He

eventually contributed to

dozens of hits by artists

such as Stevie Wonder, the

Temptations, Gladys Knight,

and Marvin Gaye. His

favorite recording bass for

many years was a modified

mid-'60s Precision.

As James Jamerson developed his virtuosic style in the early 1960s,

there was a young English musician who listened closely and began to

seek his own distinctive electric bass approach. While he was different in

just about every important way from "the Tamla bass player," this left-

handed guitarist-turned-bassist was perhaps the most gifted member of a

rock & roll band whose popularity has never been exceeded—and whose

creative influence is still powerful today.


78

Chapter 9: All You Need Is Bass

Paul McCartney found the

symmetrical Hofner 500/1

bass appealing because he

was left-handed; the right-

handed Hofner didn't look

odd when he turned it

over to play lefty. He also

liked it because it was "so

light you play it a bit like a

guitar—all that high trilling

stuff I used to do...was

because of the Hofner."

If James Jamerson was the first player to reveal that the electric bass had

unique creative possibilities, then Paul McCartney made sure everyone got

the message. Thanks to his position as the bassist in the most popular

group in the history of rock & roll, Paul had a platform for making a state¬

ment that would influence countless listeners, musicians and non-musi¬

cians alike. And he made the most of it.

In 1961, the Beatles were a fledgling quintet with Stu Sutcliffe on bass.

John, George, and Paul all played guitar. After Sutcliffe quit the band to

focus on his painting (a bad career move, to be sure), Paul was drafted to
All You Need Is Bass 79

play bass—mostly because his cheap guitar was broken. He adapted

quickly and soon discovered that he rather enjoyed his new instrument.

"I'd always liked bass," McCartney told Tony Bacon, "[and] then I started

listening to other bass players—mainly Motown. As time went on, James

Jamerson became my hero, although I didn't actually know his name

until quite recently."

It's worth noting that McCartney is the first important "Fender

bassist" in this saga who didn't play a bass made by Fender. One reason

was money: Fender instruments were quite expensive as imports, and

Paul refused to go into debt to buy one. He was also left-handed. Left-

handed production basses were rare in the early '60s, and most right-

handed models looked and felt odd when flipped over and restrung for

southpaw playing. McCartney found the solution in an inexpensive Ger¬

man-made bass, as he explained to Tom Mulhern in 1990: "The Hofner

[500/1 bass] was violin-shaped and symmetrical, so being left-handed

didn't look so stupid. And once I bought it, I fell in love with it." The

Hofner became Paul's signature instrument, and he used the axe now

commonly called a "Beatle Bass" almost exclusively until he received a

left-handed Rickenbacker bass in 1965.

With Paul getting more comfortable on bass and the songwriting

team of Lennon and McCartney churning out one memorable song

after another, the Beatles captured the hearts and minds of an entire

generation. To grasp the incredible impact they had on popular music

in the early 1960s, all you have to do is glance at the Billboard charts

for 1963 and 1964 (see charts, page 84). A year after music lovers had

been flocking to stores to pick up 45s of "Sugar Shack" and

"Dominique," they were bowled over by "I Want to Hold Your Hand

and "Can't Buy Me Love"—and the Beatles had seven more songs in the

Top 40 of 1964. The syrupy pop confections of the late 1950s had been

completely displaced by an exciting new style propelled by the electric

bass. And rock & roll was more than entertainment—it was becoming
80 ■ Chapter 9

Rickenbacker presented

Paul McCartney with a left-

handed 4001S in 1965. It

eventually became his main

bass, and he used it to

record Sgt. Pepper's Lonely

Hearts Club Band. Originally

Fireglo Red, the Rick got a

psychedelic paint job for

Magical Mystery Tour and

was later refinished

natural.

a social force that united its fans and gave them a new system of shared

values and beliefs.

A Style Is Born
Paul McCartney's early bass work was solid if unremarkable, but by early

1964 the influence of James Jamerson began to show in lines that were

becoming more and more melodic and rhythmically adventurous. One of

the best places to trace this development is on Live at the BBC, a two-CD

collection of early Beatles recordings made for radio broadcast by the

British Broadcasting Corporation. Recorded between 1963 and 1965, the

tracks provide a wonderful cross-section of the group's progress during

that period. As you listen to these quickly recorded live performances,

you can hear Paul moving away from the simple bass patterns he had

learned from early R&B and country music and beginning to develop the

melodic, contrapuntal style that would soon become his trademark.

The tracks on these CDs are not arranged in chronological order, so it

takes some effort to trace the evolution of McCartney's style. On the ear-
All You Need Is Bass ■ 81

liest cuts, such as "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby" (January 1963), the

bass playing is rudimentary: Paul's sound is blurry, and he sticks to root-

fifth patterns broken up by the simplest of fills. Even so, you can tell he

has a good feel for bass playing, and the other instrumental parts, even at

this point, seem to hinge on his lines. Within a few months, Paul's lines

progress further, and he occasionally breaks up the root-fifth tedium with

walking lines and pumping triadic figures.

McCartney's bass playing really began to blossom as the Beatles wrote

more original material. The BBC version of "I Saw Her Standing There"

(October 1963) is a big step forward: Paul's playing is more imaginative

and has terrific rhythmic vitality. And on a January 1964 cover of 'Johnny
/

B. Goode," we hear a bass line that develops continually throughout the

song, becoming more and more complex without ever losing the groove

a characteristic of many great James Jamerson lines.

Everything comes together on the version of "All My Loving" the Bea¬

tles recorded at the Piccadilly Theatre, London, on February 28, 1964. The

walking line under the verses is surprisingly sophisticated (especially

since Paul is singing the lead vocal), and the bass line just drives the band.

It's essentially the same part McCartney had played on the studio version

of the song (recorded six months earlier), but his performance on this live

track is much more confident and prominent in the mix. It was a sure

sign of the greatness that was to come.

In addition to having a great ear and a sure sense of rhythm, Paul was

blessed with a spirit of adventure. He was ready to try almost anything in

a bass line. "As time went on, I began to realize you didn't have to play

just the root notes," he explained. "If [the chords were] C, F, and G, then

it was normally C, F, and G that I played. But I started to realize you could

be pulling on the G, or just stay on the C when it went to F. And then I

took it beyond that. I thought, Well, if you can do that, what else could

you do, how much further could you take it? You might even be able to

play notes that aren't in the chord."


82 ■ Chapter 9

McCartney credits the Beach

Boys' Brian Wilson as an inspiration

in this area. "With the Beach Boys,

the band might be playing in C," Paul

explained, "but the bass might stay

on the G just to hold it all back. I

started to realize the power the bass

player had within the band." Paul

took this idea even further, and many

of the lines he played during the Bea¬

tles' great creative outburst of 1965 to

1967—when they recorded Rubber

Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely

Hearts Club Band—go well beyond

Wilson's most creative bass parts.

"Michelle," recorded in Novem¬

ber 1965, is an excellent example of

McCartney's burgeoning creative


While Bill Wyman of the
approach. Paul recalled the moment this way: "That was actually thought
Rolling Stones lacked Paul

McCartney's creative gift, up on the spot. That opening six-note phrase against the descending

he was a reliable bass chords in 'Michelle'—that was like, oh, a great moment in my life. I think

player who always seemed I had enough musical experience after years of playing, so it was just in
to find the right feel for
me. I realized I could do that." Paul's experience as a lead guitarist, lim¬
each song. Small in stature,
ited though it was, was undoubtedly helpful, and his best bass lines com¬
Wyman favored short-scale
bine the traditional support function of bass with the freedom and lyri¬
basses, including the
cism of great lead-guitar lines.
Fender Mustang. Fender

introduced the budget- McCartney was given a left-handed Rickenbacker 400IS in 1965,

priced Mustang in 1966 as and he began to use that bass along with his trusty Hofner. By the time

an alternative to the long- Sgt. Pepper was recorded in 1967, the Rick had become his primary instru¬
scale Precision and Jazz
ment. By then, his playing had progressed to the point where he felt con¬
models.
fident enough to try some radical experiments. "I was thinking that
All You Need Is Bass ■ 83

maybe I could even run a little tune through the chords that doesn't exist

anywhere else. Maybe I can have an independent melody? Sgt. Pepper

ended up being my strongest thing on bass—the independent melodies.

On 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds/ for example, you could easily have

had root notes, whereas I was running an independent melody through

it, and that became my thing. It's really only a way of getting from C to

F or whatever, but you get there in an interesting way. So once I got over

the fact that I was lumbered with bass, I did get quite proud to be a bass

player. It was all very exciting.... As it went on and got into that melodic

thing, that was probably the peak of my interest."

In fact, if you had to chose a single recording that proved the electric

bass had reached maturity, then Sgt. Pepper would be it. The music on that

classic album simply would not have worked without Paul McCartney's

exceptional artistry, which was highlighted by production that put the

sound of his bass front and center. As Abbey Road engineer Geoff Emer-

ick later explained to Howard Massey, the bass on Sgt. Pepper was isolated

on its own track and recorded simply by miking the bass amp rather than

using direct input (DI) or a mix of amp plus DI. "Although he changed

from the Hofner to the Rickenbacker at around that time, I don't think it

was so much the bass guitar he used," said Emerick. "I think it was hav¬

ing the mike on figure 8 [pickup pattern]. With the studio empty, you

could actually hear a little bit of the room ambience around the bass,

which seemed to help... The other thing I used to do when I was mix-

ing—and [previous Beatles engineer] Norman Smith taught me this—was

that the last instrument that you bring in is the bass. So, at least through

Pepper, everything was mixed without hearing the bass. I used to bring

everything to -2 on the VU meter and then bring the bass in and make it

go to 0, so it meant the bass was 2dB louder than anything on the record;

it was way out in front, the loudest thing on the record.

McCartney's brilliance, augmented by sympathetic production (and

improved recording technology), had given the bass the dominant role
84 ■ Chapter 9

on the most important rock recording of the 1960s. Sixteen years after

Leo Fender had decided he wanted to free bass players from "the big dog¬

house," his new instrument had completely transformed popular music.

You Say You Want a Revolution?


t;

Top 10 Hits of 1963


1. "Sugar Shack" by jimmy Gilmer & the Fireballs

2. "He's So Fine" by the Chiffons

3. "Dominique" by the Singing Nun

4. "Hey Paula" by Paul & Paula

5. "My Boyfriend's Back" by the Angels

6. "Blue Velvet" by Bobby Vinton

7. "Sukiyaki" by Kyu Sakamoto

8. "I Will Follow Him" by Little Peggy March

9. "Fingertips, Pt. 2" by Little Stevie Wonder

10. "Walk Like a Man" by the Four Seasons

Top 10 Hits of 1964


1. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" by the Beatles

2. "Can't Buy Me Love" by the Beatles

3. "There! I've Said It Again" by Bobby Vinton

4. "Baby Love" by the Supremes

5. "Oh, Pretty Woman" by Roy Orbison

6. "The House of the Rising Sun" by the Animals

7. "Chapel of Love" by the Dixie Cups

8. "I Feel Fine" by the Beatles

9. "She Loves You" by the Beatles

10. "I Get Around" by the Beach Boys


85

Chapter 10: The Bi; Boinj

In a special issue of Time magazine

titled "Artists & Entertainers of the Cen¬

tury" (June 8, 1998), Executive Editor

Christopher Porterfield offered an

analysis of the effect of technology on

the arts in the twentieth century. He

noted two great "convulsions," one

caused by World War I and the other by

the 1960s. Of the latter, he wrote:

"Again, a rupture opened with the past;

received standards and values were

under siege, this time in the ferment of

civil rights, the sexual revolution, and

Vietnam. In the arts the rumbling had

started in the '50s, when Elvis Presley

got everybody all shook up, when Jack

Kerouac took to the road, and Allen An experienced session


Ginsberg began to howl. In 1969, in a muddy field in New York s Catskill musician before he was

Mountains, more than 400,000 of their spiritual heirs gathered at the tapped to play bass in Led

Woodstock Festival to stake their claim as a new generation and a new Zeppelin, John Paul Jones

was a powerful creative


social and political force, complete with a language of their own—rock
force in the band, writing
music."
many of their best-known
The maturation of rock as an important musical and social force is
riffs and holding
directly linked to the acceptance of the electric bass. The other crucial
everything together with a
rock instruments—the electric guitar and the drum kit—had been around beloved Fender Jazz Bass

for decades, but the "new bass," which changed the way rhythm sections he had purchased in 1963.
86 ■ Chapterio

Throughout his long

career, John Entwistle has


worked and altered the dynamic contours of popular music, was the last

played (and collected) piece of the puzzle. Without it, there would have been no Beatles, no

dozens of different instru¬ Rolling Stones—and no Woodstock.


ments, from stock Precision

Basses to the exotic all¬

graphite Status Buzzard. Tommy, Can You Hear Me?


For a time he favored
One of the most spectacular performances at the 1969 Woodstock Festi¬
"Fenderbirds": unique
val was the early-morning show by the Who. As the sun rose on 400,000
instruments he created by

attaching a Precision Bass of Elvis's spiritual heirs, the British band that had once been known as

neck to a Gibson Thunder- the High Numbers put on a powerful show featuring many of the songs
bird Bass body. from their recently released rock opera, Tommy. Holding it all together,

and playing bass in a highly original and unusual style, was John

Entwistle.

As Chris Jisi has noted, John is "hardly a proper bassist at all; more

accurately, Entwistle is one of the first bass guitarists to play the instru-
The Bi^ Boin? ■ 87

ROUNDWOUND

FLATWOUND

The first strings manufac¬


ment so improperly that through his own sheer aggression, technique, tured for the Fender Preci¬

and sonic vision, the spare setting of his three-piece [plus vocalist] always sion Bass were steel

flatwounds. In 1963, James


seemed far, far larger."
How created his Rotosound
Because he played in a band with Pete Townshend, a guitarist
JS66 design by using a
whose style was primarily chordal, Entwistle was free to develop a busy,
round outer wrap instead
melodic "lead bass" style. Influenced by the twanging guitar of Duane
of a flat one. Although
Eddy, he sought a bright, penetrating sound that would allow him to
more abrasive, the new
play a lot of notes and still be heard over the din of Townshend's amps strings had a brilliant tone

and Keith Moon's bombastic drumming. "What I didn't realize was that no flatwound could

that I'd set quite a task for myself," he told Jisi, "because you can't play match—and they changed

the way basses were built


sloppily using that much high end. I had to clean it up and find a fluid
and played.
way of damping the notes so they didn't blur into each other or vary

in volume."
^Entwistle's other problem was strings. In 1965, when he set out to

record the first notable rock-bass solo on "My Generation," he wanted as


88 ■ Chapter io

The bright, aggressive tone

Chris Squire perfected in

Yes was highly influential

in the early 1970s. Squire

used a Rickenbacker 4001S,

equipped with Rotosound

roundwound strings and

played with a pick, to get a

bass sound that would

have been unimaginable

only a few years before.

bright a sound as possible. His first choice was a Danelectro bass. "We did

three takes/' John recalled, "all of which were faster, more trebly, and

more complex than the final one, and I kept breaking strings. You could¬

n't get replacements, so I had to keep buying Danelectros. When the store

finally ran out of them, I bought a Fender Jazz Bass, put on LaBella

strings, and used it to cut the final version."

Those were LaBella flatwound strings, of course. Although a brand-

new set had worked well enough on "My Generation," they simply

weren't intended to produce the kind of razor-edged, trebly tone

Entwistle wanted. He soon found what he needed in an all-new type of

bass string.
The Bi<j Boin^ ■ 89

The String Thing


Strings are often overlooked in discussions

of the development of stringed instru¬

ments, but they are an absolutely critical

component of tone production. Many of

the different approachs to constructing

and tuning the earliest bass instruments

(see Chapter 1) were attempts to overcome

the shortcomings of the strings. A 3-string

acoustic upright bass tuned ADG seems

odd to us today, but it was popular in the

eighteenth century because the E strings of

the time were so bad. The science of string¬

making had not progressed sufficiently to produce an E string that pos¬ When Jimi Hendrix asked

sessed the clarity and power of the other three. guitarist Noel Redding to

play bass in the Experience,


There isn't a lot of information about ancient strings. We know that
Redding asked John
the history of stringed instruments can be traced back to the lyres of
Entwistle for advice. "He
ancient Greece, but we're not sure what the earliest strings were made of—
rang me up and asked
probably horsehair, silk, and other organic materials. The first important what kind of equipment I
breakthrough in string technology occurred when someone discovered used," recalled John,

that the intestines of sheep could be used to make better-sounding strings. "which was a Jazz Bass,

According to legend, this happened in Italy during the Middle Ages; Rotosounds, and Marshalls,

so that's what he went


strands of sheep gut were used for sewing leather, and a musically inclined
for." Redding made his
saddler must have plucked a taut strand one day and liked what he heard.
bass-playing debut on the
Before long, gut became the standard material for stringing lutes, vio¬
incredible 1967 album Are
lins, and other instruments. It works well for that purpose, especially You Experienced?, which

when gut strands are woven like rope into "catlines." The problem with included "Foxy Lady,"

making bass strings this way is that you need a lot of mass to produce low "Purple Haze," "Manic

notes and still maintain a workable string tension, so the strings must be Depression," and "The

Wind Cries Mary."


large. This makes them hard to play and somewhat indistinct in tone. The
90 ■ Chapterio

solution to this dilemma was discovered around 1650, with the develop¬

ment of the overwound string. Someone figured out that you could

increase the mass of a gut string by winding metal wire over the outside;

for basses, this yielded a thinner string with a more musical tone than

that of a thick, all-gut string. Overwound strings were soon adopted for

many instruments, and they paved the way for the establishment of the

EADG-tuned 4-string as the standard orchestral bass.

Overwound strings have improved a lot since the seventeenth cen¬

tury, but the basic design concept remains the same: a core string (usually

made of gut, nylon, silk, or steel) is wrapped with one or more layers of

metal wire. The materials, the dimensions of the wire, the winding ten¬

sion, and other factors can be varied to produce different musical results.

The strings used today on many uprights have a final wind of flat

metal tape, which produces a smooth playing surface that responds well

to the bow. The first strings designed for the electric bass followed this

model—although, as former Fender executive Forrest White has noted,

strings were an impediment to Leo Fender's early experiments: "Strings

for the prototype electric basses did not exist because there were no

instruments to put them on.... Leo had to take gut strings [for upright

bass] and wrap them with small-gauge iron wire for his first units. He said

this was a heck of a job. Of course, after the bass proved successful, he had

V.C. Squier make the strings for him." (Squier was a string-manufacturing

company Fender later acquired.)

The early Fender bass strings were heavy-gauge flatwounds that were

easy on the fingers and produced a solid fundamental, although their

tone was dull and one-dimensional. There was little change to this basic

design during the 1950s and early 1960s. Then, in 1963, an English string-

maker named James How had a better idea: the roundwound bass string.

Rather than putting on a final winding of flat metal tape, he used round

nickel-steel wire, which produced a much brighter sound (although it was

hard on the frets and the bassist's fingers).


The Bi^ Boin^f ■ 91

The new Rotosound "Swing Bass" strings were exactly what John

Entwistle was looking for, and he became one of the company's most

enthusiastic product-development consultants. ("After each concert...I

visited the Rotosound factory and had them make me sets until they

came up with what I was looking for.") Armed with the crisper, brighter

tone of Rotosounds, Entwistle was able to push his sound even more to

the forefront—something that did not go unnoticed among his fellow

bassists.

One of the players who was heavily influenced by the "big boing" of

John Entwistle's sound was Chris Squire. He had co-founded the British

progressive band Yes in 1968 and was looking for a different way to play

bass, a style that would make the bass equally as important as the other

instruments in the band. "I had always played with a pick because I hated

the dull, boomy tone most bassists had," Squire told Chris Jisi. "John was

using a pick [the first time I saw him]—and his massive cutting sound and

integral parts were inspirational."

Equipped with a Rickenbacker 400IS bass strung with Rotosound

roundwounds—and often plugged into a guitar amp for added treble

response—Squire took the "lead bass" concept to new heights. When the

Yes song "Roundabout" became a hit in 1972, Squire's bright, "spring¬

like" sound reached millions of listeners and transfixed countless young

bassists. A similar development was taking place across the Atlantic,

where a pair of American bass players were helping to define the "San

Francisco Sound" as they rewrote the rules for rock bass playing.


92

Chapter n: U Giants

Early in his career, jack Whether or not there was

Casady played a Fender ever such a thing as a San


Jazz Bass. He recorded the Francisco sound, there cer¬
first two Jefferson Airplane
tainly was a Jack Casady
albums with a J-Bass before
sound. As Chris Jisi put it,
switching to a short-scale
the electric bass "underwent
Guild Starfire.
one of its most radical trans¬

formations in San Francisco

in the hands of Jack Casady.

Casady did far more than

provide a solid runway for

the improvisational folk-

rock flights of Jefferson Air¬

plane. With his innovative

use of spontaneous upper-

register melodies, dramatic

overdriven chords, and thunderous low-end bursts, Jack was the Air¬

plane's pilot, navigator, and bombardier all at once."

Casady started his career as a guitarist, emulating such early rock &

roll heroes as Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, and Buddy Holly. After encoun¬

tering a Precision Bass at a nightclub, he began to double on bass. Dis¬

covering that he could get more work as a bassist than a guitarist (one of

the eternal economic realities of the music business), Casady bought a

Fender Jazz Bass. In 1965, he took the J-Bass with him when he left Wash¬

ington, D.C., to go to San Francisco to become a member of the Jefferson

Airplane, at the invitation of guitarist Jorma Kaukonen.


S.F. Giants I 93

Jack Casady's Guild basses

were heavily modified by

Ron Wickersham of Alem¬

bic, who installed active

electronics designed to

produce a more even

sound with improved high-

frequency response.

Like Paul McCartney and John Entwistle, Casady believed the bass

should play a prominent role in rock music. "The nature of the bass," he

has explained, "is to work with and support the other instruments in a

dialogue." For Casady, that meant playing strong melodic lines that were

often the focal point of the songs, much as McCartney's lines on Sgt. Pep¬

per had been. Jack's playing on the first two Airplane albums, Jefferson

Airplane Takes Off and Surrealistic Pillow, hinted at this approach, but it

was his work on After Bathing at Baxter's, Crown of Creation, and the live

tour-de-force, Bless Its Pointed Little Head, that established him as a major

bass innovator. Listening to Casady on those albums, wrote Dan

Schwartz, "you hear bass as an equal voice, supportive and contrapuntal,

painting with huge swatches of deep chords, limning the landscape with

melodies and countermelodies, hammering down the bottom with pedal

points of gigantic scale. And yet, at the same time, you hear a stunning

delicacy, an intimacy with the instrument and the music with which

that huge presence would seem to be completely at odds."


94 ■ Chapter n

The Fender Bassman of the

early '60s was the best bass

amp of its time. The tube

head sent 50 watts of

power into a separate 2x12

cabinet, producing a bass

sound with more clarity

than anything else on the

market.

Casady's style was so powerful because he focused on sound as much

as technique—and the technology of the time was beginning to reach a

point where it could offer him the power and clarity he needed to fully

express his ideas. The first key to Casady's thundering late-'60s tone was

a different instrument. He had used the Jazz Bass on the first two Airplane

albums, but then he began to experiment with a semi-hollow Guild

Starfire bass. "I noticed that the Fender didn't distort well," Casady

explained, "but when I played overdriven chords and moved up the neck

on the Guild, it had a sweet sustain with a lot of interesting overtones.

Because it sang so well but lacked in the low end, due to its short scale, I

found myself playing more melodically and higher on the neck."

The other ingredient in Casady's sonic recipe was an unusual ampli¬

fier called a Versatone. Originally designed to get a clean sound for

acoustic bass, the 40-watts-per-channel Versatone found a different appli¬

cation with Casady. He explained: "It had separate tube amps for the

highs and the lows—sort of an early version of bi-amping, except that


S.F. Giants ■ 95

both signals were sent through a single


THE AMPEG SVT
speaker. The mix of the highs and the
300 WATTS RMS
lows was controlled by turning a pan-o-

flex knob. I plugged in and played, and

it had a warm, round tone. When I

turned up the volume to overdrive it,

the amp put out a pleasant, smooth

distortion instead of just breaking up.

And when I turned it all the way up, it

growled! Best of all, I was still getting

the clean fundamental lows in addi¬

tion to the dirty highs. I proceeded to


SIXTEEN SPEAKERS
IN TWO ENCLOSURES SEALED IN
record with it on a separate track for EIGHT SEPARATE COMPARTMENTS
ampeg
Baxter's and then used it all over Crown

of Creation. On the live album, I had it The introduction of the

Ampeg SVT in 1969


miked separately from the rest of my amps and applied it like an effect
marked the dawn of the
with a volume pedal."
modern era in bass amp

technology. With its 300-

watt head and dual 8x10

cabinets, the SVT could

keep up with any guitar

stack on the market.

Jack Casady used a Versatone—

originally designed as an ampli¬

fier for acoustic bass—as a pre¬

amp. (The Versatone is sitting

on the stage, right behind

Casady's legs, in this photo.)

Casady said he found its

"smooth distortion" perfect for

adding the right amount of

, edge to his tone.


96 ■ Chapter ii

Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead had a totally original concept of how an electric bass should sound

and how it should be played. Like Jack Casady, he was assisted by the wizards of Alembic in his

efforts to get better sound from his gear.


S.F. Giants ■ 97

Big Bottom
In addition to demonstrating what a creative player he was, the huge bass

sound of Jack Casady showed how far bass amplification had advanced

since 1951, when Leo Fender introduced the first Bassman amp. Before

Leo, all of the attempts to create an electric bass instrument—vertical or

horizontal—had fallen short because of inadequate amplification. Several

of the primitive "stick" basses of the 1930s were sold with companion

amplifiers, but these units were underpowered and their speakers ill-

suited to reproducing low-frequency sounds. Paul Tutmarc's ground¬

breaking Model 736 Electronic Bass had a Model 936 amplifier to go with

it, but that unit, too, was small and low-powered.

The slow acceptance of the Fender bass in the 1950s was due, at least

in part, to the continuing inadequacy of bass amps. The original Fender

Bassman worked fairly well at low volumes but was prone to speaker fail¬

ures (which is one reason why Leo Fender kept tinkering with the design

of the P-Bass pickup, looking for a way to soften the attack transient). An

improved version was introduced in the mid '50s, with more power and

a 4x10 speaker configuration. It was one of the keys to Joe Osborn's great

studio sound but was still too weak for loud rock & roll performances.

(On bass, anyway—guitarists loved it.)

In the early 1960s, Leo Fender found a better solution: a "piggyback"

Bassman consisting of a separate head and speaker cabinet. The tube

amplifier offered 50 watts of power, and the 2x12 cabinet held heavy-duty

speakers that could handle the attack of notes played on electric bass. As

David Hicks noted in Bass Player, "all of a sudden, you could hear the bass

guitar, without a lot of buzz or distortion. At the time, it was the ultimate

in bass gear."

Bass amps continued to get larger and more powerful throughout the

'60s, The Beatles used 100-watt Vox amplifiers on their 1965 U.S. tour,

with Paul McCartney's bass booming out of a "massive" (for the time)
98 ■ Chapter ti

speaker cabinet with one 12" and one 15" speaker. Vox later licensed the

Thomas Organ Company of California to produce solid-state Super Bea-

tle amps that sent an 240 watts of “peak power" into 4x12 cabinets. The

amplifier wars were under way.

Another California company, Acoustic Control, soon produced the

first high-powered amp designed especially for bass performance. The

Acoustic 360 had a 200-watt rms solid-state power amp mounted in the

bottom of a huge folded-horn enclosure with a single 18" speaker. The sep¬

arate head was a preamp, with such unusual features as a built-in fuzztone

and a variamp control that was, in effect, a crude parametric equalizer. The

cabinet design was something of a problem for bass players because it pro¬

jected the sound so well it was hard to hear onstage. It was also a chore

to move around. (In addition to being a powerful social force, rock & roll

also may have inspired the invention of the van.) Despite its shortcom¬

ings, the Acoustic 360 was the first high-quality amplifier to offer bass

players the volume they needed to keep up with Marshall guitar amps.

Fender followed suit with the 400 PS, another bulky two-piece stack

with a folded-horn cabinet loaded with a single 18. The power amp was

an all-tube unit that produced an astounding 440 watts rms—and

weighed nearly 100 pounds. Bass players were getting a stronger sound,

but they needed to be physically stronger (or have sympathetic band-

mates) just to drag their amps onstage.

Ampeg, under the leadership of bassist Everett Hull, had been one of

the first companies to address amplification for acoustic basses, starting

in the late 1940s. The product that launched the company was a micro¬

phone that could be installed inside a bass through the endpin (or peg)

hole—thus "amp(lified) peg." In the '50s, Ampeg offered a line of bass

amps, including one with 40 watts of power and two 15" speakers. Then,

in 1960, the company introduced the famous B-15 Portaflex, the great¬

sounding favorite of James Jamerson and many other studio bassists—

but it produced only 25 watts.


S.F. Giants I 99

In response to the Acoustic 360, Ampeg upped the ante by creating a

bass amp called the SVT. Introduced in 1969, it offered tons of power and

an innovative cabinet design that proved to be the best solution for stage

sound. The 300-watt rms tube head was designed to drive two large

closed-box cabinets, each loaded with eight 10" speakers. Ampeg's engi¬

neers had (correctly) figured that multiple small speakers working

together could not only move enough air to get a good bass sound but

would respond more quickly (have better "transient response") and offer

crisper sound reproduction than larger speakers. This foreshadowed the

many 2x10 and 4x10 cabinets available today. Original SVT amps are still

in use, and the model, in many variations, remains the mainstay of


/

Ampeg's bass amplifier line.

So, by 1970, the volume problem had largely been solved: well-made,

high-powered amps and good electric bass guitars were available to any

bass player (or, at least, to any bass player who could afford them). The

technological limitations that had slowed the progress of the electric

bass—and limited its influence—had largely disappeared.

Sound Refinement
Jack Casady's use of the Versatone amp pointed to another important

aspect of the development of better bass tone: the application of superior

electronics before the amp. Casady was using the Versatone as a separate

preamp, taking advantage of its "smooth distortion" to give his sound

presence and bite that would have been impossible before then. While

Casady was conducting his research, another group of San Francisco musi¬

cians was also seeking a sonic edge by upgrading their gear.

Formed in 1965, the Grateful Dead immediately took an experimental

approach to its music, combining elements of folk songs and early rock

with psychedelicized jams inspired by the free jazz of John Coltrane and

Ornette Coleman. Their bassist was Phil Lesh, a trumpet player who had
100 ■ Chapter ii

been trained as a composer of modern classical music. Given his back¬


ground, it wasn't surprising that Lesh took an unusual and highly individ¬
ual approach to playing bass, one that featured long melodic lines that ran
over, under, and through the music and often strayed far from the tradi¬
tional bass function of harmonic and rhythmic support.
Like Casady, Lesh was obsessed with finding a better sound. "I wanted
more tone out of the bass," he told Karl Coryat, "and I wanted to be able
to boost any area of the frequency spectrum. But most of all, I wanted the
tone to be consistent across the instrument's whole range." Phil was
assisted in his efforts by Ron Wicker-
sham of Alembic, a think tank of
experts that worked with the Dead to
improve their instruments and sound
systems. (The name "alembic" means
"anything that refines or purifies.")
Alembic had been started in 1969,
when Augustus Stanley Owsley
invited Wickersham to become the
Dead's electronic consultant. ("Bear"
The first Alembic bass was
Owsley was a close associate of the
built for Jack Casady in
band and reputedly the maker of the
1971. It featured neck-
best LSD in San Francisco.) Wicker¬
through-body construction,

active electronics, brass sham had a background in radio and


hardware, an inlaid ebony TV as well as experience as a record¬
fingerboard, and a level of ing engineer, and he had already
woodworking artistry
been working with Bay Area musi¬
never before seen in an
cians on improving the sound of
electric bass. (The body
their gear. When luthier Rick Turner
was originally topped with

bird's-eye maple plates, but


and recording engineer Bob

they were later replaced Matthews joined Wickersham, the


with purpleheart.) Dead had assembled a remarkable
S.F. Giants ■ 101

group of "mad scientists" dedicated to sonic R&D.

Lesh's Guild Starfire was a focal point for Alembic's research. In search

of the consistent tone Lesh wanted, Wickersham conducted numerous

experiments and installed active electronics—the first time that had ever

been done in an electric instrument. (Active electronics involve circuitry

built into an instrument and usually powered by one or more onboard

batteries.) Wickersham also modified Jack Casady's Guild bass, which was

renamed "Mission Control" in honor of the array of knobs and switches

that controlled the electronics. Wickersham's goal was to balance the

sound from top to bottom—always a problem with bass guitars—and to

reduce the high-frequency loss that occurs when signals travel from pas¬

sive pickups through long guitar cords.

The next logical step for Alembic was designing and building a bass

that embodied all of their ideas about both woodworking and electronics.

"We postulated that the strings should be isolated from the body of the

instrument," noted Wickersham, "as opposed to an acoustic instrument,

Perhaps in response to the popularity of the Guild Starfire,

Fender introduced its own semi-hollow bass. A product of the

notorious late-'60s period when the CBS management was

seemingly intent on ruining the company's reputation, the

Coronado Bass is usually seen as little more than a footnote

in the history of the Fender bass—but it was created by

Roger Rossmeisl, the luthier who had designed the

Rickenbacker 4000, and the instrument has found some favor

with roots rockers who like its thumpy sound.


102 ■ Chapter ii

where the string energy is coupled to the plates [vibrating surfaces] to pro¬

duce the acoustic output, since sustain could be enhanced by reflecting

energy back into the string rather than losing it to the body. So we placed

a mass block under the bridge, which has the desired effect. Further, the

traditional plastic or bone nut provided a different termination to an

open string compared to the metal of a fret, so a brass nut was fitted. And

we felt that better support for the string would be provided by a stiff neck

extending through the body, so losses from friction at the neck joint

would be eliminated."

The first Alembic bass was a truly revolutionary instrument and the

most important new bass design since Leo Fender had created the Preci¬

sion. It took the neck-through-body construction that had originated

with the Rickenbacker 4000 and added laminated hardwoods, brass hard¬

ware, intricate inlays, and an elaborate electronics configuration that fea¬

tured several sets of interchangable pickups mounted on sliding rails.

Casady used it for several years until it was dropped on a concrete floor,

causing body cracks that, according to Jack, ruined its tone.

Before the first Alembic bass, electric bass guitars had been utilitarian

instruments—sometimes dressed up with "custom colors," perhaps, but

still quite plain when compared to guitar makers' finest efforts. But Alem¬

bic's team changed everything. Not only did they bring a much more sci¬

entific approach to the design and installation of electronics, they created

instruments that were often works of art. The Alembic legacy is much in

evidence today; a display of basses at any large music store will have

many beautiful, well-crafted instruments made of exotic woods and

equipped with sophisticated active electronics.

In the same way, the influence of Casady and Lesh stretched far

beyond the San Francisco scene. Their success in elevating bass playing to

a new level of artistry enhanced the impact of the Airplane and the Dead,

inspiring not only their fellow bassists but the many young adherents

who were finding that "language of their own" in rock music. In the late
S.F. Giants I 103

'60s, the United States was a country in turmoil, bitterly divided by con¬

troversies over political power, civil rights, and the Vietnam War. For the

youth, rock was a rallying point in their struggle to influence the future

direction of the country against the entrenched forces of "the Establish¬

ment." While many bands offered anthems for this crusade, the Jefferson

Airplane might have summed it up best on their 1969 song "We Can Be

Together," which urged the young to band together, tear down the walls

of oppression, and forge "a new continent of earth and fire." And it was

all driven home by the roaring bass of Jack Casady.

As Casady and Lesh strove for sonic refinement in the United States,

another iconoclastic musician was seeking an original approach to the


/

electric bass. Like Lesh, he was classically trained; like Casady, he saw the

bass guitar as an equal voice—but this Scottish-born innovator brought a

unique vision to his music that challenged just about every established

notion of what a bass player should be.


Chapter 12: lack It Up

Jack Bruce believed the bass guitar was a new instrument that required a

new approach. Bruce had been playing jazz on upright when he was

introduced to the electric bass, and he had an instant affinity for the

smaller instrument: "I fell in love with it," he said in a 1993 interview. "I

thought, Wow, this is easy and it's loud.”

Bruce's precocious musical talent earned him a scholarship to the

Royal Academy of Music in Glasgow, Scotland, where he studied cello and

composition. He was more interested in bass, though, which he studied

independently and played at night in dance bands. But he soon grew dis¬

contented, both at the rigid British class system that discriminated

against him (he was the son of a factory worker) and at the school's strict

regulations. After he was told he could no longer play in dance bands if

he wished to remain at the academy, Jack took off for London.

Bruce was at first a "jazz purist" who played only upright and looked

askance at the developing rock scene. His outlook began to change after

a stint with the English bluesman Alexis Korner, and he took notice of the

bass guitar in 1962 after hearing a bassist named Roy Babbington play

one. Soon after that, Jack was hired for a session with the Jamaican gui¬

tarist Ernest Ranglin—and told to bring along a bass guitar. "So I went to

a music shop and borrowed a Guild [Starfire] semi-acoustic bass," recalled

Bruce. "It had those nylon tapewound strings that kind of went 'boink.'"

Intrigued by the playability and volume of the bass guitar, Bruce

started to listen more closely to recordings that featured it. "I began to

hear James Jamerson," he said. "Listening to those Tamla recordings, I

began to see the possibilities of the bass guitar. It wasn't limited to play¬

ing root notes four to the bar,- it could actually be a melody instrument_
lack It Up ■ 105

which it very much was in the hands of James." Equipped with a Japan¬

ese-made Top 20 bass guitar that was "pretty monstrous/' Jack started to

work out his ideas for the instrument, applying both upright technique

and his desire to play melodically.

While Bruce was woodshedding on the electric bass, he was still per¬

forming on upright in the Graham Bond Organisation, an R&B/jazz group

that included dmmmer Ginger Baker. In 1965, when guitarist John

McLaughlin quit the band, Jack saw an opportunity to apply the bass gui¬

tar in a new way. He purchased a Fender Bass VI and began to play it with

the group, trying to cover both the guitar and bass functions with his parts.

Bruce deliberately avoided using a Fender Precision Bass or Jazz Bass,

despite their market dominance at the time. "They had a wonderful

sound," he explained, "but I thought, Well, that's a bit limiting. Even in

those days, I was trying to find different sounds and different approaches

to the bass guitar." The Bass VI, with its 30" scale, triple-pickup configura¬

tion, and tremolo bar, was a long way from a standard Fender bass—and

Bruce's experimental parts were a long way from standard bass playing. As

can be heard on the Graham Bond album The Sound of 65, Jack s lines

were creative if not yet fully formed. His "busy" playing eventually both¬

ered Ginger Baker so much that he got Bruce fired from the band.

"I was at a low point," recalled Jack, and I thought, Well, that s it. 111

probably give it up now and get a job in a factory." And then he got a call

from Marvin Gaye, who was in town to do a television show. Gaye hired

Bruce for the TV gig and offered him a spot in his road band. Although

Jack turned down the touring job, his confidence was restored and less

than a year later he was invited to join a new band called Cream, with

guitarist Eric Clapton...and Ginger Baker. (Clapton, not knowing the his¬

tory between Bruce and Baker, had told Ginger that he thought Jack

should be in the band. Baker, at first aghast, eventually agreed.)

The three musicians first got together to play in June 1966, and Bruce

immediately knew they were onto something. With Clapton's passionate,


106 ■ Chapter 12

blues-tinged guitar on top and

Baker's jazz-inflected drum¬

ming creating a fluid rhythmic

underpinning, Jack's restless

bass parts worked perfectly. Still

armed with the Bass VI, he

began to unfold a style that

would reach creative maturity

before the trio flew apart little

more than two years later.

Jack Bruce has often said it

was his goal to play the bass

guitar "like a guitar," but it's

important to remember that he

was a legitimate jazz bassist


Jack Bruce was one of the
and a trained composer before he ever touched an electric bass. As
few bassists to adopt the
enthusiastically as he attacked his new instrument with bends, end-to-
Fender Bass VI. Despite its

narrow string spacing, he


end runs, chords, and other guitaristic devices (and few bassists have

plucked the strings with his ever matched Bruce's enthusiasm), he never lost his grounding in the
fingers. Bruce used the instrument's essential support function. That "crossover" nature of his
Bass VI for several years in playing makes it so fascinating—and is one reason it was so influential.
the late '60s and played it
For bassists, Bruce's work in Cream was a sign that good bass playing and
on Fresh Cream.
a high degree of creative freedom were not mutually exclusive. It was a
call to liberation.

While Cream was conceived as a trio of equals, Bruce was in many

ways its de facto leader. Despite a huge following that hailed him as "God,"

Clapton was a reluctant vocalist and an inexperienced songwriter who

would labor for months over a single composition. Baker was an accom¬

plished drummer but hardly suited for the task of fronting the band. That

left Jack Bruce to not only play bass but also be the lead vocalist and pri¬

mary songwriter (along with his partner, lyricist Pete Brown). Because he
lack I! Up ■ 107

was so involved in creating the

group's material, Bruce shaped it to

give himself maximum expression as

a bassist.

On Fresh Cream, recorded in the

fall of 1966, Bruce played both the

Fender Bass VI and the upright ("Four

Until Late") as well as singing, playing

harmonica, and writing or co-writing

about half of the material. The crude

production didn't do justice to Jack's

still-emerging sound, but the album's

mixture of blues and pop concepts—

and its hints at wide-open jamming—

made it clear this new band had


Just before Cream recorded
tremendous potential.
Disraeli Gears—which
Between the recording of Fresh Cream and Disraeli Gears, Bruce
included their first big hit,
stopped using the Bass VI. "The first time we came to the States, that was "Sunshine of Your Love"—

the instrument I brought with me," he explained. "It had been severely Jack Bruce bought a

painted by some Dutch artists called The Fool. They painted all these psy¬ secondhand Gibson EB-3 in

London. This small, short-


chedelic scenes on Eric's [Gibson SG] guitar and my bass, but unfortu¬
scale bass proved to be the
nately it was all done the night before we left on tour—and it never dried!
perfect instrument for
So that was partly the reason for giving up that instrument."
Bruce's exploratory,
After trying a Danelectro Long Horn Bass for a while, Bruce settled on
"guitar-like" style.
the Gibson bass that would be his main instrument for nearly a decade.

"I found a Gibson EB-3 secondhand in a London music shop and imme¬

diately liked it a lot. It had an extremely wide neck. I went to the Gibson

factory years later and told them about this instrument, and they said,

'Oh, no, it couldn't be; we never made one like that.' The neck was either

a mistake or something they tried and forgot about. It wasn t the greatest

of instruments, but it was useful at the time.


108 ■ Chapter 12

The Gibson Electric Bass

made its debut in 1953. It


Bright Ideas & Near Misses
had a 30V2" scale length—

apparently to make it more These days, well-known musicians routinely endorse instruments in
attractive to guitarists— return for getting them for little or nothing, so it's interesting that Jack
but was equipped with an
Bruce went shopping for his own bass—and bought it used. It's also inter¬
extendable endpin for
esting that it was a Gibson bass. Gibson is one of the oldest and most
vertical playing, like an
respected names in the guitar business, but the history of their electric
upright bass. Only 546
basses is largely a saga of missed opportunities.
were made before Gibson

dropped the model in As we saw in Chapter 2, Lloyd Loar was the first person to think of

1958. It was briefly reintro¬ applying electricity to the problem of getting more volume from a stringed
duced in 1970. bass instrument. He presented his ideas to Gibson's management in the

1920s, but was turned down. Fifteen years later, someone at the company
lack It Up 109

came even closer to getting a jump on the bass business with the Gibson

Electric Bass Guitar of 1938-40. Only two of these instruments were built,
Gibson's second electric
however, and Gibson never exploited the idea. It wasn't until after the
bass model, the EB-2, was
Fender Precision Bass had appeared on the market that Gibson once again
introduced in 1958. Setting
turned its attention to the idea of building an electric bass.
a trend that would define
The Gibson Electric Bass was introduced in 1953. It had a shorter scale many of the company's

(30V2") than the Fender Precision, which should have made it even more bass models over the years,

appealing to guitarists. But its body was violin-shaped, and it came this semi-hollow instru¬

ment was the "partner" of


equipped with a telescoping endpin, so it could be played vertically. This
a guitar—in this case, the
would seem to indicate that the target market was upright bassists. The
ES-335. The single hum¬
single pickup was placed at the end of the neck (in contrast to the mid-
/
bucking pickup was
body placement on the Precision Bass), which contributed to the Gibson's
notable for its murky
deeper but less distinct tone. The tuning machines were mounted banjo-

style with rear-facing keys. The overall impression was one of design con-

fusion—just who was supposed to play this instrument?—which might

help to explain its limited appeal.


Gibson tried again in 1958 with the EB-2. (The original Electric Bass

was renamed the EB-1 but soon dropped from the company's line.) This

new model established a practice that would be a predominant theme in

Gibson's bass offerings over the years: it was essentially a guitar body with

a bass neck attached. The EB-2 was the partner of the ES-335 and shared

the guitar's semi-hollow body design. Like the Electric Bass/EB-1, it had a

3OV2" scale length and a single pickup mounted at the end of the neck.

The tuners were again the banjo-style units, suggesting that Gibson was

building its new bass model simply by grafting necks from the Electric

Bass/EB-1 onto ES guitar bodies. This may have been efficient for the fac¬

tory, but it showed that Gibson was not giving much thought to design¬

ing bass guitars as unique instruments.


A year after the EB-2 was introduced, Gibson offered the EB-0. (Even

though the numeric designation is a zero, but it's usually spoken as the

letter "O.") Why the company decided to use a model-numbering


110 ■ Chapter 12

sequence that went from one to two to zero is anybody's guess. Once

again this bass was a "partner" instrument, the guitar in question being

the Les Paul Jr. Two years later, its body shape was modified to match the

newly introduced SG guitar, and a two-pickup version called the EB-3 was

added to the line. Thanks to its use by Jack Bruce in Cream, the EB-3 had

a brief period of popularity in the late '60s and early '70s, but it was dis¬

continued in 1979.

Gibson's most successful bass design was probably the Thunderbird,

which debuted in 1963. Once again conceived in tandem with a guitar

model (the Firebird), the original Thunderbird offered neck-through-body

construction and one- and two-pickup configurations. Most important, it

had a 34" scale length that matched the Fender basses—and it blasted out

a powerful, biting tone that got the attention of top players like John

Entwistle. By 1965, though, Gibson had altered the body (going from the

so-called "reverse" shape to "non-reverse") and dropped the neck-

through-body construction for the more conventional approach of gluing

the neck to the body. The Thunderbird, in various flavors, has gone in

and out of production ever since, and it is still a favorite with many heavy
metal and hard rock bassists.

Bach Meets Rock


Jack Bruce couldn't have cared less about Gibson's problems in the bass

market. He found his EB-3 perfectly suitable for Cream, especially since it

was easy to play while he was singing. He used it to record Disraeli Gears

in May 1967, and the change in his sound was quite apparent. With fel¬

low bassist Felix Pappalardi producing and his role as the primary vocal¬

ist and songwriter firmly established, Jack was front and center through¬

out the album that launched Cream to superstardom. His bass playing

was strikingly bold: more and more, his parts were functioning as coun¬

termelodies to Clapton's guitar lines, and they were filled with string
lack It Up ■ 111

bends, upper-register fills, and other "guitar-like" devices. Bruce's tone

had become fat and brash, with the characteristic edge of distortion that

would become his trademark.

Beginning with Disraeli Gears and carrying through Wheels of Fire and

Goodbye (and the subsequent releases of live material from Cream's 1968

shows), Bruce's bass lines grew increasingly improvisational. Impatient

with the conventions of rock and R&B bass playing, Jack simply discarded

them for a new approach that owed as much to his study of J.S. Bach and

Charles Mingus as it did to any of his electric bass predecessors. Seen from

the perspective of 30-plus years, some of it might sound self-indulgent

and a bit sloppy, but at the time it was a revelation.

At the beginning of the '60s, the Fender bass had gained only a small

degree of acceptance, mostly in the restricted world of studio playing.

Thanks to the brilliant and influential ideas of James Jamerson and Paul

McCartney, it began to approach its full potential. Musicians such as

John Entwistle, Jack Casady, Phil Lesh, and Jack Bruce carried this cru¬

sade forward, forging new styles that made the bass an equal voice—and

making their groups that much more popular and powerful. The music

of the leading rock bands became the soundtrack for the social changes

that were driven forward by the generation that came of age in the late

'60s. While some of the ideals may seem naive today, the impact of those

turbulent years cannot be denied. The America that emerged in the

1970s after the end of the Vietnam War bore little resemblance to the

complacent and conforming U.S.A. of the 1950s. And rock music

fueled by the Fender bass and its descendants—had helped to power the

revolution.
Something else was happening in the late '60s, too. The influence of

the Fender bass was beginning to reach beyond rock and have an impact

on other musical styles. A young bassist in Oakland, California, was one of

the key players in this movement, and his far-reaching influence was based

on a spur-of-the-moment decision to strike the strings in a different way.


Chapter 13: Thumbslinyers
\V'

When Leo Fender designed the Precision Bass, he assumed players would

pluck the strings with their thumbs; that's why the early- P-Basses have a

finger rest on the G-string side of the body. If you put the fingernails of

your right hand against this rest, your thumb will be in position over the

strings about midway between the pickup cover and the end of the neck.

Striking the strings with a downstroke—assuming the bass is equipped

with heavy flatwound strings and its rubber string mute—produces a

thick, meaty tone much like that of an upright bass.

Many of the early electric bassists did indeed use this right-hand tech¬

nique. Fender pioneer Monk Montgomery, although he was accustomed to

playing the upright with his fingers, said: "The downstroke came to me

naturally, and I would just strike the string that way. I had no examples

or influences."

When guitarists such as Carol Kaye and Joe Osborn began to adopt

the Fender bass, they held onto their flatpicks. This gave their attack a

click" that was advantageous in the studio, especially since the record¬

ing gear of the time did not have the sophisticated equalization that

would later help bassists get a good sound regardless of their right-hand

technique.

By the early 1960s, many bassists had started to use another right-

hand technique: positioning the hand above the strings and using their

fingertips to pull the strings. (Noticing this, Fender eventually made the

finger rest into a thumb rest by moving it to a position near the lowest

string.) This technique was similar to the pizzicato style many jazz

bassists use, plucking the strings with one or two right-hand fingers.

James Jamerson used only his index finger—which he called "The


Thumbslin^ers ■ 113

Hook"—but most Fender bassists preferred to alternate their index and

middle fingers. (Later, some bassists would use three or even four fingers

for more speed.) This fingerstyle technique produces a sound that is

nearly as thick as a "thumb tone" but without the harshness of a "pick


Bootsy Collins played one
tone." Alternating the fingers allows more rapid playing and aids string
of the funkiest bass lines of
muting, because the plucking finger naturally comes to rest against the
all time on James Brown's
adjacent string.
"Sex Machine" and went
Muting, or string damping, is an important and much overlooked
on to achieve stardom with
aspect of bass technique. With its rubber mute in place, the original P- Parliament/Funkadelic and

Bass did not require much damping by the player, because the notes were as a solo artist. Slapping is

dead—that is, they did not have much sustain. When bassists began to just one element of his
/
complex technique, which
remove the mute and play with a pick or their fingers, they discovered
includes a variety of pats

and slides as well as classic

fingerstyle playing. Bootsy

was also a pioneer in the

use of bass effects, getting

some truly wild sounds

with the help of his

Mu-Tron III envelope

follower and Big Muff

fuzz pedals.
114 ■ Chapter 13

that the strings would sometimes ring longer than they wanted them to,

or their hands might brush the strings accidentally. This produced

unwanted sounds that often clashed with the note being struck, causing

muddy and indistinct tone. (The problem is especially acute with a bright

tone. As John Entwistle said, "You can't play sloppily.... I had to clean it

up and find a fluid way of damping the notes so they didn't blur into

each other.")

To remedy this, bass players learned to mute their strings in different

ways, using either their right- or left-hand fingers or the heel of the right

hand to damp the strings not being played. Many bassists have developed

this technique without thinking about it much—they have simply

learned how to position their hands to produce a clean sound. (For gui¬

tarists who double on bass, this can be one of the hardest aspects of bass

technique. Simply picking up an electric bass and playing it like a guitar,

without good string-muting technique, can produce ugly, clattering

sounds.) With the introduction of roundwound strings—with their long

sustain and bright, ringing tone—string-muting technique became cru¬


cial to good bass sound.

Slapping
By the late 1960s, most Fender bassists were using either their fingers or

a pick to strike the strings. And then a young musician named Farry Gra¬
ham had a different idea.

Tike many of the great musical innovations, Graham's new bass tech¬

nique was born of necessity. Tarry had grown up in a musical family in

Oakland, California, where he learned to play drums, clarinet, and saxo¬

phone as well as guitar. By the time he was 15, he was working in a group

led by his mother, who sang and played piano. "We had a trio," Graham

recalled, "me, my mother, and a drummer. One club we played at had an

organ with bass footpedals. I started playing the footpedals while I sang
Ihumbslin^ers ■ 115

and played the guitar, and it sounded great. Then one night the organ

broke down, and we sounded kind of empty without the bottom end. The

next day I rented a St. George solid-body bass from a store called Music

Unlimited; I planned to play it temporarily until the organ could be fixed.

It turned out they couldn't get the necessary parts anymore, so I was

stranded on the bass. Meanwhile, thinking that my stint as a bassist would

be limited, I plucked the strings with my thumb and never bothered to

learn the normal right-hand technique, with two fingers over the top."

Graham faced another crisis when the drummer departed. "That was

when I started to thump the strings with my thumb to make up for not

having a bass drum. And I also plucked the strings with my index finger

to fill in the snare backbeat. Over time, I got it down pretty good, but I

wasn't thinking in terms of


Larry Graham invented his
creating anything new; I was
"thumping and plucking"
just trying to do my job—to
technique to compensate
provide as much of a founda¬
for the lack of a drummer
tion as I could." on club dates. It proved to
As it turned out, Graham be highly influential on

had invented a new way of other bassists and was a

playing bass that would be key element in the

development of funk. Larry


instrumental in launching a
used a mid-'60s Jazz Bass
style of music called funk.
he called "Sunshine" in
Instead of using his thumb
Sly & the Family Stone and
for downstrokes, he was later in his own band,
"thumping"—hammering Graham Central Station.

the strings with the side of (Sly Stone himself

contributed some cool bass


his thumb near the base of
playing after Graham left
the neck, which bounced the
the band, especially on the
strings off the frets and pro¬
1973 album Fresh.)
duced a tone that was both

deep and clear. (The sound is


116 ■ Chapter 13

much like that of a bass drum and a

plucked bass note played in unison,

which was what Graham was trying

to imitate.) To this, he added a sec¬

ond technique: pulling out the G

string and letting it snap back

against the neck, producing a short,

percussive note. Larry calls this

"plucking," but it is usually referred

to as "popping." The combination

of both techniques is now generally

called "slapping and popping" or


Louis Johnson of the
simply "slapping," and it has been widely adopted by electric bassists in
Brothers Johnson played
many styles.
devastating slap bass on

such 70s funk hits as "I'll Larry Graham's new style came to the attention of a wide audience

Be Good to You" and after he joined Sly & the Family Stone and played on such hit albums as
"Strawberry Letter 23." Dance to the Music (1968) and Stand! (1969). These recordings are impor¬
Johnson has called slapping
tant not only because of Graham's bass innovations but because of their
"a matter of natural
social impact. Sly Stone's band was unique, even in the "peace and love"
evolution for me," noting
environment of the late '60s: it brought together male and female musi¬
that he developed the
cians of different races and ethnic backgrounds to play music that
technique before he heard

Larry Graham. blended elements of R&B and rock in songs that often had strong social

and political messages. Once again, the Fender bass was playing a promi¬

nent role in driving home music that was intended to be a force for pos¬

itive change. (Little did Sly suspect that "Everyday People" would later

become the theme for a series of Toyota commercials.)

Funk Meets Jazz


By the early 1970s, Larry Graham's "thumping and plucking" style was

showing up in the work of other influential funk bass players like Bootsy
Thumbslin^ers 117

There's more to funk than

slapping. Francis Rocco

Prestia of Tower Of Power

set the standard for

fingerstyle funkiness with

his churning 16th-note line

on "What Is Hip?" (Tower of

Power, 1973), which

"changed the course of

history," according to Will

Lee. Prestia used Precision

Basses for many years.


118 ■ Chapter 13

Collins and Louis Johnson (who

has said he developed the idea inde¬

pendently, before hearing Graham).

It also caught the ear of Stanley

Clarke.

Clarke was a formally trained

bassist who had attended the

Philadelphia Academy of Music,

but he also listened to and per¬

formed both jazz and rock.

Although the upright was his main

instrument, he had been playing


Trained as a classical the electric bass since the age of 16—and he was very skillful on both
musician, Stanley Clarke
instruments. Clarke's early professional work included jazz gigs and com¬
emerged as the first great
mercial sessions in New York City, where word of his talent quickly
jazz-rock electric bassist.
spread. In 1971, he was invited to join Return To Forever, a seminal jazz-
His amazing technical

facility and bright, rock band led by keyboardist Chick Corea.

percussive sound with The drummer in Corea's group was Lenny White, who showed Larry

Return To Forever and on his Graham's new bass technique to Clarke. "Lenny didn't really know what
1974 solo album dazzled
he was doing on bass," recalled Stanley, "but he had great rhythm. Since
listeners and set a new
I learned from him, my slapping was a little different." Clarke soon
standard for bass
became renowned for his ability to apply the new technique to complex
players. Clarke is known for
jazz compositions. "Chick wrote tunes in A\>, C#, everything. I didn't get
using a wide array of

Alembic basses, in a chance to slap in E until I did my solo stuff, and that was like a release—

standard, tenor, and whew!—because it was so much easier."


piccolo tunings. Clarke had been using a Gibson EB-2 when he joined Return To For¬

ever, but in 1973 he found out about a new kind of bass guitar that was

better suited to his needs. "We were playing at a club in San Francisco,

and this guy came up to me and said my playing was great but my sound

was atrocious. It was Rick Turner, who was with Alembic. He had a bass

with him, so I tried it out. It was like a new bass player was born that
Thumbslin^ers ■ 119

night—suddenly, I could play

anything I heard in my head."


Five years after Leo Fender
Clarke has been closely identi¬
sold his company to CBS,
fied with Alembic ever since,
he started a new company,
and his large collection of Alem¬
Music Man, with Forrest
bic basses eventually included White and Tom Walker.

piccolo basses (tuned EADG an White came up with the

octave higher, like the bottom idea of a 3+1 headstock,

and Leo did the rest,


four strings of a guitar), tenor
designing a great-sounding
basses (tuned ADGC or AEBF$),
single-pickup bass that
and other specialized instru¬
represented another step
ments. in the evolutionary process
In 1972, Clarke recorded a he had begun with the

largely overlooked solo album, Precision Bass.

Children of Forever, on which he

played only the upright. But his

1974 eponymous solo release on

Nemperor Records (later reis¬

sued on an Epic CD) astounded

listeners—and sent bass players

scrambling to the woodshed.

The cover showed a confident

Stanley, Alembic bass in hand,

ready to take on the world. The

album's first four tunes were a


stunning showcase of his electric bass technique. There had never been

a bass, sound quite like that, nor had anyone ever heard such a dazzling

array of runs, slaps, strums, pops, chords, and assorted other techniques,

all delivered at lightning speed and with crisp, clear articulation.

School Days followed two years later, and by then Clarke had firmly

established himself as the first jazz-rock bass virtuoso. It seemed unimagin-


120 ■ Chapter 13

able that another musician could play the electric bass with such a distinc¬

tive, personal sound and astounding technique—but no sooner had Stan¬

ley Clarke demonstrated his greatness than another brash young musician

came along, Fender Jazz Bass in hand, proclaiming himself the greatest.

Verdine White of Earth,

Wind & Fire was another

great fingerstyle funk

bassist. His work was

distinguished by fluid

melodies and sophisticated

harmonic ideas that

reflected his background in

jazz and classical music as

well as classic R&B. He

played Fender Telecaster,

Precision, and Jazz basses

on such enduring EW&F

hits as "Shining Star,"

"Singasong," and "Can't

Hide Love."
121

Chapter 14: The World’s Greatest


Bass Player
Clarence Leo Fender and John Francis

Pastorius III made an odd creative part¬

nership. By all accounts, Leo was a shy,

diffident man who loved nothing better

than tinkering in his lab. He shunned

attention and was sensitive about his

lack of a college degree. He never learned

to play the instruments he spent his life

designing and building. Jaco was loud

and brash and outrageous. He craved

attention and dressed oddly. Even as a

child, he was always eager to perform for

an audience and proclaim himself the



best at whatever he did. And after he Although Jaco's first Jazz
gave up the drums and picked up a Fender Jazz Bass, it wasn't long before Bass was supposedly a '60

he had crowned himself the World's Greatest Bass Player. It was an incred¬ model he got from a friend,

ible boast—and it was true. this snapshot shows a teen¬

age Jaco with a new instru¬


Jaco was a pure electric bassist. He never played the guitar. He fooled
ment with block finger¬
around on upright bass occasionally, but pronounced the big instrument
board inlays, which indicate
"a pain in the ass...too much work for too little sound." He probably
it was probably made in
would have followed in his father's footsteps and become a drummer, but
late 1966 or early 1967.
after he broke his wrist playing football he found it difficult to hit the

snare drum properly. At the age of 15, he picked up an electric bass to sub

for another local player. He took to the instrument quickly, and accord-

ing to his brother Rory had become "the best bass player in the entire

state [of'Florida]" by the time he was 18.


122 ■ Chapter 14

After starting out on a pawnshop instrument, Jaco acquired a Fender

Jazz Bass. According to a number of sources, this was a used '60 J-Bass he

got from his friend and fellow bassist Bob Bobbing. Bill Milkowski quotes

Jaco as saying he replaced the "stack knob" controls on this bass with the

Jaco's first steady gig was


three-knob setup found on later Jazz Basses because the bass "just didn't
with a local band called

Las Olas Brass. This show seem to have enough punch" with the original wiring.

was at Teen Town, which This is an interesting story, although there are photographs of Jaco
Jaco said was "a place I that tell a slightly different tale. One of these appeared in the September
used to go dance when I
'97 issue of Bass Player with the caption "Future Jazz Great: The day Jaco
was 13." It later inspired
got his first J-Bass, in Oakland Park, Florida." In this color snapshot, a
one of his compositions for
teenage Jaco is shown standing in the yard of a typical South Florida
Weather Report.
home, proudly holding what appears to be a brand-new sunburst Jazz

Bass, complete with the chrome covers over the pickup and bridge. The

fingerboard has mother-of-pearl block inlays rather than dots, indicating

the bass was not made before late 1966. On the next page, there is a black

& white photo of Jaco onstage with the Las Olas Brass, "circa 1967," play¬
ing what looks like the same bass.
The World’s Greatest Bass Player ■ 123

There are numerous photos of

Jaco later in his career playing a

fretted Jazz Bass that is an early

model with dot markers on the

fingerboard, and it has the three-

knob controls. So it appears likely

that he may, indeed, have owned

a '60 J-Bass that he modified with

the later wiring. Jaco was a noto¬

rious storyteller, and he told vari¬

ous versions of incidents in his


/
life in different interviews. Sens¬

ing, no doubt, that a used, pre-

CBS Jazz Bass was a "cooler"

instrument than a brand-new

bass made after 1965, he probably

rearranged the details of his bass


One of Jaco's main basses
acquisitions. Ultimately, though, it doesn't really matter when his basses
was a fretted '60 Jazz Bass.
were made or from whom he got them.
He modified it by installing
At some point Jaco got another Jazz Bass. This instrument, reportedly the three-knob controls

a '62, was to become the "Bass of Doom," which he used to record much found in later J-Basses

of his most famous music. In an act that probably would have horrified because he felt this gave

the bass more punch at


Leo Fender, Jaco yanked out the frets and filled the slots with wood putty.
louder volumes
(He gave varying accounts of how this was done: pulling them out with

a pair of pliers, prying them out with a butter knife.) To protect the fin¬

gerboard from the abrasion of Rotosound roundwound strings, Jaco

coated the wood with several layers of marine epoxy. This produced a

smooth, hard surface that gave the bass a unique "singing" quality.

"I have a fretless bass, so it's virtually like I'm playing a wood bass,"

Jaco said. "In other words, the strings go into the wood on the neck, but

being that it's a bass guitar, it gets that bright sound and direct sound. It's
124 ■ Chapter u.

jaco got his distinctive

sound from a '62 Jazz Bass

that he had defretted. He

coated the fingerboard

with marine epoxy, which

created a hard surface that

stood up well to round-

wound strings. His favorite

amp was the Acoustic 360,

and he sometimes used an

MXR Digital Delay.

just legitimate vibrato. That's it—there are no tricks. It's all in the hands.

It's like I'm the first guy to be using a fretless and really get down and play

it. Because nobody can play it—they cannot play it in tune. I play in tune

like a cello player."

Imprecision Bass
Jaco was not the first musician to use a fretless electric bass—that honor

may go to Bill Wyman, of all people—but he was correct in his assessment

that he was the first to really "get down and play it" consistently and with

good intonation. Before Jaco, the fretless was little more than a footnote

in the story of the electric bass; after Jaco, it became an entire chapter.
The World’s Greatest Bass Player 125

The first production fret¬

less bass was the Ampeg

AUB-1, introduced in 1966.

It had a scroll peghead, an

extra-long 34^/2" scale

length, and a diaphragm

pickup mounted under the

bridge.
126 ■ Chapter 14

Bill Wyman became a fretless pio¬


neer more or less by accident. Origi¬
nally a guitarist, he had purchased his
first bass guitar in 1961 after being
"staggered by [the] impact" of the
sound of an electric bass in a local
band. Wyman's first bass was an inex¬
pensive Japanese instrument, which
he immediately modified by reshaping
the body and pulling out all the frets.
He had intended to refret it, but found
he could play it quite well by carefully
placing his fingers on the fret slots.
The impromptu fretless remained a
favored instrument for years (Wyman
has praised its "pure and deep and
Rick Danko used a rich" sound), and it can be heard on
Precision Bass on many of many Rolling Stones recordings—most notably, "Paint It Black."
The Band's classic
The first production fretless was the Ampeg AUB-1 "horizontal bass,"
recordings. He later
which debuted in 1966. The instrument was aimed at upright players; it
adopted an Ampeg fretless
had a scroll headstock, an "extra long" scale length of 34V2", and a weirdly
that was modified with

Fender pickups.
shaped body with two /-holes that went entirely through it. Thanks to its
unusual bridge-mounted diaphragm pickup, it could use gut strings to
better simulate acoustic-bass sound (at least in theory). The AUB-1 and its
fretted partner, the AEB-1, didn't put a noticeable dent in Fender bass
sales, although a few players found them interesting. One was Rick Danko
of The Band, who used an Ampeg fretless during the recording of Cahoots
and Rock of Ages.
Fender first offered a fretless Precision Bass in 1970. There's a certain
degree of irony to this, given that the Precision name was derived from
the instrument's fretted fingerboard. (Forrest White reported: "I asked Feo
The World’s Greatest Bass Player ■ 127

how he came up with the name Precision Bass. He said, 'It was simple. If

a player noted the right fret, the tone was right on—a precision result.'")

The fretless P-Bass sold modestly; early owners included Freebo, who did

some nice work with one on several early Bonnie Raitt albums, and Sting

of the Police.

It apparently never occurred to Fender to offer a fretless Jazz Bass,

even at the height of Jaco's popularity. This was a sign of how out of

touch the company had become by the mid 70s. Not only had quality

control slipped, but the important advisory role musicians played in the

pre-CBS era had largely vanished. Product decisions were based on the

bottom line, not the music scene. Fortunately, this trend was reversed in
/

the 1980s, when a group of Fender executives led by Bill Schultz pur¬

chased the company and took important steps to restore product quality

and responsiveness to artists. So it's not surprising the company's line in

recent years has included several fretless Jazz Basses, one of which is a spe¬

cial "Jaco Pastorius Relic Jazz Bass" made by the Fender Custom Shop.

Triumph & Tragedy


The fretless Jazz Bass, strung with Rotosound strings and plugged into an

Acoustic 360 amp, was the tool Jaco needed to realize his creative vision.

Many of his early gigs were with R&B bands, where he perfected a per¬

colating 16th-note style—influenced by a South Florida bassist named

Carlos Garcia and studio ace Jerry Jemmott—that gave the music incred¬

ible forward motion. Jaco mastered the technique of playing harmonics,

using both natural harmonics (which are played by placing a finger

lightly on the string without depressing it) and artificial harmonics

(which involve using an extended finger like a capo and picking behind

it). This gave Jaco a tremendously extended range to work with, tran¬

scending the supposed limitations of the bass. He got the most from the

expressive capabilities of the fretless fingerboard, creating long, fluid


128 ■ Chapter 14

One of the finest of Jaco's

disciples, British bassist

Pino Palladino has a distinc¬ Fender offered a fretless

tive style that has enhanced version of the Precision

many hits, including Paul Bass in 1970, thereby

Young's "Wherever I Lay defying the instrument's

My Hat (That's My Home)" name, which was based on

and Don Henley's "Sunset the precise intonation the

Grill." His favorite fretless is frets offered. Despite the

a 79 Music Man StingRay. incredible impact of Jaco

Pastorius, Fender did not

offer a fretless Jazz Bass

until many years later.


The World’s Greatest Bass Player ■ 129

melodic lines filled with slides and expressive vibrato. He found the

most effective double-stops and used them to fill out his parts. Taking a

cue from Jimi Hendrix, he created a flamboyant stage presence that

included cross-stage slides and spectacular flips. And, perhaps because of

his training as a drummer, Jaco played everything with uncanny rhyth¬

mic accuracy.
In 1975, Jaco auditioned—solo—for Bobby Colomby, who was the

drummer with Blood, Sweat & Tears and had a production deal with Epic

Records. Colomby described the event to Bill Milkowski: "So Jaco plugs in

his bass and starts playing. As I sat there listening, my eyes started bug¬

ging out and my hair was standing on end. I couldn't believe it. He was¬

n't kidding—he was the greatest bass player in the world! I had heard

hundreds of bassists in my time, but none of them even approached the

facility that Jaco showed that afternoon. I was absolutely stunned by

what he was doing on the bass. He was definitely coming out of the James

Jamerson and Jerry Jemmott style of playing, but he went well beyond

their scope. He was doing things on the bass that I had never heard any¬

body do before—harmonics, chording, impossibly fast lines.... He was

truly a phenomenon."
Thanks to Colomby's enthusiastic endorsement, Jaco got a solo deal

with Epic. The LP that resulted, titled simply Jaco Pastorius, was recorded

in late 1975 and released in 1976. It is the single most important and influ¬

ential solo recording ever made by an electric bassist. It shattered any

notions that the Fender bass was an instrument of limited expression. It

proved that a bass player could function effectively as the lead voice and

the foundation—and do them both at the same time. It sent an entire gen¬

eration of bassists scurrying to their practice rooms. (Dave LaRue said, "I

was at Berklee when Jaco's first solo album came out. Everybody in the

bass department threw up their hands and said, Okay, let s start over. )

M6st of all, Jaco Pastorius—released 25 years after Leo Fender had intro¬

duced his new instrument—proved the Fender bass had truly come of age.
130 ■ Chapter 14

The release of Jaco's first solo album in

1976 was a watershed event in the history

of the electric bass guitar. On such brilliant

tunes as "Donna Lee," "Continuum,"

"Portrait of Tracy," and "Come On, Come

Over," Jaco demonstrated the full expres¬

sive potential of his instrument. In the liner

notes of a CD reissue in 2000, Pat Metheny

wrote: "That this is the most auspicious

debut album of the past quarter-century is

inarguable. As with all great recordings,

the force of its value becomes more

evident as time passes."

Jaco's career took off after his solo album was recorded. He played

with Pat Metheny on the guitarist's stunning debut, Bright Size Life. He

was invited to join Weather Report and immediately made a strong con¬

tribution to the album Black Market. He went on to spark some of the

group's finest work on such recordings as Heavy Weather, Mr. Gone, Night

Passage, and the potent live album 8:30, which showcased his solo fea¬

ture, "Slang." From 1976 to 1980, not only did Jaco light a fire under

Weather Report with his playing, he contributed a number of evocative

and well-crafted compositions to their repertoire, such as "Havona,"

"Teen Town," and "Three Views of a Secret." During this period, he was

also a guest star on a number of records. He collaborated with Joni

Mitchell on four albums, including Hejira, which has some of his fresh¬

est and most lyrical playing. Jaco went on the road with Mitchell's all-

star band in 1979 and is a powerful presence on the Shadows and Light

album and video recorded during the tour.

And then, like a meteor, Jaco tumbled from the heavens. Over¬

whelmed by fame and suffering from a mental disorder exacerbated by

drug and alcohol abuse, he fell apart. The years from 1980 until his
The World’s Greatest Bass Player ■ 131

death in 1987 were marked by a great deal of turmoil and very little

good music.

Despite his tragic decline, Jaco Pastorius forever changed the way the

Fender bass was played and perceived. David Hungate summed it up in

a Bass Player interview: "You have to separate electric bass playing into

two periods: Before Jaco and After Jaco. Most of us who thought we had

our acts together in the early '70s were faced with a serious decision the

first time we heard him: give up the instrument or try to figure out what

the hell he was doing. I don't believe any other individual has so totally

revolutionized and expanded the approach to an instrument."

As the first generation of post-Jaco bassists began to emerge in the

1980s, many musicians struggled to get beyond mere imitation. The

"Jaco clones" were everywhere. But there were a few individuals who had

quite different ideas about bass playing. One was a New York studio

bassist who had been trying for several years to make a fundamental

change to the instrument itself—and whose advocacy of the 6-string bass

altered the course of the instrument's development.


132

Chapter 15: Battleships l B Strings


VS' •

A hybrid with a Precision

neck on a jazz body,

Anthony Jackson's "Career

Girl" Fender bass was his

main studio instrument in

the early 1970s. In this

photo, it's on the right,

resting against Jackson's

left knee. Jackson ordered

his first contrabass guitar

from Carl Thompson in

1975. He's holding it up

with his right hand—notice

the tight string spacing

compared to the Fender.

The other two instruments

are Fodera/Jackson

6-strings made in 1988

(lower left) and 1989 (in

Jackson's lap).

In 1975, as Jaco prepared for his breakthrough debut album, a luthier

named Carl Thompson was building an unusual instrument called a

"contrabass guitar." Session bassist Anthony Jackson had ordered the new

instrument, which had six strings rather than four. One of the extra

strings was tuned to B, a fourth below a 4-string's open E; the other was

C, a fourth above open G.

Jackson had begun to play bass in 1965 at the age of 13, and by 1970 he

was already getting studio work. He backed singer Billy Paul on the hit "Me
Battleships i B Strings ■ 133

In 1976, jimmy Johnson was

and Mrs. Jones" and shortly afterward received a writer's credit for his bass the first bassist to play a

line on the O'Jay's "For the Love of Money." Jackson created that unforget¬ 5-string electric bass tuned

BEADG. Alembic built the


table (and much imitated) part using his newly purchased Maestro phase-
instrument. Johnson soon
shifter pedal and a Fender Precision Bass, which he played with a pick.
discovered that the 8 string
As satisfying as that was, Jackson still envisioned sounds he couldn't
could produce unwanted
play on his Fender. The idea for an extended-range instrument kept com¬
noise that cluttered his sound,
ing back to him, inspired at least in part by his practice sessions with so he developed a right-hand

records by jazz organist Jimmy Smith. While listening to a bass line Smith muting technique based on

played on his footpedals, Jackson heard a note that was below the range placing his thumb between

the B and E strings.


of his P-Bass; that note was, he later explained, "one I simply had to play."

At first Jackson tried to go lower simply by detuning his bass. While

this worked reasonably well if he dropped down only a half- or whole-step,


134 ■ Chapter\$

larger intervals were a problem. "A little common sense, combined with a

willingness to experiment, led me to modify my Fender accordingly," Jack-

son told Chris Jisi. "I raised the nut, readjusted the truss rod, and did much

bridge-fiddling until the instrument felt manageable when tuned down

two whole-steps."

Jackson played sessions with his Fender bass tuned this way, includ¬

ing the ones that produced the memorable Chaka Khan albums Naughty

(1979) and What Cha' Gonna Do For Me (1980). As good as they were, the

results further convinced Anthony that he needed an all-new instrument.

Although he was primarily interested in extending the range of his bass

downward, he never considered the idea of adding just one string: "As the

lowest-pitched member of the guitar family, the instrument should have

had six strings from the beginning. The only reason it had four was

because Leo Fender was thinking in application terms of an upright bass,

but he built it along guitar lines because that was his training."

When Jackson approached him about building a contrabass guitar,

Carl Thompson's reaction was: "Crazy guy! Six strings, low B—what are

you talkin' about?" But he built one anyway. The first instrument was

delivered to Jackson early in 1975. It had a 34" scale length, like a Fender

bass, and it worked reasonably well, although Jackson disliked its tight

string spacing. After Thompson made one more experimental contra¬

bass—this time with a 44" scale length that was "impractical to finger"—

Jackson set out to find another builder who would construct a 6-string bass

with wider string spacing. "It's solely to duplicate the string spacing on my

Fender 4-string," he explained, "which I've owned since 1972 and feel very

comfortable with." The comfortable instrument was a Fender hybrid Jack-

son had put together from a Precision neck and a Jazz body. Because he

had used it on so many successful sessions, he dubbed it "Career Girl."

Ken Smith was the next builder to tackle Jackson's project. He con¬

structed two 6-strings, both with 34" scale lengths. The first instrument

was completed in 1981, and Jackson used it for three years even though
Battleships S B Strings ■ 135

he felt the string spacing was, once again, too tight. Smith's second

instrument arrived in 1984, and Jackson finally approved of the spacing,

which matched that of "Career Girl." While its wide neck looked

unwieldy—skeptics tended to use nautical terms like "battleship" and

"aircraft carrier"—Jackson demonstrated that it could be played with

highly musical results. He continued his experiments with instruments

made in the shop of Vinnie Fodera, who had been an assistant to Ken

Smith. The first Fodera/Jackson contrabass, with a 36" scale length, was

built in 1986. More versions have followed (as of this writing, Anthony is

using his ninth Fodera instrument), and most of the 6-string basses cur¬

rently available feature the wide string spacing Jackson had advocated
/
from the beginning.

While Anthony Jackson believed that a contrabass with six strings

made the most sense, others thought that five strings might be enough.

Jimmy Johnson was probably the first bassist to use a bass with just the

additional low B string, which was inspired by the C-extension upright

his father played: "The idea came from my dad, because [some] orchestral

basses have extensions that let you go down to low C. They have a

machine just for that, and I started talking to my dad about how I could

do this on electric bass."

Johnson reportedly considered making a device that would work like

the C-extension of an upright, but abandoned the idea when a string

manufacturer told him it would be too much trouble to make an extra-

long E string. (Phil Kubicki revived this concept in the 1980s; see Chap¬

ter 18.) Johnson then settled on the idea of adding a B string. He knew

that Alembic had built custom 5-string basses with a high C, so he

ordered one. After it arrived, he modified the nut and bridge to accept the

largest-diameter string he could find (.120), which he tuned to B—and in

1976 the 5-string bass tuned BEADG was born.

Once again, string spacing was an issue. Johnson's first Alembic 5-

string, and most of the other early 5's that followed it, had relatively tight
136 ■ Chapter is

spacing. This made it hard for Fender players to adapt; luthiers took

notice, and the spacing has slowly been moved out over the years. On a

Precision Bass, the string spacing at the bridge (measured from the center

of a string to the center of the adjacent one) is 3/4"; on most contempo¬

rary 5-strings, the spacing is 5/s" to 3/4".

Leo Fender may have set the standard for string spacing, but the com¬

pany that bears his name was late

to jump into the 5-string market

(not counting the Bass V, which

had a high C string). In the mean¬

time, builders like Roger Sadowsky

were more than happy to fill the

The first graphite neck H «aP with high-quality, Fender-


was a component of an H inspired 5 s.
Alembic bass built in

1977. The neck was

made by Modulus
Enter Graphite
Graphite, a company
The addition of one or two
founded by San Francisco
strings—especially the heavy-
bassist and aerospace
gauge B string, which can be as big
engineer Geoff Gould.
as .142 (compared to a .105 E

string)—puts more strain on a bass

neck. This presented a problem to

bass builders, many of whom

began to look for materials that

would help them make stronger

necks. One material that looked

promising was a high-tech com¬

posite of carbon fiber and epoxy

resin, commonly (if inaccurately)

referred to as "graphite."
Battleships 8 B Strings 137

The idea of using graphite to

make a bass neck came from the


This is one of the earliest
fertile mind of Geoff Gould, a
Modulus Graphite basses, a
bassist who happened to be a satel¬
6-string built in late '81 or
lite engineer at Ford Aerospace in
early '82, according to
the late 1970s. "I was at a Grateful Geoff Gould. It has a

Dead concert at [San Francisco's] quilted-maple top and back

Winterland in October 1974," and a through-body

graphite neck. It was the


recalled Gould, "and I noticed that
first Modulus bass made
Phil Lesh had this thick lamb's-
with a 35" scale length—
wool strap to hold his bass. I
the extra inch is generally
assumed the bass was really heavy.
considered to improve the
I was working on the Voyager proj¬ sound of the B string, and

ect at the time, and many of the many 5- and 6-string basses

parts we were using were made are now built with a 35"

scale. After seeing a photo


from composites, to save weight. It
of this bass in Guitar Player,
just seemed to me that you ought
Phil Lesh contacted
to be able to do the same thing
Modulus and ordered a
with a bass." 6-string.
Gould got in touch with Ron

Armstrong and Rick Turner of

Alembic, and he showed them sam¬

ples of the carbon composite used

on the space probe. After some con¬

sideration, the "war council" at

Alembic decided they would col¬

laborate with Gould to build a bass

with a graphite neck. Following a


period of trial and error, they completed a prototype in the spring of 1976.

'<We were able to get Stanley Clarke to try it out during the soundcheck

before a'Return To Forever concert," said Gould. "It was an ideal situation,
138 ■ Chapter is

because Stanley was using an Alembic bass that was virtually the same in

every respect except the neck. The difference in sound was striking."

Alembic built a short-scale bass with a graphite neck and presented it

at the January 1977 NAMM trade show, the annual gathering of musical

instrument manufacturers, store owners, journalists, and various hangers-

on. There was considerable skepticism but also considerable interest, from

both bassists and the R&D department of one major manufacturer. (After

some preliminary meetings, the company decided against adopting the

new technology.) John McVie of Fleetwood Mac purchased the Alembic

show bass, and word soon began to spread about this new material.

Rick Turner obtained a design patent, which was assigned to Gould's

new business, Modulus Graphite. Alembic was Gould's only customer at

first, and a handful of Alembic/Modulus basses were made in 1977-78.

Over the next few years, Gould began to produce Fender replacement

necks and to build graphite necks for several customers, as well as offer¬

ing his own basses under the Modulus Graphite name. Furniture-

designer-turned-luthier Ned Steinberger took the composite idea to the

extreme, introducing a headless, rectangular-bodied, all-graphite bass in

1979. Bassists like Tony Levin, Geddy Lee, and Sting latched onto them,

but the fad proved short-lived. Steinberger eventually sold his company

to Gibson and in recent years has focused on upright electric basses that

meld wood and composites.

Graphite can be used in a less radical way, as a reinforcing material that

improves the strength and sound of a conventional wooden instrument.

In recent years, builders have used graphite bars to stiffen the necks on

many basses, including several Fender models, and combinations of com¬

posites with traditional materials are becoming more and more common.

The emerging bass technology of the 1970s was a rite of passage for

the instrument. As Alembic's influence spread, more high-end instru¬

ments appeared, and the advent of 5- and 6-string basses meant bassists

had more choices than ever. What had been a nearly linear development
Battleships 8 B Strings ■ 139

Ned Steinberger's all¬

graphite instrument,

introduced in 1979, was

the most radical departure

to date from the original

Fender bass design. Tony

Levin got the first

Steinberger L-series bass, a

fretless 4-string. "That

instrument had a lot of

hardened steel in it, mixed

with the graphite,"

explained Ned Steinberger.

"The thing weighed a ton,

but that super-stiff,

super-heavy construction

gave it a really sweet,

dynamic sound."

path since the introduction of the Precision Bass began to branch in

many directions.
Appropriately, this took place during a time of transition in American

society. After the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam in 1973, the coun¬

try turned inward. The social unrest of the '60s was replaced by a focus

on fashion (most of it bad) and self-involvement. Richard Nixon was

brought low by Watergate; Bruce Springsteen hit his creative stride on

Born to Run (with Gary Tallent pounding away on a Danelectro bass); the

startling special effects in Star Wars amazed moviegoers; and a new musi-

cal genre was in ascendance. The good news: in this style, the bass line

often had unusual prominence. The bad news: it was...disco.


140

Chapter 16: Dance, Dance, Dance


\v>

In the post-Vietnam era, dancing

replaced demonstrations. Popular

music remained an important social

force, and the charts were filled

with songs that combined elements

of rock and soul over a relentless

(and often stupefying) beat. The

new style was called disco.

"Disco was the most self-con¬

tained genre in the history of pop,

the most clearly defined, and the

most despised," wrote Ken Tucker in

Rock of Ages. "No other pop musical

form has ever attracted such rabid

partisans and fanatical foes, divid¬


The great bass playing of
ing audiences along racial and sexual lines, even as its function, para¬
Bernard Edwards was like

an oasis in the desert of doxically—as music designed to make you dance, dance, dance—was to

disco. His playing on Chic's turn the pop audience into one big happy family."
early 70s hits—especially If disco had a redeeming quality, it was its strong emphasis on
"Good Times"—continues
rhythm. Many of the most popular disco songs were little more than
to be recycled by samplers
arranged bass lines, and the best of these came from Chic, who had huge
and sequencers. The band
hits with "Le Freak" and "Good Times" in the late 1970s. Chic was led by
made a strong comback in
guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards, who got a thick but
1992 on Chic-ism, four

years before Edwards's well-defined sound from his Music Man StingRay and Ampeg amps. "I

untimely death at love the fat, smooth sound of Jamerson," Edwards explained to Don
the age of 43. Snowden, "but I also like to hear the notes I'm playing and the little
Dance, Dance, Dance ■ 141

things that go between the chords, so I

always have a lot of top on there."

Despite the glitzy disco trappings that

surrounded his parts, Edwards worked

like a classic R&B bassist, pumping out

insistent patterns low on the bass—"I

play a lot on the E and A strings, and I

stay down at the first five frets for a fat,

chunky sound"—and always focusing

on the groove. Chic's sound was highly

influential. "Good Times," with its

incredibly infectious bass line, has

been much copied and sampled, pro¬

viding the basis for both Queen's

"Another One Bites the Dust" and the

Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight."


Sid Vicious of the Sex Pis¬
The slick superficiality of disco inspired many reactions. One of the
tols was the quintessential
most important (and certainly the loudest) of the anti-disco styles was punk bassist. He was angry
punk rock. Punk bands returned to the essential elements of rock & roll— and nasty, he couldn't

three-chord songs, cranked-up amps, blistering tempos—and topped it all really play—and he used a

off with a healthy dose of anger. The bass playing was crude, and the Precision Bass.

instrument of choice was almost always a black or white Fender Precision,

which reflected the genre's emphasis on the basics. Usually slung down

around the bassist's knees and attacked with a flatpick, the punk P-Bass

was as essential to the music's effect as screaming vocals and an attitude

of sneering indifference to the audience.


The quintessential punk bassist—sadly—was probably Sid Vicious of

the Sex Pistols. When the band was formed in 1975 ("manufactured"

might be a better word, since it was the creation of promoter Malcolm

McLaren), Glen Matlock was the bass player. Matlock had some experience

as a rock musician, and he brought a reasonable degree of competence to


142 ■ Chapter 16

rabble-rousers like "Anarchy in the

U.K." When Matlock quit (or was

fired; accounts vary),, he was

replaced by Vicious, who had no

idea how to play bass but was

seething with anger at just about

everyone and everything. His brutal

bass-bashing ensured that the music

would remain appropriately anti-

technical. Vicious capped off his

short career by murdering his girl¬

friend and then killing himself with

a drug overdose. While there were

other punk bassists who made

stronger musical contributions—

Dee Dee Ramone of the Ramones

and Paul Simonon of the Clash, for


Aston "Family Man" Barrett
instance—Vicious typified the angry ethos of the punk rocker.
and his brother, drummer

Carlton Barrett, were the A more sophisticated alternative to disco came from Jamaica. For

rhythm section for the those who longed for the everybody-get-together days of the late '60s,
Wailers. Their seamless reggae offered a common bond and inspiring (if sometimes mysterious)
grooves set the standard
messages. Influenced by both calypso and American R&B, reggae had
for the reggae rhythm sec¬
developed into a well-defined style by the early 70s, and its popularity
tions that followed.
surged after the Wailers released Burniri in 1973. Reggae's unusual start-

and-stop bass patterns gave the music much of its hypnotic power. Aston

"Family Man" Barrett of the Wailers was one of the founding fathers of

the style; armed with a Fender Jazz Bass, he had a huge, deep sound, and

his sinuous lines were copied by many other reggae bassists.

Robbie Shakespeare was one of Barrett's most ardent disciples. Origi¬

nally a guitarist, Shakespeare decided to switch to Fender bass after seeing

Family Man perform. "I went to that person and said, 'You have to teach
Dance, Dance, Dance ■ 143

Robbie Shakespeare and

drummer Sly Dunbar—the

Riddim Twins—are the

greatest rhythm section in

reggae history. They have

teamed up on an incredible

number of recordings,

working with everyone

from Peter Tosh to Bob

Dylan. Shakespeare used a

Jazz Bass on many of his

classic recordings.

me how to play this thing/" Shakespeare recalled. "About two days later,

he came by my house to show me some things. I said, The bass is the

instrument for me/ because bass guitar is what makes the song." Shake¬

speare went on to become one of the most-recorded bassists of his gener¬

ation, contributing not only to dozens of essential reggae tracks but

albums by such high-profile American artists as Grace Jones, Carly Simon,

and Bob Dylan. He began his career playing a Fender Jazz Bass and used

a number of different instruments over the years, including a Hofner and

a Steinberger, before settling on a Paul Reed Smith bass. He explained the


144 ■ Chapteri6

choice to Don Snowden: "I like a bass that sounds like a bass, deep but

clean, have a lot of balls in it. I can get a Fender Jazz sound, a Fender Pre¬

cision sound, just by turning a knob." Unfortunately, Shakespeare's

favorite PRS bass was a discontinued model, although the company got

back in the bass business in 2000.

Robbie Shakespeare is an eloquent spokesman for the primacy of bass.

"I'm going to make my instrument be the lead, playing the melody. At

the same time, it's supposed to interact with the drummer, the guitarist,

the keyboards, and the singer, and leave enough space for percussion. If

you feel like dubbing on a hundred keyboards, guitars, or vocals, it must

not clash. If you take away all the instruments and the bass alone is there,

it's supposed to still sound commanding and carry a song."

Hybrids
The most profound musical developments of the 1970s occurred in what

might be called "hybrid" styles: crosses between genres that produced

music greater than the sum of its parts. In all of these, the Fender bass was

a crucial catalyst.

In pop music, the most interesting hybrid group was the Police.

Formed in 1977, the band combined the energy of punk rock with the

sophistication of reggae. (While some might question their punk creden¬

tials—especially since guitarist Andy Summers had already been working

as a studio musician—their first single, "Roxanne," was deemed suffi¬

ciently upsetting to be banned by the BBC.) The central figure of the band

was an English bassist-singer-songwriter named Gordon Sumner, but bet¬

ter known as Sting. Originally a guitarist, he had picked up the bass when

his observation of Paul McCartney and Jack Bruce led him to conclude

that it would be easier to sing while playing bass. Like McCartney, he

quickly learned that being the bassist gave him a great deal of control

over the music, especially on reggae-influenced grooves. "In reggae


Dance, Dance, Dance 145

Sting's playing with the

Police combined the frenzy

of punk with the melodic

sophistication of reggae. In

recent years, his favorite

bass has been a battered

'54 Precision. Because of its

delicate condition, the

Fender Custom Shop built

him an "aged" replica that

duplicates the look and

sound of the old P-Bass.

there's a power shift toward the bass and away from the guitar, Sting

explained to Karl Coryat, "which was very attractive to me as a bassist.

The way bass is used in reggae, and particularly dub [which features deep,

nearly subsonic bass], is very radical. It's a revolutionary way of loading

the rhythm of a bar, and it isn't easy to do."


146 ■ Chapter 16

Berry Oakley was noted for

his fluid, melodic style with

the Allman Brothers Band.

He can be heard at his best

on the great 1971 album

Live at Fillmore East.

Oakley's favorite

instrument was

"The Tractor," a Jazz Bass

he had modified by

moving the neck pickup

back and installing a Guild

Starfire pickup in its place.

It looked odd but

sounded great.

Sting played a number of different basses with the Police, including a

Precision fretless. He eventually settled on a 79 Ibanez Musician fretless,

making him one of the first prominent bassists to perform regularly with

a Japanese-made instrument. In his post-Police years, he has returned to

Fenders. He favored a '62 Jazz Bass for several years, until he came across

a battered '54 Precision. "I rescued it from the orphanage about ten years

ago and fell in love with its dilapidated appearance," he recalled. "There's

no finish on it; it's just a wreck. Something about that really appeals to

me. An old instrument is something to be cherished. I think instruments

absorb and retain energy—it sounds mystical, but I really believe it."

Of all the hybrids, the most important was probably a style called

"fusion"—the cross between jazz and rock (although it was closer to jazz

and funk in some cases). One of the things that distinguished this style
Dance, Dance, Dance ■ 147

from traditional jazz was

the required inclusion of

an electric bass, and the

consequent increase in

ensemble volume.

Miles Davis generally

gets credit for creating

fusion on his landmark

1969 album Bitches Brew,

which featured Dave Hol¬

land on acoustic bass and


/
Harvey Brooks on Fender

bass. Brooks was an inter¬

esting if somewhat sur¬


Kenny Gradney provided a
prising choice for the assignment. He was best known for his work with
funky foundation for the
folksingers like Judy Collins and Richie Havens, and for studio work with groove-oriented music of

Bob Dylan ("Like a Rolling Stone") and the team of Mike Bloomfield and Little Feat, which combined

elements of rock, blues,


A1 Kooper (Super Session). Brooks has pointed out that his key creative
soul, country, and New
influences came from Motown—"I learned by listening to James Jamer-
Orleans R&B. Gradney
son and Bob Babbitt"—and his R&B instincts proved to be perfect for joined the band just in

Davis's quirky improvisational schemes. time to cut Dixie Chicken in

After Bitches Brew, Miles Davis remained committed to working with 1973. (His predecessor, Roy

Estrada, was also a


Fender bassists. His early 70s albums have some excellent work by
dedicated P-Bass man.)
Michael Henderson, a tremendously promising player who disappeared
The band broke up after
just as he seemed to be reaching his creative peak. In poor health, Miles the death of founder Low¬

himself dropped out of the music scene in 1975. When he returned six ell George in 1979; they

years later, he hired one of the best musicians ever to play a Fender bass- re-formed in 1988, with

Gradney still on bass.


more about that in Chapter 17.
Stanley Clarke and Jaco Pastorius were the leading bassists in fusion.

Jaco's predecessor in Weather Report, Alphonso Johnson, also played a

key early role in establishing the electric bass in this new genre. He was
148 ■ Chapter 16

A native of Oakland, California, Paul Jackson brought

funk to fusion on Herbie Hancock's classic Head Hunters

album in 1973. His favorite instrument at the time was a

In the late '60s, the versa¬ modified Telecaster Bass that had four Bartolini Hi-A

tile Harvey Brooks used a pickups (one for each string, with an amp to match).

Jazz Bass to back Bob

Dylan, do session work


less flashy than Stanley and Jaco (who wasn't?) but no less solid—and he
with the Doors, and jam
was also a fine composer whose contributions include Weather Report's
with Jimi Hendrix. He also
"Cucumber Slumber" (.Mysterious Traveller, 1974).
cut Super Session with Mike
Paul Jackson was another outstanding fusion bassist, and his playing
Bloomfield and Al Kooper.

In 1970, Brooks was invited on Herbie Hancock's 1973 Head Hunters album (especially on their big hit,

by Miles Davis to be the "Chameleon") was as funky as fusion ever got. And we can't consider
Fender bassist on the fusion pioneers without mentioning Percy Jones of Brand X, who
seminal fusion album
deserves considerable credit for forging a unique style on a '74 Precision
Bitches Brew.
fretless before he ever heard Jaco. Rick Laird of the original Mahavishnu

Orchestra, on a Jazz Bass, also did yeoman service; his steady, structural

bass lines often seemed to be the only thing holding the music together

as guitarist John McLaughlin and drummer Billy Cobham traded rapid-

fire outbursts. In the 1974-75 version of Mahavishnu, Ralphe Armstrong

had a more featured role and soloed frequently. He played a Fender bass

that was similar to Anthony Jackson's "Career Girl": it had a Precision


Dance, Dance, Dance ■ 149

neck on a Jazz body—but it was

fretiess.

Steve Swallow is an important,

if often overlooked, figure in the

story of the electric bass. Trained

on classical piano as a child, he

became an ardent jazz musician as

a teenager, playing first trumpet

and then acoustic bass. By the late

1960s, he had established a solid

career as a straight-ahead jazz

musician, working with such

respected leaders as guitarist Jim

Hall and saxophonist Stan Getz.

And then, while strolling through

a NAMM show in 1969, Swallow

stopped to try out an electric bass.

He abruptly dropped the upright,

never to return, and since 1970 he

has played electric bass—with a Steve Swallow was a well-

pick—exclusively. established mainstream

Swallow's first electric bass was a Gibson EB-2. He later played several jazz bassist when he tried

Fender and Fender-like basses (some of them semi-hollow) before obtain¬ out an electric bass in

1969. He abruptly quit the


ing a one-of-a-kind 5-string made by luthier Ken Parker in 1989. The
upright and began to play
instrument is tuned EADGC, and Swallow uses it with great artistry to
electric bass exclusively. His
play both impeccably solid bass lines and soaring, guitar-like solos. While
work is characterized by
he has never had the visibility (or the imitators) of Stanley Clarke or Jaco beautiful solos that are

Pastorius, Swallow has been an effective champion of the electric bass, heavily influenced by his

especially among jazz musicians. By playing it so well for so long, he has study of R&B vocalists such

as Marvin Caye and
proven its worth.
Freddie Jackson.
150

Chapter 17: Miles Ahead

In 1980, Leo Fender left Music Man to team


with two old friends, George Fullerton and
Dale Hyatt, in a new company called G&L.
(The "G" was for George, the "L" for Leo.)
G&L offered guitars and basses that looked
familiar yet incorporated new features derived
from Leo's relentless trial-and-error research.
The G&L L-2000 bass, for example, was avail¬
able with a vibrato tailpiece and a preamp fea¬
turing three toggle switches that could be set
in 18 different combinations. Not everyone
thought this was progress over the elegant
Marcus Miller is renowned simplicity of the Precision Bass, but Leo
for the great sound he gets explained his experiments by saying, "I owe it to musicians to make bet¬
from his 77 Jazz Bass,
ter instruments."
which was modified by
If Leo ever looked up from his workbench and paused to consider the
Roger Sadowsky. Miller
progress that had been made by his Precision Bass and Jazz Bass since
"thumps" with his thumb
their introductions, he must have felt some pride. In less than 30 years,
most of the time, produc¬

ing a rich, clear tone that his electric basses had gained widespread acceptance and altered the
records exceptionally well. course of popular music. They were in use in just about every genre of
In addition to his work American music, from country to rock to R&B to jazz, and virtuosos like
with Miles Davis, he is best
James Jamerson and Jaco Pastorius had clearly demonstrated their cre¬
known for his solo albums
ative potential.
The Sun Don't Lie, Tales, and
There were more virtuosos on the way. One was a young musician
Live & More.
who was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Jamaica, Queens: Marcus
Miller. Initially schooled on the clarinet, he quickly mastered several
Miles Ahead 151

Leo Fender started G&L in

1980. His L-2000 bass

featured a Kahler vibrato

tailpiece and complicated

active electronics. In some

ways, it was a successor to

the original Jazz Bass—but

was it an improvement?

Some bass players thought

so; others preferred his

original designs.

?iI | }
152 ■ Chapter 17

Darryl Jones has played with Miles Davis,

Sting, Madonna, Herbie Hancock, Peter

Gabriel, and...oh, yes...the Rolling Stones.

On the Stones' Voodoo Lounge tour, he

favored a white '66 Jazz Bass. His bass

collection also includes a '58 Precision and

several Sadowskys.

The "lead bass" style of Tim Bogert

in Vanilla Fudge (1967-70) was a key

influence on many young players,

including Jeff Berlin and Billy Shee¬

han. Bogert's favorite bass during

his Vanilla Fudge days was a

modified Precision. He later played

in Cactus and then rejoined Fudge

drummer Carmine Appice to back

guitarist Jeff Beck.


Miles Ahead ■ 153

Billy Sheehan said "old Leo

Fender got it right" when

he created the Precision

Bass, but Billy transformed

his '69 P-Bass into the

homemade custom

instrument he called "The

Wife." It featured dual

pickups (a Gibson EB-0

humbucker and a DiMarzio

Model P), each with its

own output jack.

Jeff Berlin improved his

mid-'60s Precision Bass by

having the neck cut down

to Jazz Bass dimensions

and installing a Badass

bridge and custom-made

Glen Quan pickups. In

recent years, he has played

Peavey and Dean basses

that he helped to design;

they are similar in many

respects to this modified

P-Bass.
154 ■ Chapter 17

While Leo Fender was cre¬

ating new instruments at

G&L, CBS-owned Fender

was developing such curi¬

ous and short-lived models

as the Lead Bass, which

appeared in the 1980 cata¬

log and then vanished.

Mark Egan was the original bassist in the

Pat Metheny Group, where he used a

modified Precision Bass that belonged to

Metheny. The blond P-Bass had a PJ

pickup configuration, and Jaco Pastorius

himself had removed the frets and

coated the fingerboard with marine

epoxy. Egan's fine playing anchored the

band's stunning eponymous debut in

1978. After recording one more PMG

album, American Garage, Mark set out on

his own as a studio bassist and co-leader

(with drummer Danny Gottlieb) of the

group Elements.
Miles Ahead ■ 155

Will Lee started young. This


other instruments, including electric bass. Before he was 20, Miller was
photo shows him at age 14,
working professionally as a studio bassist and jazz sideman. And then, in
playing a white P-Bass with
1981, he got a call from Miles Davis. The famed trumpeter was coming the Inner Sounds. A first-
out of retirement and putting together a new band. After a jam session at call New York studio musi¬

CBS Studios in New York, Miller got the nod to join the group; he played cian since the 1980s, Will

a key role on Davis's "comeback" album, The Man with the Horn, and a has played on well over

1,000 albums. His extensive


Grammy-winning 1982 live set called We Want Miles. A few years later,
instrument collection
Miller collaborated with Miles as bassist-composer-arranger-producer on
includes '63 Precision and
Tutu, Amandla, and Siesta.
Jazz Basses as well as the
Since high school, Miller's favorite bass had been a '77 Jazz Bass. Sadowsky 4-string he's used

While many mid-'70s Fender basses were mediocre instruments, noted for years on David Letter-

more for their heavy wood and thick finishes than playing ease or good man's late-night TV show.

sound, Miller's bass was clearly the exception. On the surface, it appeared

to be a fairly standard, natural-finish J-Bass with an ash body and maple

neck, but it had been modified by Roger Sadowsky to improve its tone.

The stock bridge was replaced by heavier Badass model, and a Stars Gui¬

tars preamp (tweaked by Sadowsky) was installed to facilitate more


156 ■ Chapter 17

The Bullet Bass was


sophisticated tone-shaping. (In 1998, Fender offered a Marcus Miller Sig¬
another Fender oddity

from the early '80s. It was nature Jazz Bass that replicated the modifications.)

available in short-scale and Miller's style combines the thumb-style playing of Larry Graham—
long-scale versions, which Marcus prefers to call "thumping," as Larry did—with the harmonic
although few bass players
sophistication of Jaco Pastorius. Miller is noted for the clarity of his sound.
cared for either.
"I strike the strings right in front of the chrome neck-pickup cover, not at

the bottom of the neck where you get all the overtones," he told Chris Jisi.

"A lot of times I don't pluck [i.e., pop] at all. That developed during my

jingle days, because I found that using my thumb was the best way to hear

the bass coming out of a tiny TV speaker. Plus, if you use two alternating

fingers, as I do when I play fingerstyle, there's always a strong note fol¬

lowed by a weak one; with the thumb, every note is strong."

Shortly after Miller left the Miles Davis band, his spot was taken by

Darryl Jones. (Tom Barney was the interim bassist and played on one
Miles Ahead ■ 157

In 1990, Billy Sheehan worked with

Yamaha to create the Attitude Bass, a new

instrument inspired by the modified Preci¬

sion he called "The Wife." The top-of-the-

line Limited model had special DiMarzio

pickups, a Hipshot D-tuner key, scalloped

frets, and other features of Billy's Fender «

bass. The Deluxe (shown here) was a sim¬

plified "club musician" version.

At the age of 22, Victor

Bailey had the unenviable

task of succeeding Jaco in

Weather Report. He did a

superb job, showing he

could cover Jaco's parts

and bring something of his

own to the music. In 1987,

he released a critically

acclaimed solo album,

Bottom's Up. Throughout

his career, Bailey has

favored J-style basses.


158 ■ Chapter 17

album, Star People.) Jones was a Chicago

native and bandmate of drummer Vince

Wilburn, a nephew of Davis. He brought a

funky, blues-inflected sound to two mid-'80s

Davis albums, Decoy and You're Under Arrest.

His approach was heavily influenced by

three of the most important bassists of the

'70s. "Larry Graham, Stanley Clarke, and

Jaco were the key players," Jones explained.

"Larry opened my ears to what the instru¬

ment could do, both sonically and techni¬

cally, through slapping and popping and his

use of effects like the fuzztone. Stanley

broadened that concept, in terms of my

thinking about soloing and developing the

In 1981, Chicago native Steve Rodby facility to play challenging music. Those
succeeded Mark Egan in the Pat
two, in turn, allowed me to appreciate Jaco,
Metheny Group. Although the major¬

ity of his work has been done on

amplified upright, Rodby is also a mas¬

ter of subtle groove playing on electric

bass. He has used modified Fender

Precision Basses and, more recently, a

Modulus 5-string.

In 1985, after seeing Anthony Jackson

with his contrabass guitar, John Pati-

tucci put his modified Jazz Bass aside

and started playing a Ken Smith

6-string. He soon became one of the

instrument's most distinctive players,

and the most accomplished electric/

acoustic doubler since Stanley Clarke.


Miles Ahead ■ 159

who expanded my focus on a more musical level. Like a lot of people at

the time, my reaction to Jaco was: This isn't a bass player—this is a musi¬

cian who plays bass."

After his stint with Miles, Jones joined Sting's post-Police "jazz band,"

where Sting eschewed bass to focus on his singing. Jones played on The

Dream of the Blue Turtles and Bring On the Night and toured with the band.

After various sessions and tours with Madonna and Peter Gabriel, he got

a call to audition for the Rolling Stones. In 1994, he was asked to accom¬

pany the World's Greatest Rock & Roll Band as a sideman (only Mick,

Keith, Charlie, and Woody are Stones). Unsurprisingly, Jones has favored

vintage Fender basses for the Stones gig, including '65 and '66 Jazz Basses

as well as a '58 Precision. He has also played several Fender-like basses,

including a pair of Sadowsky 4-strings and an Ernie Ball Music Man Ster¬

ling (in essence, a StingRay with a J-style neck).

Darryl Jones's playing career is proof of the remarkable progress made

by the Fender bass from the 1950s to the 1990s. Imagine that Bill Black

had announced in 1958 he was leaving Elvis Presley to play his Precision

Bass with Miles Davis. It would have been laughable. Or, even more

absurdly, if Paul Chambers had told Miles he was splitting so he could go

slap his bass with Elvis—not only ridiculous but unthinkable, given the

racial climate of the time. Yet few people thought there was anything

unusual about Darryl Jones working with both Miles Davis and the

Stones. It was simply business as usual for a talented electric bassist.

Jeff, Billy & Will


Jeff Berlin is a master musician whose work has always defied categoriza¬

tion. A violin prodigy as a child, Berlin dropped his classical studies by

the time he was 13 to focus on electric bass. (We can imagine what his

parents thought.) Inspired by Jack Bruce's freewheeling approach in

Cream, while still a teenager Jeff developed a style he has described as


160 ■ Chapter 17

MINUTEMEN

With the Minutemen, Mike Watt fused the incredible

energy of punk with powerful political commentary—

often delivered in songs that lasted less than 60

seconds. His favorite instrument was a modified '68

Telecaster Bass; his favorite technique was banging the

strings with his fist.

The molten bass lines of

Flea powered the Red Hot


"365 notes per bar." "When I heard Jack Bruce playing with so much orig¬
Chili Peppers to mass popu¬

larity in the late '80s. His inality and freedom, it was a revelation. He opened my ears to improvi¬

style combines the slapping sation and exploration, which changed my approach permanently. I
of funk with the raw power wanted to find notes that other people didn't play, like Jack did."
of punk and heavy metal,
Berlin's search for those notes led him to the Berklee College of Music,
often delivered on a Music
where he moved quickly from student to teacher. After two years at
Man StingRay at excruciat¬
Berklee, he teamed up with drummer Carmine Appice, guitarist Ray
ing volume.
Gomez, and keyboardist Steve Hill in a mid-'70s fusion band. More jazz-

rock followed, including collaborations with guitarists Allan Holdsworth,

John McLaughlin, and Larry Coryell. Then, in 1977, Berlin joined a band

led by former Yes drummer Bill Bruford. They recorded three albums that

became cult classics, including one, Gradually Going Tornado, that show¬

cased Berlin's amazing facility on his modified Precision Bass. Jeff's career
Miles Ahead ■ 161

Gary Willis forged a powerful style on fretless 5-string

that reflected his key bass influences—Jaco, Paul Jackson,

and Rocco Prestia—and his restless search for new

approaches to composition and improvisation. He is best

known as the co-leader, with guitarist Scott Henderson,

of the fusion band Tribal Tech.

Texas bassist Tommy Shannon teamed with drummer

Chris Layton in Stevie Ray Vaughan's superb backup

band, Double Trouble. Shannon's favorite basses for the

SRV tjig included an Olympic white '62 Jazz Bass and '57

and '66 Precisions.


162 ■ Chapter 17

peaked in the mid '80s with the release of two solo albums, Champion and

Pump It! The former included Berlin's version of "Dixie," the first of his

amazing solo-bass renditions of famous anthems. The highlight of Pump

It! was Berlin's note-for-note cover of Eric Clapton's guitar solo on

Cream's "Crossroads," which made it clear he could play just about any¬

thing on bass—and play it with authority.

Jeff Berlin's work has always swung back and forth between rock and

jazz (not to mention Latin music and several other styles), and his record¬

ings have featured musicians from bands ranging from Journey to Chick

Corea's Elektric Band. He shrugs at attempts to categorize his work and

mentions a wide range of players who have influenced his bass style, from

James Jamerson to Stanley Clarke to Tim Bogert of Vanilla Fudge.

Billy Sheehan is another Bogert disciple. "He was my biggest influ¬

ence," Sheehan told Tom Mulhern. "He pushed me—unknowingly, with

his Vanilla Fudge recordings—into being a fingerstyle player. He did

things with his fingers that guys with picks just couldn't do." Like Berlin,

Sheehan developed a singular, virtuosic bass style by absorbing a wide

range of influences and then transcending them by finding his own orig¬

inal voice. A voice that, in Sheehan's case, has usually been expressed at

considerable volume.

Sheehan's originality is based on both his technical innovations and

his unique sound. He emerged in the late '70s with the Buffalo-based

band Talas, where the spotlight was on Billy's dazzling speed, harmonics,

and "hammering" technique—which invited comparisons with guitarist

Eddie Van Halen. In 1984, Sheehan joined a band led by flamboyant

vocalist David Lee Roth and got a chance to showcase his chops in

onstage duels with guitarist Steve Vai. After he split from Roth in 1987,

Sheehan put together Mr. Big, a hard rock outfit in which he had more

control of the material.

The basis of Sheehan's sound—which has been described as sounding

like a chain saw going through chocolate pudding—was a heavily modi-


Miles Ahead ■ 163

Studio ace Lee Sklar has played on dozens of hit records and is

well known for his stints with James Taylor and Phil Collins. Lee's

favorite studio instrument is a modified P-Bass. The neck is from

a '62 Precision; it was reshaped to J-Bass dimensions and has

mandolin frets for more precise intonation.


164 ■ Chapter 17

Steve Harris of Iron Maiden

is a longtime P-Bass devo¬


fied Fender bass he called "The Wife." The bass started out as a '69 Preci¬

tee. His "Number One" sion. Because of his admiration for the "super deep" tone Yardbirds'
bass is a '69 or 70 Pre¬ bassist Paul Samwell-Smith got from his Gibson bass, Sheehan added a
cision that has been refin¬ Gibson EB-0 pickup in the neck position. Not knowing how to connect
ished several times. Prais¬
two pickups to one output jack, he simply added a second jack. He
ing Precisions, Harris said:
replaced the Precision's neck with one from a '68 Telecaster Bass (which
"I really like the roundness
had the same peghead shape as the original '51 P-Bass). The stock pickup
on their bottom end. I can

get a lot of top, real lows, was yanked in favor of a DiMarzio Model P. A Schaller bridge and Schaller

the midrange, and every¬ tuning machines replaced the worn-out originals. The upper frets were
thing—really solid." scalloped to facilitate string bends. Stove bolts attached a heavy-duty

strap to the body. With a few more refinements and a couple of decals,

Sheehan had created his own custom Fender bass.

Because of the two output jacks, Billy connected his bass to two amps,

one for the low end from the EB-0 pickup and one for the brighter sound

of the P-style pickup. At one point he developed this into a massive rig

that included distortion preamps to fine-tune the "chainsaw" high end

and huge subwoofers that reach down to the bottom of the human hear¬

ing range for the "chocolate pudding" bottom.


Miles Ahead ■ 165

In Latin music, the

legendary electric bassist


After years of heavy playing, "The Wife" was beginning to disinte¬
Sal Cuevas is renowned for
grate, so Sheehan worked with Yamaha R&D to create a replacement.
an innovative approach
Introduced in 1990, the Attitude Limited Bass duplicated the double-out-
that applied slapping and
put setup of the Fender hybrid and featured improvements like a other R&B and jazz
strengthened neck joint and a Hipshot Xtender key, which has a lever techniques. Some of his

that drops the E string down a half- or whole-step. (Yamaha later offered best work was on Ray

lower-priced Attitude basses that had the same basic design but fewer Barretto's Rican/Struction

and the Fania All-Stars'


bells and whistles.)
albums Crossover and
In recent years Sheehan has expanded his musical horizons by per¬
Rhythm Machine.
forming and recording with the trio Niacin, which includes organist John

Novello and former P-Funk drummer Dennis Chambers. The trio's wide-

open, improvisational style is far from the hard rock bombast of the David

Lee Roth band and Mr. Big, yet Sheehan's style and sound fit perfectly.

The most versatile '80s bassist of them all was Will Lee. The son of an

orchestra bassist/educator (Dr. William F. Lee III of the University of

Miami) and a big-band singer, Will grew up surrounded by music. After

trying piano and then drums, he settled on electric bass. His first bass was

a cheap Xapanese instrument, but he took the money from his gigs with
166 ■ Chapter 17

a surf band to buy a white Precision. Will quickly mastered the instru¬

ment, and by the time he was 18 he had landed a job with a New York

horn band, Dreams, succeeding his idol, Chuck Rainey.

Lee soon made a name for himself as a smart, versatile player (and

singer), and by the early '80s he was one of the busiest session players in

New York, cutting dozens of jingles and recording albums with everyone

from the Bee Gees to the Brecker Brothers. Although much of his session

work was anonymous, he landed a highly visible gig as a member of the

band on David Letterman's late-night show, a spot he has held continu¬

ously for more than 25 years.

Aside from having quick ears and an encyclopedic knowledge of pop

music, Lee is one of the most potent groove players of all time. "My basic

approach can be summed up in two words," he told Chris Jisi. "The

pocket.' The most important function of the instrument is creating and

holding down grooves." Will's knack for doing just that, often with only

a few well-chosen and perfectly placed notes, is nothing less than

astounding. He is quick to credit such key influences as Rainey and

Willie Weeks (especially for his work on "Voices Inside (Everything Is

Everything)" from Donny Hathaway Live), but Lee's talent in this area is

almost without peer. He has taken the rhythmic innovations of Jamer-

son and the other early R&B greats, mixed in the melodic genius of

McCartney, and then added a dash of hipness—without ever losing

touch with the groove.

After using (and tinkering with) his white P-Bass for several years, Lee

moved on to Jazz Basses and then to Sadowsky J-style basses. His well-

worn black Sadowsky has an ash body, maple neck, and stock pickups

from an early-'60s Jazz Bass ("the relationship between pickups and wood

is essential, and the old Fenders just sounded better"). His sunburst TV-

show bass is much the same, except for a maple top on the body. He

always leaves the chrome pickup cover on his basses, finding it a useful

anchor point for both finger- and pick-style playing.


Miles Ahead 167

The considerable skill of bassists such as Marcus Miller, Darryl Jones,

Jeff Berlin, Billy Sheehan, and Will Lee made the 1980s an exciting era for

bass. As great as they were, though, it was a decade of musical as well as

political conservatism. The musical concepts that dominated were essen¬

tially extensions of the radical ideas of the '60s and 70s. The big question,

as the 1990s approached, was: Will there be a new breakthrough?


168

Chapter 18: Forward Into the Past

The news in the early 1990s was dominated by

the conflict with Iraq, which culminated in

my ; the six-week Gulf War. It was a great triumph


V*. /
ft
(k t*
^
.
for President George Bush, but in 1992 he lost

the presidency to an obscure Arkansas politi¬

cian named Bill Clinton. Clinton, who openly

admired Elvis Presley and played honking

R&B saxophone, represented the ascendance

of the rock & roll ethos to the highest levels of

4 ffl
political power.

In music, the story was diversity—or, per¬

haps more accurately, fragmentation. Rap,

which featured many recycled bass lines, was


In the early '90s, Stuart
on the rise with so-called "urban" listeners and the old distinction between
Hamm worked with the
black and white popular music seemed to be reasserting itself (although
Fender Custom Shop to

create a new bass model, many white teenagers embraced rap as well as rock). Concertgoers turned

called the Urge. The idea, out in droves to see Garth Brooks, whose "modern country" bridged the
according to Hamm, was to gap between traditional country and the energy of rock. Jazz turned in on
build a modern-sounding
itself, focusing on its history (and the upright bass). The Rolling Stones and
bass with the "vintage
Pink Floyd had hugely successful tours—and Michael Jackson married
look" of the classic
Elvis's daughter, Lisa Marie.
Fender models.
In 1990, a new magazine called Bass Player began regular publication.

(A spinoff of Guitar Player, it had been tested with "special edition" issues

in 1988 and 1989.) Its appearance confirmed the importance of the electric

bass in modern music, and the magazine quickly developed a loyal follow¬
ing.
Forward Into the Past ■ 169

In 2000, Fender introduced The Kubicki Ex Factor has a

the Urge II, an updated lever on its "headless head-

version of the original Stu stock"; by flipping the

Hamm signature model. lever, a bassist can play

The scale length is 34" two additional notes below

(rather than the 32" of the open E. This design

original Urge), and in recalled the original

many ways it represents a concept of Jimmy Johnson,

contemporary hybrid of who envisioned a bass that

the time-tested Precision emulated the C-extension

and jazz designs. of a classical upright.

Johnson eventually decided

a 5-string was a better

idea—but his initial

concept was sound.


170 ■ Chapter 18

Bass Player arrived just in time to chronicle two distinct strands in the

ongoing story of the Fender bass. The first was the emergence of several

new virtuosos who picked up where Jaco left off and made a case for the

electric bass as a featured instrument. One of these master players was Stu¬

art Hamm, a Berklee-trained bassist known for his work with guitarists

Steve Vai and Joe Satriani as well as his solo efforts. Hamm—who had

grown up listening to Chris Squire, Stanley Clarke, and Jaco—was fluent in

all aspects of modern bass technique, from the most basic fingerstyle

accompaniments to slapping, hammering, harmonics, and two-handed

tapping. In concert, he was famous for his solo version of Vince Guaraldi's

"Linus and Lucy," which demonstrated how piano-like the electric bass

could be.

Early in his career, Hamm played Kubicki Factor basses almost exclu¬

sively. These sleek, headless instruments were created by luthier Phil

Kubicki as a modern alternative to the traditional look and feel of Fender

basses. They featured an intermediate scale length of 32" and slim necks

perfect for the high-speed virtuosity of a player like Hamm. Yet their sound

was solid enough to appeal to a roots-oriented bassist like Kenny Gradney

of Little Feat. The Kubicki Ex Factor model had an extension on the E

string; by flipping a lever, the bassist could play two additional fretted

notes, extending the instrument's range down to D without sacrificing its


playing ease.

In 1991-92, Hamm worked with the Fender Custom Shop to create a

new bass that, he explained, "combined some of the things I like about my

Kubickis with characteristics I've always associated with Fender basses,

especially the warm, round sound and that great vintage look." What

emerged from their collaboration was dubbed the Urge. It had a 32" scale

length and custom-wound P and J pickups, along with a preamp that

offered treble/mid/bass boost as well as a choice of active or passive opera¬

tion. Visually, the bass was less radical than the Kubicki and had the "vin¬
tage look" Hamm craved.
Forward Into the Past ■ 171

The Urge proved ideal for Stuart Hamm but less so for other bassists—

the scale length was the main problem—so in 2000 Fender offered a revised

version called the Urge II. The new bass had a standard 34" scale and a sim¬

plified control configuration. Reviewing it in Bass Player, Scott Malandrone

noted that "you can clearly see the Precision and Jazz influence on the Urge

II" and went on to conclude that it "takes elements of history's most pop¬

ular basses and successfully combines them into a great-playing and great¬

sounding package."

Victor Wooten was another '90s virtuoso whose playing spanned the

full range of bass technique, along with a few ideas he picked up from

banjo players. Wooten burst onto the scene early in the decade as a mem¬

ber of Bela Fleck & the Flecktones. This unique ensemble, whose instru¬

mental music combined elements of bluegrass, jazz, rock, R&B, and just

about every other style its members had heard, was the perfect setting for

Wooten's subtle mastery. He had grown up listening closely to Stanley

Clarke, and he was also influenced by the two-handed tapping of guitarist

Stanley Jordan. Wooten added the final ingredient while killing time on

breaks during a gig at Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia. "I'd fool

around with the banjo," he explained. "I'd play my regular bass patterns,

but because the banjo is tuned differently, it would sound like some really

outside stuff."
Wooten eventually integrated this "outside stuff" into his bass style,

which features a highly developed slapping technique that combines up-

and downstrokes with his right-hand thumb and left-hand hammers and

pull-offs. The result is runs of astounding speed, delivered with pinpoint

accuracy and an apparent ease that belies the years of work behind the

technique. Wooten's playing has garnered much praise, and he continues

to amaze listeners with his work with the Flecktones, in his "Bass Extremes"

partnership with Steve Bailey, and on his solo albums.

Wooten, like Hamm, usually plays a 4-string. His basses are made by

Fodera, and he owns several different fretted and fretless instruments based
172 ■ Chapter i8

One of the great bass virtu¬

osos of the 1990s, Victor

Wooten developed a

unique style that combined

ideas he learned from Stan¬

ley Clarke and guitarist

Stanley Jordan with banjo

playing and a big dose of

originality. In addition to

touring and recording with

Bela Fleck & the Flecktones,

Wooten has made several

well-received solo albums.


Forward Into the Past I 173

The multi-talented Michael Manring

has an amazing style that involves

playing in a large number of alternate

tunings—and sometimes using two or

three basses at once. He has recorded

as a solo artist on Windham Hill and

Alchemy Records as well as working

with such eclectic bands as Montreux,

Sadhappy, and Cloud Chamber.

In the 1990s, many young

bassists embraced vintage

Fender instruments. Patrick

Dahlheimer of Live, shown

here with an unusual

mahogany-body '62 Preci¬

sion Bass, was typical of

this group. He is an enthu¬

siastic collector and player

of pre-CBS Fender basses.


174 ■ Chapter i8

Oteil Burbridge has

emerged as one of the

great bass talents on the

contemporary scene, bring¬

ing his incredible melodic

gift to groups as different

as the Aquarium Rescue

Unit and the Allman Broth¬

ers Band. Although he

favors Modulus 5- and 6-

string basses for his solo

work and A.R.U. gigs, Oteil

plays a Jazz Bass (with a

pick) with the Allmans,


on the company's Monarch Deluxe model. In recent years, Wooten has also
echoing the sound of origi¬
played an NYC Empire bass, a Fodera-made instrument inspired by the Jazz
nal bassist Berry Oakley.
Bass. "It's like a Fender," he explained to Bill Feigh, "and since I've never

owned a Fender I've never had that sound. The bass really reminded me of

Marcus [Miller] when I got it because it has a fatter tone."

The most radical bass virtuoso of the 1990s was Michael Manring. Tike

Hamm and Wooten, he had mastered the entire encyclopedia of bass tech¬

nique, but Manring extended these devices into new sonic territory with

his use of alternative tunings, ranging from simple £-string drops to such

unusual variants as £#G#AE. He frequently changed tuning on the fly—one

of his solo pieces requires "12 to 16 basic tunings and maybe a hundred tun¬

ing switches"—and his desire for maximum flexibility led to intensive

instrument-development work with luthier Joe Zon. One of their creations,

the Hyperbass, is a graphite-neck fretless equipped with four custom Hip-

shot machines and a special bridge that allows further retuning by flipping

two levers. The number of possible Hyperbass tunings is mind-boggling,

although Manring modestly noted in 1991, soon after the instrument


Forward Into the Past ■ 175

debuted, that he had actually used

"only about 40." (The number has

since grown considerably.)

As amazing as he is as a bass tech¬

nician, Manring is notable first and

foremost as a composer. He empha¬

sizes that he usually conceives his

pieces away from the bass and then

tries to find the right combination of

tunings and techniques to execute

them. This is one reason his music is

so deceptive—it often sounds effort¬

less on record, but if you see Manring

play his solo pieces you realize how

complicated they are. (Fellow bassist

Steve Rodby, who produced Man¬

ring's Drastic Measures album, said his

music is "almost always ten times It wasn't only young

harder than it sounds.") bassists who were infected

with "vintage fever" in the


During the first stage of his career, Manring used a Paul Reed Smith fret¬
'90s. Ceddy Lee of Rush—a
less and a Music Man StingRay fretless, which was the vehicle for many of
band that was formed in
his early retuning experiments. He also played a Japanese-made Riverhead
1968—used his early-'70s
fretted bass. After hooking up with Zon, he developed a number of special¬
Jazz Bass on the band's

ized instruments. In addition to the Hyperbass, Manring's arsenal includes 1993 album, Counterparts.

a one-of-a-kind headless fretted bass ("Vinny") as well as customized Zon

Legacy Elite and Sonus basses. (Zon described the latter model, which fea¬

tures a slim graphite neck, as a "Jazz Bass for the '90s.") In spite of all of his

custom instruments and unusual tunings, Manring remains a skillful

accompanist as well as a solo artist. He has said it is very important to

understand the full range of the instrument's capabilities, which are limit¬

less: "Ta me, electric bass is so special, so beautiful in any context. I really
176 ■ Chapter 18

In 1982, Fender introduced

its U.S. Vintage Series basses,

which replicated the look and

feel of the company's classic

instruments. The initial offer¬

ings were '57 and '62 Preci¬

sion and '62 Jazz models.

(The latter was actually closer

to a '60-61 J-Bass with the

"stack knob" setup.) These

instruments were a hit with

players and foreshadowed

the "back to vintage" move¬

ment of the 1990s.

believe that someday electric bass will be looked at as a really high art

form."

Action & Reaction


While some artists were elevating the status of the electric bass as a solo

instrument during the 1990s, a counter-revolution was taking place. With

the ascendance of grunge and other forms of back-to-basics rock, the orig¬

inal instruments of Leo Fender enjoyed a spectacular revival. Fender Musi¬

cal Instruments had serendipitously anticipated this movement with the

introduction of their "Vintage Series" instruments—reproductions of clas¬

sic models such as the '57 Precision and the '62 Jazz—and the bass players
Forward Into the Past 177

In 1996, Fender rolled out

the "tweaked traditional"

instruments in its new

Deluxe line. Shown here

(L-R) are the Precision Bass

Deluxe, Precision Bass

Deluxe with maple finger¬

board, Jazz Bass Deluxe,

and Jazz Bass Deluxe V.

These new basses combine

modern active circuitry

with classic Fender design

features.

of the '90s embraced these instruments as well as vintage P-Basses, J-Basses,

StingRays, and even some G&L models.

A cruise through the pages of Bass Player during the mid to late '90s

confirmed this trend. In issue after issue, young bassists were either pic¬

tured with Fender basses or quoted as using them as their main perform¬

ing/recording instruments. To name just a few: Mike Mills, R.E.M. (P-

Bass)...Ben Shepherd, Soundgarden (J-Bass)..Jeff Ament, Pearl Jam

(StingRay, various Fender-style basses)...Sara Lee, Gang Of Four, B-52s (G&L

L-2000)...John Doe, X (P-Bass)...Aimee Man (P-Bass)...Matt Malley, Count¬

ing Crows (StingRay)...Tim Cross, Sponge (P-Bass)...Bardi Martin, Candle-

box (StingRay)...Matt Freeman, Rancid (J-Bass)...Melissa Auf der Maur,

Hole (P-Bass)...Andrew Levy, Brand New Heavies (StingRay, P-Bass)


178 ■ Chapter i8

Steve Bailey emerged as an

important talent in the

early 1990s, displaying daz¬

zling technique on a Heart-

field DR6 fretless, a Japan¬

ese-made 6-string that

Fender distributed. After a

NAMM jam, he formed the

duo Bass Extremes with

Victor Wooten.

...Rachel Haden, That Dog (P-Bass)...Corey Parks, Nashville Pussy (J-Bass)

...Drew Miller, Boiled In Lead (J-Bass)...and so on.

Typical of this movement was Patrick Dahlheimer of Live, who

explained to Scott Malandrone that he had converted from modern high-

tech basses to vintage Fenders after finding a '62 Precision in a pawnshop:

"I bought the bass and started playing it onstage. The sound was amazing;

it was musical. The tone didn't depend on a battery or active electronics. It

was a hunk of wood and you had to make it work." Many of his compatri¬

ots echoed this sentiment of feeling a special connection with vintage

Fender basses.

Perhaps even more telling were the veteran players who had moved (or

moved back) to Fender basses. Geddy Lee of Rush, known for his "high

tech" sound on Rickenbacker, Steinberger, and Wal basses, picked up his

old Jazz Bass to record the album Counterparts. Pino Palladino adopted a '63

Precision (with flatwound strings) to record with D'Angelo. Jazz virtuoso

Jimmy Earl, a devoted 6-stringer, began to play his '65 Jazz Bass again. Stu¬

dio ace Randy Jackson dropped his modern 5-strings for a Fender-style bass

made by Mike Lull. And Gene Perez kicked up the sound of Masters At

Work remixes with a '78 Jazz Bass.


Forward Into the Past ■ 179

Roscoe Beck collaborated

with the Fender Custom

Shop on the design of a

signature bass inspired by

the Jazz Basses of the

1960s. It has proven to be

one of the company's most

successful 5-string models,

uniting contemporary con¬

struction with the classic

J-Bass sound.

There may have been no breakthrough players like James Jamerson or

Jaco Pastorius in the 1990s—and perhaps bass playing has matured to the

point that there never will be again—but as the 50th anniversary of the Pre¬

cision Bass approached, Fender basses continued to exert a powerful influ¬

ence. Not every great player used a Fender or Fender-like bass, but Leo

Fender's original creation can legitimately be seen as the forebear of nearly

all of the electric bass guitars on the market today. Just about every bass

player, it seems, still has to consider the Precision Bass or Jazz Bass at some

point in his or her career, and then decide whether to embrace the original

instrument or choose an alternative. And instrument builders are still faced

with the primacy of Leo Fender's design. At a 1996 roundtable discussion

with 14 well-known bass makers, Michael Tobias opened the session by ask¬

ing: "Is the Fender bass still the standard?" The builders all had different

reactions to the question, but in the end one conclusion was inescapable:

the instruments of Leo Fender had had a profound and enduring impact.
Finale

In Instruments of Desire, the prize-winning American Studies scholar (and

guitarist) Steve Waksman explains the thinking of French musicologist

Jacques Attali. "Instruments play a key part in his larger effort to theo¬

rize the role of music as a prophetic social force/' writes Waksman, "one

that contains within it the principles of cultural, economic, and political

power. In the first chapter of his book, Noise, Attali outlines his inquiry

in terms that make manifest his overarching belief in the capacity of

music to embody and, indeed, herald the social order." Waksman goes

on to demonstrate how musical instruments can function as "tools of

social and cultural (as well as aesthetic) transformation."

Leo Fender might have been befuddled by all this talk about over

arching beliefs, but he knew his electric bass was important. In 1994,

former Fender executive Forrest White, who had worked closely with

Leo during the company's glory years, wrote: "Today the Precision Bass

is the most widely used electric bass throughout the world. I personally

think it was Leo's greatest overall contribution to music, and I believe

he, too, thought it was his greatest accomplishment."

It was indeed an extraordinary accomplishment. The Fender bass

has proven to be a powerful force in the evolution of popular music,

and as such has served as a tool of "social and cultural (as well as aes¬

thetic) transformation." This did not happen overnight. The Precision

Bass was greeted with little enthusiasm and gained limited acceptance

at first. Only a few P-Basses were sold in the early 1950s, but the market

was promising enough for the company to continue to produce (and


Finale ■ 181

improve) the instrument. By 1960, Leo Fender had created a new model,

the Jazz Bass, and other companies such as Gibson, Rickenbacker, and

Danelectro had entered the burgeoning bass market.

During the 1960s, the primordial sound of early rock & roll was tran-

formed into something much more potent and influential. The power

of the electric bass, in the hands of such innovators as James Jamerson

and Paul McCartney, was critical in this transformation. And rock music

was no longer just a diversion; it was, as Christopher Porterfield of Time

put it, the language of a new generation determined to usher in sweep¬

ing social change.

It may seem simplistic to ascribe social change to the invention of a

musical instrument, but the line of causality is clear: without the Fender

bass, rock music as we now know it was simply not possible. (Remem¬

ber what Keith Richards said: "It suddenly changed...[and] I realized...it

was because of the bass.") Rock was a powerful unifying force in the

'60s, and by the end of that cataclysmic decade it dominated popular

culture. In the 1970s, the influence of music featuring the Fender bass

spread even further, and we were introduced to higher levels of virtuos¬

ity. When Jaco's first solo album was released in 1976, Leo Fender's

"crazy" invention was firmly established as a vehicle for profound musi¬

cal expression.

By the late '70s and early '80s, the importance of the electric bass

was firmly established, and it proliferated in a variety of forms. A few,

like the Steinberger bass, owed little to Leo Fender's designs. Nonethe¬

less, the influence of the original Precision Bass runs through the his¬

tory of the electric bass like the theme of a great symphony. It is a ref¬

erence point that cannot be ignored. After dozens of competitive

instruments had appeared on the market, Fender basses still remained

of prime importance. Even for the players who eventually chose not to

use them, they were so dominant that they demanded consideration.

And they have endured.


182 ■ Finale

If it's unsurprising that James Jamerson chose a Precision Bass in

1961_because there were so few alternatives—then it's quite telling

that Patrick Dahlheimer chose one in 1998, when there were so many

alternatives. In an industry where the flavor of the month is always

changing, Fender basses have remained a constant. Their sound has for¬

ever altered the way popular music is written and played, and that

music has had a profound effect on the everyday lives of countless peo¬

ple around the world.


183

Sources

During my tenure as Editor of Bass Player (1989-96), we published many

articles that touched upon the history of the electric bass, and I began to

accumulate files drawn from a variety of sources: magazines, newspapers,

books, liner notes, videos, radio programs, and the World Wide Web. I

also interviewed and spoke informally with many musicians and music

writers about different aspects of the instrument's development. The fol¬

lowing articles and books were helpful in preparing this book, and many

of them are quoted in the text:

Articles
Ashton, Adrian. "Bring It on Home: The John
Paul Jones Interview." Bass Player,
November 1994.

Bacon, Tony. "Steve Harris—Iron Maiden."


Bass Player, October 1992.

_. "Paul McCartney: Meet the Beatle."


Bass Player, July/Aug 1995.

Bass Player staff (Jim Roberts, Karl Coryat,


Chris Jisi). "Masters of Funk." Bass
Player, September 1992.

Blecha, Peter. "Discovered! The World's First


Electric Bass Guitar." Vintage Guitar,
March 1999.

Brown, G. "Carol Kaye." Bass Player, Jan/Feb


1993.

Conrow, Ray. "In Memory of Berry Oakley."


Bass Player, Jan/Feb 1993.

Coryat, Karl. "Flea Jumps in a Different Direc¬


tion." Bass Player, Jan/Feb 1992.

_. "Stanley Clarke Scores Big." Bass Player,


✓Sept/Oct 1993.

__. "Geddy Lee: Still Going!" Bass Player,


Decerpber 1993.
184 ■ Sources

_. “Sting: Bring on the Note." Bass Player,


March 2000.
PRECISION BASS
_. "Phil Lesh." Bass Player, June 2000 and
The now lour string flMlllM Bose Jfl on* »1 the moet revoluilonory
Instruments lo male* an appoarance tax many yeors. Il l* the answer
lo every boo* player's <M>« to* a poriablo Instrument M extremely
July 2000.
lino tono quality, plus ploying ease and comlort. TM» remarkable
now Instrument U Infinitely eerier lo ploy than a conv'mtlorial ban*,
inasmuch ax the lechnlque Is llks tbal owd to ploying a guitar. Vary
little ittiton action Is required lo obtain lull rich ban* volumo, thereby Crisafulli, Chuck. “Duck Dunn: He's a Soul
eliminating tho eltort that went to to ploying His old styl. bare.
The nock oi this Instrument Is nleador and hotted, and the string
adjustment is etoen to lh» tret*, thus enabling the player lo play «ilfe
Man." Bass Player, December 1994.
greatly Increased speed. Moot player, (tod iW UreU technique Im¬
proves very rapidly will* the use ol this new Instrument and thal --
can play considerably more dllhcull work them evsr Mote.
With tho Precision Bass it I* possible (o obtain considerably Dr. Licks (Allan Slutsky) with James Jamerson
volume (ban wtlb a conveoflonel Instrument. The spaco required lor
storage or carrying o( Ibis Instrument to approximately ;v ol thal re¬
quired (or Ore old type bass.
Jr. "James Jamerson: Interview with the
The render Precision Bass opens an entirely new field ol boss
playing, and already they have becatno sloe* Items to a great many Ghost of Studio A." Bass Player, Spring 1990.
ol the nation's lop musical organisation*.
Available as an accessory to a fine molded plush lined case, COV-
ored to Dupont "drain Hair Seal." or a padded plastic loath or bag.
_. "Who Is Bob Babbitt and How Did He
Get All Those Gold Records?" Bass Player,
March 1994.

DuClos, Michael. "Carl Thompson: Veteran


Bassbuilder with Vision." Bass Player, Febru¬
ary 1996.

Feather, Leonard. "Hamp-lified Fiddle May


LIONEL HAMPTON
Lighten Bassists' Burdens." Down Beat, July
30, 1952.

Forte, Dan. "The Ventures: Still Rockin' After


All These Years." Guitar Player, September
1981.

Garbarini, Vic. "Sting." Bass Player, April


1992.

Gerety, Sean. "Percy Jones." Bass Player, October 1992.

Green, Tony. "Larry Graham." Bass Player, September 1996.

Gruhn, George. "Gibson Upright Electric Bass." VG Classics, June 1997.

Hicks, David. "Vintage Volume: The Great Bass Amps of the '60s." Bass Player, July/Aug
1992.

Isola, Gregory. "Little Feat's Kenny Gradney." Bass Player, December 1995.

_. "Bill Wyman: Back & Blue." Bass Player, May 1998.

Jansson, Mikael. "I Go Pogo: A Brief History of the Electric Upright Bass." 1994 Bass
Buyer's Guide (Bass Player special issue).

_and Scott Malandrone. "Jurassic Basses: Was There Electric Bass Before Leo?" Bass
Player, July 1997.

_. "Paul Jackson: A Headhunter Speaks." Bass Player, March 1998.

_. "Totally Weird Basses: Regal's Bassoguitar." Bass Player, February 1999.

_. "Totally Weird Basses: The Stroh Bass." Bass Player, September 1999.

Jisi, Chris. "The Anthony Jackson Interview." Bass Player, Spring 1990 and Summer 1990.

_. "Will Lee." Bass Player, Fall 1990.

_. "Pino Palladino: Fretless Magician." Bass Player, March 1992.

_. "Alphonso Johnson: Fusion Revolutionary." Bass Player, April 1992.

___ with Anthony Jackson. "Joe Osborn: The Saga of a Studio Pioneer." Bass Player,
May/June 1992.
Sources ■ 185

. "Marcus Miller." Bass Player, October


PRECISION BASS
1992.

. "The Big Groove of Gary Willis." Bass


Player, April 1993.

with Anthony Jackson and Dan


Schwartz. "The Heroic Bass of Jack
Casady." Bass Player, Sept/Oct 1993.

. "Max Bennett." Bass Player, November


1994.

. "Chris Squire Talks About Talk." Bass


Player, November 1994.

. "Darryl Jones: Like a Rolling Stone."


Bass Player, Jan/Feb 1995.

. "John Entwistle: Return of the Ox."


Bass Player, April 1996.

. "Groove Convergence! Will Lee Inter¬


views Chuck Rainey." Bass Player, Febru¬
ary 1997.

. "Oteil Burbridge Breaks Out." Bass


Player, August 1997.

. "Double Trouble: Roscoe Beck


Interviews Tommy Shannon." Bass
Player, November 1997.

. "Francis Rocco Prestia." Bass Player,


December 1997.

_. "Jeff Berlin: The Return of a Player." Bass Player, January 1998.

_. "Gene Perez Is in the House!" Bass Player, July 1999.

_. "New York Soul Stew: The Legendary Jerry Jemmott." Bass Player, October 1999.

Johnston, Richard. "David Hungate: Studio Ace." Bass Player, March 1992.

Kohman, Peter Stuart. "Surf Bass: Out of the Doghouse." Vintage Guitar, May 1997.

Leigh, Bill. "Flecktone Alone: Victor Wooten Arrives as a Solo Artist." Bass Player, Febru¬
ary 1998.

Malandrone, Scott. "The Ampeg Story." Bass Player, March 1995.

_. "Billy Sheehan: Bare Bones Bass with Mr. Big." Bass Player, April 1996.

_. "Patrick Dahlheimer: Live Stock." Bass Player, July 1997.

_. "Fender Stu Hamm Urge II" (product review). Bass Player, June 2000.

Martin, Bill. "Chris Squire: Creating a New Dimension." Bass Player, November 1994.

Milkowski, Bill. "Portrait of Jaco," Bass Player, Jan/Feb 1991.

_. "Victor Wooten: Bass Ace of the Flecktones." Bass Player, Jan/Feb 1991.

_. "George Porter Jr.: Funkmaster." Bass Player, April 1996.

__. "Life After Jaco." Bass Player, September 1997.

_. "Blues Legend Dave Myers." Bass Player, December 1998.


186 ■ Sources

Murphy, Bill. "Bass Culture: Dub Reggae's Low-End Legacy." Bass Player, November 1996

Newman, Mike. "Monk Montgomery: The First Man to Record on Bass Guitar." Guitar
Player, September 1977.

Roberts, Jim. "Steve Swallow." Guitar Player, November 1987.

_. "Steve Rodby." Guitar Player, December 1987.

_. "Verdine White." Guitar Player, October 1988.

_. "Victor Bailey." Guitar Player, July 1989.

_. "Billy Sheehan: Power & Precision." Bass Player, Spring 1990.

_. "Harvey Brooks: A Long Time Cornin'...Back." Bass Player, March/April 1991.

_. "Good Times, Bad Times: Bill Wyman Chronicles the Rise of the Rolling Stones."
Bass Player, May/June 1991.

_. "Michael Manring's Drastic Measures." Bass Player, May/June 1991.

_. "Stuart Hamm: He's Got the Urge." Bass Player, July/Aug 1991.

_and Chris Jisi. "Free-Floating Fretless: Mark Egan." Bass Player, Jan/Feb 1992.

_. "Dancing in the Dark: An Interview with Steve Swallow." Bass Player, May/June
1992.

_. "The Stuart Hamm Signature Bass.” Bass Player, September 1992.

_. "Jack Bruce: Renaissance Man." Bass Player, Sept/Oct 1993.

_. "Michael Manring Rocks!" Bass Player, Jan/Feb 1994.

_. "Pushing the Envelope: A Bassmakers Roundtable." Bass Player, January 1996.

Sievert, Jon. "Michael Rhodes" (Tommy Cogbill sidebar). Bass Player, September 1992.

Sklarevski, Alexis. "Lee Sklar: Interview with a Studio Legend." Bass Player, Jan/Feb 1992.

Smith, Richard R. "Classic Fender Basses." Guitar Player, March 1989.

_. "The Fender Precision Bass—A Classic: 1952-1964." Bass Player, Spring 1990.

_. "Leo Fender's Bass Revolution." Bass Player, September 1996.

Snowden, Don. "Bernard Edwards." Bass Player, September 1992.

_. "Robbie Shakespeare." Bass Player, Jan/Feb 1993.

Teagle, John. "Fender Myth Debunked! (Part I)." Vintage Guitar, March 1999.

Wheeler, Tom. "Keith Richards." Guitar Player, December 1989.

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Bacon, Tony. The Ultimate Guitar Book. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

_and Paul Day. The Pender Book: A Complete History of Fender Electric Guitars. San Fran
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_and Barry Moorhouse. The Bass Book: A Complete Illustrated History of Bass Guitars.
San Francisco: GPI/Miller Freeman, 1995.

Blasquiz, Klaus. The Pender Bass. Milwaukee: Hal Feonard Publishing, 1990.

Brun, Paul. A History of the Double Bass. France: self-published, 1989.


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Dr. Licks (Allan Slutsky). Standing in the Shadows of Motown: The Life and Times of
Legendary Bassist James Jamerson. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1989.

George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm & Blues. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1989.

Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Viking, 1987.

Gruhn, George and Walter Carter. Electric Guitars & Basses: A Photographic History. San
Francisco: Miller Freeman, 1994.

_• Gruhn's Guide to Vintage Guitars. San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 1999.

Guralnick, Peter. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. Boston: Little, Brown &
Company, 1994.

Hopkins, Gregg and Bill Moore. Ampeg: The Story Behind the Sound. Milwaukee: Hal
Leonard Publishing, 1999.

Massey, Howard. Behind the Glass: Top Record Producers Tell How They Craft the Hits. San
Francisco: Miller Freeman, 2000.

Milkowski, Bill. Jaco: The Extraordinary and Tragic Life ofjaco Pastorius. San Francisco:
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Mulhern, Tom, ed. Bass Heroes: 30 Great Bass Players. San Francisco: GPI/Miller Freeman,
1993.

Nichols, Geoff. The Drum Book: A Histoiy of the Rock Drum Kit. San Francisco: Miller Free¬
man, 1997.

Planyavsky, Alfred. The Baroque Double Bass Violone. Lanham, MD & London: Scarecrow
Press, 1998.

Smith, Richard R. Fender: The Sound Heard


'round the World. Fullerton, CA: Garfish
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Ward, Ed with Geoffrey Stokes and Ken


Tucker. Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone
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Whitburn, Joel. Billboard Top 100 Singles:


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188 ■ Photo Credits

p. 11, Marcus Miller, by Karjean Ng p. 88, Chris Squire, by Neil Zlozower


p. 15, Fender Factory 1952, from the collection of p. 92, Jack Casady w/ Jazz Bass, Redferns
Richard Smith p. 93, Jack Casady w/ a modified Guild, courtesy of
p. 22, Regal Bassoguitar, from the collection of Jack Casady
Richard Smith p. 94, Fender Bassman amp, from the collection of
p. 23, Dobro Upright Bass, from the collection of Richard Smith
Richard Smith p. 95, Jack Casady w/ a Versatone amp; courtesy of
p. 24, Gibson Upright Bass, by Experience Music Jack Casady
p. 26, Regal Electric Upright, from the collection of p. 96, Phil Lesh, by Jay Blakesberg
Richard Smith p. 106, Jack Bruce w/ Fender Bass VI, Redferns
p. 27, Vega Electric Upright, from the collection of p. 107, Jack Bruce w/ Gibson EB-3, Redferns
Richard Smith p. 108, Gibson Electric Bass, by John Peden
p. 29, Audiovox Model 736, by Experience Music p. 109, Gibson EB-2, courtesy of Balafon Books
p. 31, Design Patent for Orig. P-bass, from the col¬ p. 113, Bootsy Collins w/ star bass, by Paul Natkin
lection of Richard Smith p. 115, Larry Graham, Redferns
p. 32, Orig. Precision bass, by John Peden p. 117, Rocco Prestia, courtesy of Rocco Prestia
p. 36, Fender ad for P-bass/Bassman amp, from the p. 119, Music Man StingRay, from the collection of
collection of Richard Smith Richard Smith
p. 37, Monk Montgomery, from the collection of p. 120, Verdine White, courtesy of Verdine White
Richard Smith p. 123, Jaco w/ fretted bass, by Richard Sassaman
p. 38, Shifte Henri, from the collection of Tom p 124, Jaco w/ fretless, by Tom Copi
Wheeler p. 125, Ampeg AUB-1 fretless, by Evan Sheeley
p. 39, Rickenbacker "Frying Pan", from the collec¬ p. 128, Pino Palladino, by Paul Natkin
tion of Richard Smith p. 132, Anthony Jackson, by Ebet Roberts
p. 40, "Butterfly Bass" graphic, by John Peden/Paul p. 133, Jimmy Johnson, by Margo Reyes
Haggard p. 137, Early Modulus Graphite bass, by Geoff
p. 41, Early Drum set, courtesy of Balafon Books Gould
p. 42, Close-up of '55 pick-up, from the collection p. 139, Tony Levin, courtesy of Tony Levin
of Richard Smith p. 141, Sid Vicious, by Ebet Roberts
p. 44, '55 Precision bass, by John Peden p. 142, Aston "Family Man" Barrett, by Peter Simon
p. 44, '55 Precision bass w/ amp, from the collection p. 143, Robbie Shakespeare, by Ebet Roberts
of Richard Smith p. 145, Sting, by Steve Jennings
p. 45, '57 Precision bass, by John Peden p. 146, Berry Oakley, ABB Archives
p. 46, Close-up of a split-coil pickup, from the col¬ p. 147, Kenny Gradney, Michael Ochs Archives
lection of Richard Smith p. 149, Steve Swallow, by Ebet Roberts
p. 47, Bill Black, Michael Ochs Archives p. 151, G&L L-2000 bass, from the collection of
p. 49, Dave Myers, courtesy of Dave Myers Richard Smith
p. 53, Danelectro Long Horn 6, courtesy of Balafon p. 152, Darryl Jones, by Neil Zlozower
Books p. 152, Tim Bogert, courtesy of Tim Bogert
p. 53, Rickenbacker 4000, courtesy of Balafon Books p. 153, Billy Sheehan, by Neil Zlozower
p. 57, Custom-color Fender basses, from the collec¬ p. 153, Jeff Berlin, by Neil Zlozower
tion of Richard Smith p. 154, Mark Egan, courtesy of Mark Egan
p. 61, Joe Osborn, by Ebet Roberts p. 155, Will Lee, courtesy of Will Lee
p. 62, Jazz Bass prototype, from the collection of p. 157, Victor Bailey, courtesy of Fender
Richard Smith p. 158, Steve Rodby, by Paul Natkin
p. 62, Jazz Bass prototype pickup, from the collec¬ p. 158, John Patitucci, by Neil Zlozower
tion of Richard Smith p. 160, Flea, by Jay Blakesberg
p. 63, Early Jazz bass w/ stacked knobs, courtesy of p. 161, Gary Willis, courtesy of Gary Willis
John Slog p. 163, Lee Sklar, courtesy of Lee Sklar
p. 64, Fender Bass VI, '61, from the collection of p. 164, Steve Harris, by Neil Zlozower
Richard Smith p. 165, Sal Cuevas, by Dan Thress
p. 65, Max Bennett, courtesy of Max Bennett p. 168, Stuart Hamm, courtesy of Fender
p. 68, "St. James" graphic, Created by Paul Haggard p. 169, Kubicki Ex Factor, courtesy of Balafon Books
p. 69, Jamerson & The Funk Machine, by Jon Sievert p. 172, Victor Wooten, by Rick Malkin
p. 69, Fender Bass V, courtesy of Balafon Books p. 174, Oteil Burbridge, courtesy of Modulus Guitars
p. 70, Chuck Rainey, courtesy of Chuck Rainey p. 175, Geddy Lee, by Neil Zlozower
p. 73, Memphis Boys, by Dan Penn p. 179, Roscoe Beck, by Max Crace
p. 74, Jerry Jemmott, courtesy of Jerry Jemmott p. 183, Fender Catalog, 1954, from the collection of
p. 75, David Hood, courtesy David Hood Richard Smith
p. 77, Bob Babbitt, by Rick Malkin p. 184, Fender Catalog, 1955, from the collection of
p. 78, Paul McCartney w/Hofner 500/1, Pictorial Richard Smith
Press p. 185, Fender Catalog, 1958, from the collection of
p. 80, Paul McCartney w/ Rick. 4001S, Pictorial Press Richard Smith
p. 85, John Paul Jones, by Neil Zlozower p. 188, Fender Catalog, 1961, from the collection of
p. 86, John Entwistle, by Len DeLessio Richard Smith
Index ■ 189

400 PS, 98 Berlin, Jeff, 152, 153, 159- 159, 162 Fender: The Sound Heard Hamm, Stuart, 168, 169-
5- string electric bass, 133, 162, 167 Crosby, Israel, 23 'round the World, 29-30, 171, 174
135-136 Berry, Chuck, 42, 92 Cross, Tim, 177 31 'Hamp-lified fiddle,' 35, 36
6- string electric bass, 132- Bigsby, Paul, 54 Cuevas, Sal, 165 Fenderbirds, 86 Hampton, Lionel, 34-37
135 Bill Black Combo, 48 Curtis, King, 74 Fieldy, 18 Hancock, Herbie, 148, 152
'79 Ibanez Musician fret¬ Billboard Magazine, 43, 59, Fifth Dimension, 67 Harris, Richard, 67
less, 146 79 Dahlheimer, Patrick, 173,
Firebird, 110 Harris, Steve, 164
Black, Bill, 41, 46-48, 159 178, 182
Acoustic 360, 98, 99, 124 Flack, Roberta, 70 Harrison, George, 78
Blood, Sweat & Tears, 129 Dan, Steely, 70
Acoustic Control Flatwound strings, 87, 90 Hathaway, Donny, 70
Bloomfield, Mike, 147, 148 Danelectro 6 string (Dano Flea, 160 Havens, Richie, 147
Company, 98 6-string), 52, 53, 60, 61,
Bobbing, Bob, 122 Fleetwood Mac, 138 Hawkins, Roger, 75
Alembic, 93, 96, 100, 101- 64
Bogert, Tim, 152, 162 Fodera, Vinnie, 135 Hayes, Isaac, 11
102, 118-119, 133, 137, D'Angelo, 178
Boiled in Lead, 178 Fodera/Jackson contrabass, Hayzlett, Elizabeth Nagel,
138 Daniel, Nathan, 53
Booker T. & the MGs, 72, 135 32
Allen, Mark & his Orches¬ Danko, Rick, 126
73 Four Aces, 50 Henderson, Fletcher, 23
tra, 26 Davis, Miles, 147, 150,
Bradley, Harold, 52 Frankenstein bass, 30 Henderson, Michael, 147
All-graphite Status 152, 155, 156, 159
Brand New Heavies, 177 Franklin, Aretha, 70, 72, Henderson, Scott, 161
Buzzard, 86 Dobro company, 23
Brand X, 148 74 Hendrix, Jimi, 89, 129, 148
Allman Brothers Band, Doe, John, 177
Brecker Brothers, 166 Freebo, 127 Henley, Don, 128
146, 174 'doghouse' bass, 13, 41
Broadcaster guitar, 31 Freeman, Matt, 177 Henri, Shifte, 37, 38
Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, Doors, 148
Brooks, Garth, 168 fretless bass, 123-127 Hicks, David, 97
63 Double Trouble, 161
Brooks, Harvey, 147, 148 Fudge, 152 High Numbers, 86
Ament, Jeff, 177 Dreams, 166
Brothers Johnson, 116 Fullerton, George, 32, 150 Hill, Steve, 160
Ampeg AUB-1 "horizontal Drummond, Tim, 73
Brown, G., 60 Funk Brothers, 75 Hipshot Xtender key, 165
bass,” 125, 126 Dunbar, Sly, 143
Brown, James, 73, 113 Funk Machine, 69, 75 Hofner [500/1 bass], 78,
Ampeg Company, 98, 99 Dunn, Duck, 72
Brown, Pete, 106 79, 82
Ampeg SVT, 95 , Dylan, Bob, 143, 147, 148 G&L L-2000 bass, 150, 151
Brown, Ray, 68, 71 Holdsworth, Allan, 160
Appice, Carmine, 152, 160 G&L, 15, 150
Bruce, Jack, 102, 104-107, Earl, Jimmy, 178 Hole, 177
Aquarium Rescue Unit, Gabriel, Peter, 127, 149,
108, 110, 111, 144, 159, Earth, Wind & Fire, 120 Holland, Dave, 147
174 152, 159
160 Eddy, Duane, 52, 59, 87 Holly, Buddy, 92
Armstrong, Ralphe, 148 Gang of Four, B-52s, 177
Bruford, Bill, 160 Edwards, Bernard, 140, 141 Hood, David, 75
Armstrong, Ron, 137 Gaye, Marvin, 70, 71, 75,
Buchanan, Roy, 65-66 Edwards, Nokie, 56 How, James, 87, 90
Arnold, Jerome, 76 77, 105-106, 149
Bullet Bass, 156 Egan, Mark 154, 158 Hull, Everett, 98
Attali, Jacques, 180 George, Lowell, 147
Burbridge, Oteil, 174 Elektric Band, 162 Hungate, David, 52, 131
Attitude Bass, 157 Getz, Stan, 149
Elements, 154 Hyatt, Dale, 150
Audiovox Model 736 Elec¬ Callender, Red, 62 ghitaron, 19
Emerick, Geoff, 83 Hybrid styles, 144-149
tronic Bass, 28-30 Campbell, Glen, 67 Gibson EB-0, 109-110
Entwistle, John, 86-88, 91, Hyperbass, 174-175
Audiovox Manufacturing, Candlebox, 177 Gibson EB-1, 109
28 93, 110, 111, 114
'Career Girl,' 132, 134, Gibson EB-2, 109 Iron Maiden, 164
Auf der Maur, Melissa, 177 ES-335, 109
135, 148 Gibson EB-3, 107, 110
Estrada, Roy, 147 Jackson 5, 11
Carpenters, 67 Gibson Electric Bass Gui¬
B-15 Portaflex, 98 Experience Music Project Jackson, Anthony, 74-75,
Casady, Jack 92-95 tar, 23-24, 54, 108-110
Babbington, Roy, 104 Museum, 14 132, 148, 158
Chambers, Dennis, 165 Gibson Les Paul, 54
Babbitt, Bob, 77, 147 Jackson, Freddie, 149
Chambers, Paul, 68, 159 Fabian, Christian, 35 Gibson Mando-Bass, 21,
Bach, Johann Sebastian, Jackson, Jermaine, 11
Charles, Ray, 63 Faith, Percy, 59 22, 30, 31
18, 111 Jackson, Michael, 168
Chic, 140, 141 Fania All-Stars, 165 gitarrenbaumeister, 55
Bacon, Tony, 52, 79 Jackson, Paul, 148, 161
chitarrone, 19 Feather, Leonard, 35-36 Gleick, James, 39
Bailey, Steve, 171, 178 Jackson, Randy, 178
Clapton, Eric, 105, 110, Fender Bass V, 69 Gomez, Ray, 160
Bailey, Victor, 157 Jaco Pastorius Relic Jazz
162 Fender Bass VI, 60-63, 64, Gordy, Berry, 70, 75
Baker, Ginger, 105, 106 Bass, 127
Clarke, Buddy, 62 65, 79, 105-107, 111, Gottlieb, Danny, 154
Barney, Tom, 156 Jaco, 74, 121-131, 132,
Clarke, Stanley, 118-120, 116, 129 Gould, Geoff, 136, 137-138
Baroque Double Bass Vio- 147, 149, 150, 154, 156,
137-138, 147, 149, 158, Fender Bassman amp, 34, Gradney, Kenny, 147, 170
lone, 19 157, 158-159, 161, 170,
162, 170, 171, 172 94, 97 Graham Bond Organisa¬
Barrett, Aston "Family 179, 181
Clash, the, 142 Fender fretless Jazz Bass, tion, 105
Man," 142 Jamerson, James, 68-77,
Cloud Chamber, 173 127, 128 Graham Central Station,
Barrett, Carlton, 142 78, 79, 80, 81, 98, 104-
Cobham, Billy, 148 Fender fretless Precision 115
Barretto, Ray, 165 105, 111, 112-113, 129,
Cochran, Eddie, 55 Bass, 128 Graham, Larry, 11, 114-
Bass Book, The, 52 140, 147, 150, 162, 166,
Cogbill, Tommy, 72, 73, 74 Fender Jazz Bass 62, 63, 64, 116, 156, 158
Bass Extremes, 171, 178 179, 181, 182
Coleman, Ornette, 99 65-67, 92 Grand Ole Opry, 34
bass lute, 19, 20 Jansson, Mikael, 28
Collins, Bootsy, 73, 113, Fender Musical graphite bass necks, 136-
Bass of Doom, 123 Jefferson Airplane, 92, 94,
116, 118 Instruments 139
Bass Player, 52, 97, 122, 102, 103
Collins, Judy, 147 Corporation, 14 Grateful Dead, 96, 99, 100-
131, 168, 170, 171, 177 Jemmott, Jerry, 74, 127,
Collins, Phil, 163 Fender Precision Bass, 13- 101, 102, 137
bass viol, 17, 18, 20 129
Colomby, Bobby, 129 16, 17, 30, 31-38, 39, 42, Gruhn, George, 24
Bassman amp, 44, 50 Jisi, Chris, 65, 86-87, 91,
Coltrane, John, 74, 99 46-47, 49-51, 56, 57, 58, Guaraldi, Vince, 170
Beach Boys, 56, 60, 63, 82, 92, 134, 156, 166
Combo 400, 54 68, 179, 180, 181, 182 Guild Starfire Bass, 94, 101
84 Johnson, Alphonso, 147-
contrabass chitarrones, 19 Fender Vintage Series, 176- Guitar Player, 37, 58, 137,
Beatles, 78-84, 86, 97 148
contrabass da Gamba, 17 178 168
Beauchamp, George, 26 Johnson, Jimmy, 133, 135,
Cooke, Sam, 72 Fender, Leo, 13-16, 29-30, guitarron, 19
Beck, Jeff, 152 169
Corea, Chick, 118, 162 31-38, 42, 44, 45, 46, 60, Guralnick, Peter, 46-47
Beck„Roscoe, 179 Johnson, Louis, 116, 118
Coronado Bass, 101 62, 63, 69, 84, 90, 97, 98, Guy, Samuel "Jay," 42
Bee Gees, 166 Johnson, Roy, 35
Coryat, Karl, 100, 145 102, 112, 119, 121, 123,
Bela Fleck & the Haden, Rachel, 178 Jones, Darryl, 152, 156,
Coryell, Larry, 160 126-127, 129, 134, 136,
Flecktones, 171, 172 Haley, Bill, 45 157-159, 167
Counting Crows, 177 150, 153, 154, 156, 176-
Bennett, Max,'65 Hall, Jim, 149 Jones, Grace, 143
Cream, 105, 106, 110, 111, 179, 180-182
190 Index

Jones, John Paul, 85 93, 97-98, 111, 144, 166, Perez, Gene, 178 Schultz, Bill, 127 Thunderbird, 110
Jones, Percy, 148 181 piccolo bass, 119 Schwartz, Dan, 93 tic-tac, 20, 52, 53, 60
Jones, Quincy, 48, 63 McKenzie, Scott, 67 Pickett, Wilson, 72, 74, 75 scordatura, 18 Tobias, Michael, 179
Jordan, Louis, 42 McLaren, Malcolm, 141 Pink Floyd, 168 Serenader Electric String Tosh, Peter, 143
Jordan, Stanley, 171, 172 McLaughlin, John, 105, Planyavsky, Alfred, 19 Bass, 29 Townshend, Pete, 87
Joseph, Bruno, 26 148, 160 Pohlman, Ray, 62 Sex Pistols, 141 Travis, Merle, 54
Journey, 162 McVie, John, 138 Police, 127, 144, 145, 146 Shakespeare, Robbie, 142- Tribal Tech, 161
Memphis Boys, the, 73 Porter, Jr., George, 73 144 Tropical Islanders, 24
Kamin, Wally, 24 metal-resonator guitar, 23 Porterfield, Christopher, Shannon, Tommy, 161 Tucker, Ken, 140
Kaukonen, Jorma, 92 85, 181 Sheehan, Billy, 152, 153, Turner, Rick, 100, 118,
Meters, the, 73
Kaye, Carol, 60-63, 65, 67, Praetorius, Michael, 19 157, 162-165, 167 137, 138
Metheny, Pat, 130
72, 112 Presley, Elvis, 38, 41, 42, Shepherd, Ben, 177 Tutmarc Bass, 14, 28-30
Milkowski, Bill, 50, 122,
Ken Smith 6-string, 158 45, 46, 47, 48, 52, 59, 73, Sherrell, Charles, 73 Tutmarc, Bud, 28, 29
129
Khan, Chaka, 134 Simmons, Jimmy, 52 Tutmarc, Paul H., 14, 28,
Miller, Drew, 178 85, 86, 159, 168
King, B.B. 74 Presley, Lisa Marie, 168 Simon & Garfunkel, 60, 63 29, 30, 97
Miller, Marcus, 150, 155-
King Curtis, 70 Simon, Carly, 143
156, 167, 174 Prestia, Francis Rocco, 117,
Kohman, Peter Stuart, 56 U. S. Vintage Series, 176-
Mills, Mike, 177 161 Simon, Paul, 75
Kool & the Gang, 11 179
Minutemen, 160 Price, Joel, 34 Simonon, Paul, 142
Kooper, Al, 147, 148 Urge II, 169, 171
Mitchell, Joni, 130 punk P-Bass, 141 Sinatra, Frank, 63
Korner, Alexis, 104 Urge, 168, 171
Modulus Graphite bass, Sklar, Lee, 163
Kubicki Ex Factor, 169, 170 Queen, 141
136, 137 Slutsky, Allan "Dr. Licks," V. C. Squier, 33, 90
Kubicki, Phil, 135, 170 70, 71, 72, 74
Montgomery, Monk, 36- R.E.M., 177 Vai, Steve, 162, 170
LaBella flatwounds, 69, 88 37, 112 Rainey, Chuck, 70, 74, 166 Sly & the Family Stone, 11, Van Halen, Eddie, 162
Laird, Rick, 148 Montgomery, West, 36 Raitt, Bonnie 127 115, 116 Vanilla Fudge, 152, 162
LaRue, Dave, 129 Montreux, 173 Ramone, Dee Dee, 142 Smith, Jimmy, 133 Vaughan, Stevie Ray, 161
Las Olas Brass, 122 Moon, Keith, 87 Ramones, the, 142 Smith, Ken, 134-135, 158 Vega electric upright, 27
Lasner, Rich, 34 Moore, Scotty, 47 Rancho Revelers, 23 Smith, Norman, 83 Ventures, 56
Layton, Chris, 161 Motown, 63, 69, 70, 71, Rancid, 177 Smith, Paul Samwell, 164 Versatone, 94-95, 99
Led Zeppelin, 85 75, 76, 77, 79 Randall, Don 30 Smith, Richard R., 29-30, Vicious, Sid, 141, 142
Lee, Dr. William E, III, 165 Mr. Big, 162 Ranglin, Ernest, 104 31-32, 33, 68 Vincent, Gene, 92
Lee, Geddy, 138, 175, 178 Mulhern, Tom, 79, 162 Red Hot Chili Peppers, 160 Snowden, Don, 140, 144 Vintage Guitar, 29, 56
Lee, Sara, 177 Muscle Shoals Studio, 75 Redding, Noel, 89 Soundgarden, 177 violone, 17
Lee, Will, 117, 155, 165- Music Man StingRay Bass, Redding, Otis, 72 Spector, Phil, 63 Vivi-Tone electric basses,
167 15 Regal Bassoguitar, 22-23 Sponge, 177 24
Leech, Mike, 73 Music Man, 119, 150 Regal Electric Double Bass, Springsteen, Bruce, 139
Myers, Dave, 49-51 Squire, Chris, 88, 91, 170 Waiters, 142
Leiber and Stoller, 47 26
Myers, Louis, 50 stack knob configuration, Waksman, Steve, 180
Leigh, Bill 174 Return To Forever, 118,
62, 63, 64 Walker, Tom 119
Lennon, John, 78, 79 137
Nashville Pussy, 178 Watt, Mike, 160
Les Paul, Jr. (guitar), 110 Richards, Keith, 58, 181 Staple Singers, 75
neck-through-body bass, Weather Report, 122, 130,
Lesh, Phil, 96, 99-101, 102, Rickenbacker 4000, 101, Steinberger bass, 139, 181
54-55 147, 148, 157
103, 111, 137 102 Steinberger, Ned, 138, 139
Nelson, George, 48-50 Weeks, Willie, 166
Letterman, David, 155, Rickenbacker A-25 'frying 'stick' bass, 14, 24, 97
Nelson, Ricky, 66 Wheeler, Buddy, 52
166 pan' guitar, 39 Sting, 127, 138, 144, 145,
Newman, Mike, 37 Wheeler, Tom, 13
Levin, Tony, 138, 139 Rickenbacker Combo 400, 146, 152, 159
Niacin, 165 White, Forrest, 15, 90, 119,
Levy, Andrew, 177 54 Stone, Jesse, 49
Novello, John, 165 126-127, 180
Lewis, Jerry Lee, 41, 46 Rickenbacker Electro Bass- Stratocaster guitar, 33, 44,
Little Feat, 147, 170 Oakley, Berry, 146, 174 54 White, Lenny, 118
Viol, 25, 26, 28, 30
Live, 173, 178 Odum, Bernard, 73 Stroh, Augustus, 21 White, Verdine, 120
Rickenbacker left-handed
Loar, Lloyd, 14, 21, 24, Sugar Hill Gang, 141 Who, the, 86
O'Jays, the, 133 4001S, 80, 82
108 Orbison, Roy, 59, 84 Rickenbacker Model 4000, Summer, Gordon, 144 Wickersham, Ron, 93, 100,
Luhman, Bob 65-66 Osborn, Joe, 61, 65-67, 72, 53-55 Summers, Andy, 144 101-102
Lull, Mike, 178 97, 112 Riddim Twins, 143 Sunshine, 115 'Wife, the’ 153, 157, 164,
lute, 18, 19 Overwound strings, 90 Super Beatle amps, 98 165
Righteous Brothers, 62
luthier, 19 Owsley, Augustus Stanley Rivers, Johnny, 67 Sutcliff, Stu, 78 Wilburn, Vince, 158
"Bear," 100 Robinson, Smokey, 75, 76 Swallow, Steve, 149 Willis, Gary, 161
Madonna, 152, 159 Wilson, Brian, 56, 82
Rodby, Steve, 158, 175
Mahavishnu Orchestra, Palladino, Pino, 128, 178 Talas, 162 Wilson, Jackie, 59
Rodgers, Nile, 140
148 Pappalardi, Felix, 110 Tallent, Gary, 139 Wonder, Stevie, 77, 84
Rolling Stones, 58, 86, 126,
Malandrone, Scott, 171, Parker, Charlie, 74 'Tamla' bass player, 76, 77 Woodstock Festival, 85, 86
152, 159, 168
178 Parker, Ken, 149 Taylor, James, 163 Wooten, Victor, 171-174,
Rossmeisl, Roger, 54-55,
Malley, Matt, 177 Parks, Corey, 178 Teagle, John, 29 178
101
Mamas & the Papas, 67 Parliament/Funkadelic, Telecaster, 31, 32 Wyman, Bill, 18, 125-126
Roth, David Lee, 162, 165
Mann, Aimee, 177 113 Temptations, 77
Rotosound "Swing Bass" X, 177
mandolin orchestra, 21, 22 Pastorius, John Francis III. tenor bass, 119
strings, 91
Manring, Michael, 18, 173, SeeJaco The Band, 126
Rotosound roundwounds, Yardbirds, 164
174-176 Pat Metheny Group, 154, 'The Hook,' 112-113
87, 88, 89 Yes, 88, 91, 160
Martin, Bardi, 177 158 'The Tractor,' 146
Roundwound bass string, Young, Paul 128
Martino, Al, 63 Patitucci, John, 158 theorbo, 19, 20
87, 90
Marvellettes, 71 Zon, Joe, 174, 175
Rush, 175, 178
Massey, Howard, 83 Paul Butterfield Blues Thomas Organ Company
Ruth, Horace "Chili," 71
Masters at Work, 178 Band, 76 of California, 98
Matlock, Glen, 141-142 Paul, Billy, 132-133 Sadowsky, Roger, 150, 155 Thompson, Carl, 30, 132-
Matthews, Bob, 100 Paul, Les, 24, 39 Sam & Dave, 72 135
McCartney, Paul, 78-84, Pearl Jam, 177 Satriani, Joe, 170 Thompson, James, 30
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SHOW YOU HOW AND WHY.

“Yeah, the electric guitar turned heads...


but the bass guitar let you know the ’50s were
T his richly illustrated history reveals the true colors
of the Fender electric bass: as a powerful agent of
over and music was going to new places.”
change in popular music and popular culture. It tells the
•ft

:l§i ilicr story of technological and artistic evolution, of basses


and players -and of their profound influence on the
“It was all over by the early ’60s. The drum¬ world around them. Celebrating the instrument’s 50th
mers were starting to play eight to the bar, anniversary, How the Fender Bass Changed the World
and I thought at first maybe they were just
salutes the revolutionary impact of the bass in the hands
going for more power. Then I realized that,
of James Jamerson, jack Bruce, Paul McCartney,
no, it was because of the bass.
Carol Kaye, John Entwistle, Jaco Pastorius, Sting, and
—-Keith Richards
other bass visionaries and virtuosos past and present.

“Old Leo I'em let got it right.”


J im Roberts has been playing bass since 1970. The
founding editor and former publisher of Bass Player, he
now writes the magazine’s monthly “Perspective” column.

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Backbeat BASS
PLAYER

www.backbeatbooks.com
An Imprint of Music Player Network

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