Distinctive Musicians II - Bassists

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc6IT61FHVg

Bootsy Collins (PARLIMENT FUNKADELIC, PRAXIS, BOOTSY'S RUBBER BAND)

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!

Guitarists will be next.