Fiction, poetry, thoughts on Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs, Adeptus Titanicus and Warhammer, music, art, and random creativity. Also, from time to time, cats.
OK - I have some ACTUAL useable RPG content boiling through my brain so I'm going to stop obsessing over musicians after this post (probably). There are way too many fantastic musicians to really do this topic justice in a little pot like this, but here are a few of the folks I think are truly over the top:
Charlie Hunter (GARAGE A TROIS, SUPERBLUE, VARIOUS MUSICIANS)
Charlie Hunter plays an eight string and does basslines and guitar lead simultaneously. He's insanely talented. The thing below is really a wonderful example; though both the bassline and guitar work is sparse, every note is in the right place at the right time, and I find the whole incredibly relaxing - the word that comes to mind, if you could shear it of the pretentious overtones it's become associated with, is cool. Hunter's playing isn't always this mellow - some of his work with Bobby Previte is pretty tense - but it's hard to mistake him for anyone else. There's a playfulness there that I only ever see in the most technically accomplished musicians - guys like Hunter, Les Claypool, or Buckethead - where they are like "now I'm going to do some silly shit and it's still gonna be amazing." This one doesn't have too much silly shit, but it makes me untense my shoulders when I didn't even realize how tight I was holding them - it just empties the body of stress in some weird alchemy.
Fine Corinthian Leather, by the way, is purely an advertising gimmick. Ricardo Montalban called the leather used for the upholstery this in a commercial for the 1975 Chrysler Cordoba. But if anything sounds like fine Corinthian leather should, this is it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBGvMic-ZDE
Adrian Belew (KING CRIMSON, TALKING HEADS, FRANK ZAPPA, DAVID BOWIE)
I really do not understand why Belew isn't more well known, he is so creative and plays with such joy.
Everyone, EVERYONE on this track is fucking incredible. Bill Bruford is a legendary drummer, Robert Fripp (the other guitar on this) could easily be featured separately on this list as well, but Adrian Belew plays lead on this and when Belew plays lead, he makes sounds with a guitar that are hard to believe aren't the sky cracking in two. Lyrically, I think this is about as perfect a description of obsession as I have ever heard.
I do remember one thing. It took hours and hours, and by the time I was done with it, I was so involved, I didn't know what to think.
I carried it around with me for days and days...playing little games...like, not looking it for a whole day. And then, looking at it. To see if I still liked it.
I DID!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc6huqPzerY
Robert Fripp (KING CRIMSON, BRIAN ENO, BLONDIE)
The other guy playing guitar on the track above is every bit as unique. Fripp is a true innovator, cut from the same cloth as Les Paul, who first brought electricity to guitar. His innovations are too numerous to list, really, but Frippertronics (the introduction of tape loops to his playing, which he started in the late 1970's) and New Standard Tuning deserve special mentions. Here's a lovely quote from him that I think captures his overall approach to the instrument, which, though it can sound incredibly complex, is at its roots an exercise in intentionality and simplicity:
"With a note of music, one strikes the fundamental, and, in addition to the root note, other notes are generated: these are the harmonic series.... As one fundamental note contains within it other notes in the octave, two fundamentals produce a remarkable array of harmonics, and the number of possible combinations between all the notes increases phenomenally. With a triad, affairs stand a good chance of getting severely out of hand."
There are so many things he's done - Fracture is an amazing piece of music, the guitar solo in Baby's On Fire from Here Come the Warm Jets is mesmerizing, his work on the album above with Adrian Belew - all of it is good. I nearly chose an early piece where he's using Frippertronics, but ultimately decided on Discipline - the thematic counterpart to Indiscipline, above, and from the same album. If Belew shines on Indiscipline, then the cerebral, beautiful stasis of Discipline is pure Fripp. Also, King Crimson is probably the roots of math rock.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en5YRCvppIA
Buckethead (PRAXIS, GUNS AND ROSES)
Buckethead is a once-in-a-generation Mozart level genius at his chosen art. I listed bands he's been with above, but he is most prolific doing solo work. Look at this thing - the number of albums he has put out per year since 2010. In 2015 he put out an album every three or four days.
The thing I like about Buckethead's playing is that it isn't pure shredding for its own sake - he knows how to lay back when he should (listen to Wake the Dead or Whitewash, for example), and even on this track, which is a tour de force of his talent, he takes the time to develop thematic melodies that really push the whole thing to the next level. I think what I'm trying to say is that he plays with feeling, something I think is missing from some of the other shredders or incredible technical players.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNXwYo-w1HE
James Calvin Wilsey (The Avengers, Chris Isaak)
The King of Slow. Chris Isaak got the credit for Wicked Game but for my money it is those first two notes from Wilsey and his lead playing that make the song. Just perfect, haunting, beautiful, the lead floats above the tune like a lonely ghost drifting over the desert. Dude puts his soul out there when he plays like that. We only got one solo album from this guy, below is the first track from it. He's already gone, and that sucks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9haU5gu-Ccg
OK, that is that for now then! Next up - A return to the World With No Extras - I think!
OK, so this is a music blog for the time being. After this, I'll probably only do one more of these on guitar players and then return you to your regularly scheduled broadcast.
There are so many really good bass players that I almost feel bad with choosing the five below. That said, I'm trying to highlight folks that have such a distinctive approach to their instruments that you can tell within a few bars that it's them if you are familiar with them. Still, leaving John Entwhistle, Stanley Clarke, CAROL KAYE holy moly, Tina Weymouth, CHARLIE MINGUS jesus christ, and Ron Carter out was hard!
Brian Gibson (LIGHTNING BOLT)
Lightning Bolt is a two piece - one guy singing and playing drums, and Brian Gibson. Gibson is a fucking lunatic who plays his bass tuned to cello standard (C G D A) and uses a banjo string for the high A, along with a metric shitton of distortion, a Digitech Digital Whammy pedal and god knows what else (probably a Boss Octave) to get an insanely original sound. I saw these guys for the first time at Gabe's Oasis in Iowa City (the only punk-rock dive in that town, really) and I think I went because Don Caballero was playing. I happened to be towards the back of the crowd and I noticed a bunch of musical gear sitting out on the floor back there. I just figured the drum kit and massive amps were there was because the place didn't have a green room or that it was full and that it would all eventually be moved to the stage. I think that's what everyone thought.
We were wrong.
These guys set up in BACK of the crowd, on the floor, before anyone got there, and started to play immediately when the previous band finished their set, almost no pause at all, essentially taking the entire audience on the back foot and playing with such sheer exuberance and energy that at one point I was laughing with delight and I wasn't alone. They were so loud I could feel the shockwaves hitting my chest and stomach and actually see them moving the liquid in my drink (granted, my position in the rear of the crowd had suddenly become a front row seat but still they were SO loud). It was easily one of the best live shows I've ever seen. I love the fact that they did away with the stage and essentially became one thing with the crowd. I don't know if they still do that, but they did it at every one of the three other shows I saw them play.
This turns into one of the most ferocious things I have ever heard by a minute and a half in - this thing is seven minutes of churning, blistering, relentless, remorseless aggression and it is just beautiful. I don't even know what genre to put it in. No one else plays like these guys.
Bootsy, Bootzilla, Boo Man Chu, Captain P-Mo, Fuzzface, the Player, the Zillatron himself. I would not say he's underappreciated, but he's so incredibly distinctive. No one plays like this guy. You can tell when he's playing right away (or that it's someone imitating him, at the very least).
I chose this thing - nearly ten minutes long, with two bass tracks panned extreme left and right (basically one in each ear, headphones recommended). It's long but man is it good, and it really gives you a sense of his range and style. It is not totally indicative of his playing which with P-Funk for example is much more conventional (though only because Bootsy made it conventional), but I think it really showcases his talent. His use of effects here is visionary and really tasteful. He uses an envelope filter quite a lot to get automated wah sounds based on pitch, an expression pedal as a pitch-bender to get up into frequencies the instrument could never reach otherwise, a flanger, at least one kind of delay, and probably a host of other effects, to say nothing of distortion. Sometimes he sounds like the kickback from firing a particle accelerator cannon (or, well, what such a thing should sound like), sometimes he sounds like the trembling digital web of an electronic spider, and sometimes he sounds like the ocean rolling in and then... receding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FgDk5lo-Zs
Brian Ritchie (VIOLENT FEMMES)
I don't think Ritchie is on anyone's list of "greatest bass players" but he has such a unique sound I felt I had to include him. I am unaware of any other band where the bass sounds like this - almost acoustic, almost like an upright, but not quite.
This song is so goddamn good. I am surprised it hasn't been pinched by someone like Scorsese or Tarantino for a film. Generally I love the scores those two directors put together, though often after a movie's success one of those tunes gets picked up by the advertising industry and played ad nauseam in commercials for burgers until the opening chords make me want to vomit red meat in the collective faces of whoever is on the board of directors. Dick Dale's Miserlou for example was in I think every single fucking commercial for every single product you could buy between 1994 and 1996. Now, on the one hand, that's great, because I feel like Dick Dale finally got some recognition and probably a decent payout, and I don't begrudge him that at all. I might very well come back to him when we get to guitarists. But on the other hand, that process of a song like Miserlou or Tomoyasu Hotei's Battle Without Honor or Humanity being co-opted by the advertising world makes me more than a little sick to my stomach.
Ahem. I'm way off track here. This thing will probably get stuck in your head, and it will be almost immediately apparent why it will probably never be used in a commercial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLHi3wiSuWc
Jaco Pastorius (WEATHER REPORT)
Again, I would say Jaco isn't underappreciated I don't think, but it does seem like he's fading a bit in the collective memory. What he did for music in general and particularly for the bass guitar is nothing short of monumental. There are a ton of wonderful apocryphal stories about Jaco, but one of my favorites is that when asked about the future of jazz, he replied "Well, I'll be in Miami next week."
He modified a standard Fender jazz bass to be fretless. He had different stories about when and how he removed the frets - one of them was that he removed the frets with a butter knife and sealed the fretboard with epoxy resin.
Like so many great musicians, he had serious problems with substance abuse. I guess he could be a real asshole when he drank (as so many of us can) and he liked to drink (as so many of us do). He was frequently homeless the last few years of his life. His death at thirty five was a tragedy of his own making - this is from the Wikipedia entry on Jaco:
On September 11, 1987, Pastorius sneaked onstage at a Santana concert at the Sunrise Musical Theater in Sunrise, Florida. After being ejected from the premises, he made his way to the Midnight Bottle Club in Wilton Manors. After reportedly kicking in a glass door, having been refused entrance to the club, he became involved in a violent confrontation with Luc Havan, a club employee who was a martial arts expert. Pastorius was hospitalized for multiple facial fractures and injuries to his right eye and left arm, and fell into a coma. There were encouraging signs that he would come out of the coma and recover, but they soon faded. A brain hemorrhage a few days later led to brain death. He was taken off life support and died on September 21, 1987, at the age of 35.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc6IT61FHVg
Les Claypool (PRIMUS, LES CLAYPOOL'S FLYING FROG BRIGADE)
OK, once again, not someone who is underappreciated by any means, but I think perhaps the single most distinctive bassist stylistically I have ever heard. Almost more than Bootsy, you can tell when Les is playing pretty much immediately. People tend to either love him or hate him. I love him, but I DO have to be in the mood and I'm not always. This is a pretty early thing, from the first Primus album, but if you don't know Claypool's playing for some reason, this will give you a really good picture of why he is hailed far and wide as a bass monster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ufAE-skaA4
That's all for now! There are obviously a lot of other folks who deserve their own showcase, but those are the five I chose in the moment. If there is someone whose lack of inclusion feels to you as though it is an atrocity up there with family annihilation in its stark evil, if you happen to have an opinion about any of this that you'd like to share, or if you would just like to tell me about one of your favorite bass players, please DO!
