Occasionally, when I run into a great bass backstage at a festival I'll play a few notes on the low E string, just to feel the instrument vibrate against my belly.
For me, if the music is good, whether the artist is famous or unknown, I love being part of the music and contributing what I can to the bass end.
Ridley Pearson also plays bass guitar and sings with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band made up of such successful authors as Amy Tan, Stephen King, and Dave Barry-a band that, according to Barry, "plays music as well as Metallica writes novels".
I've been making Bass Communion music longer than any kind of other music. I don't know if you picked up a copy of a vinyl release I put out a couple of years ago of something called Altamont.
Peacock bass like to hide at ambush points, away from the strong canal currents. If you fish early and know those peacock hangouts, you will have little or no trouble catching peacocks on lures and live bait.
So for all that we might speak words in each other's vicinity, this could never develop into anything that could be called a conversation. It was as though we were speaking in different languages. If the Dalai Lama were on his deathbed and the jazz musician Eric Dolphy were to try to explain to him the importance of choosing one's engine oil in accordance with changes in the sound of the bass clarinet, that exchange might have been more worthwhile and effective than my conversations with Noboru Wataya.
Jack Bruce, as soon as I saw him, it changed me. I didn't even know what bass players did until I saw Cream.
Plus, I grew up with Steve Cropper. There were so many good guitar players another one wasn't needed. What was needed was a bass.
The bass player's function, along with the drums, is to be the engine that drives the car. . . everything else is merely colours.
I used to play bass for a while and got to the point where I was good enough to be in a shitty band.
I'm 13 to 17, 18 years old; I thought that's what the world was like. It never occurred to me that this was a very unusual period in music history. So I went on assuming that one day I'm going to have my band like my heroes had their own band. So people ask me this question all the time - they go, "Bass is basically a background instrument. " The other thing is that in urban music, Black music, the bass has a much higher profile.
So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument.
On Ain't No Telling I came up with the bass solo.
Nothing beats 2 guitars, drum and bass.
So by the time I taught myself the bass guitar at the age of 14, my hands were already pretty nimble.
I like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.
Guitar is for the head, drums are for the chest, but bass gets you in the groin
There's always going to be the cooler-clubbers who are going to harvest a lot of fish, but I think the hard-core bass fishermen release just about everything they catch these days. Years ago, I think people were willing to release smaller fish, but now I think they're willing to release them all, and that's the important part.
I've always been playing with other people, and that's how I learned. I got a kit of drums I couldn't play, but I also knew a guitarist and a friend of mine played bass and could teach us bass, and we just played. And I learned.
Rick Bass is one of the best writers of his generation.
