Red Dirt Bass

Memphis versus New Orleans edition, rock-steady style....





And hey, check the oh-so helpful annotation from an online (non-bass) guitar tabs for the Meters track:

As far as the regional preferences go in the classic soul department, I've always been shamelessly biased/provincial But to be geographically charitable, I'll throw this one out as easily being among the top five (if not top three) Most Icon Bass Lines of All Time:



Go back and compare the original Undisputed Truth version that had been done just months earlier. Whitfield & company definitely improved it the second time around, starting with scripting something catchier for the bass player.

King for a Day

(or, Depressing Films of the Early 1970s: The King of Marvin Gardens)

Originally posted at ...And What       
Will Be Left of Them?, January 2013 

A couple of immediate impressions, in reverse order...

Mainly: Atlantic City in the wintertime of 1972 looks for all the world like the elephant’s graveyard, the place where the American Dream of unending postwar prosperity went to meet its final resting place. The aging tourists line up for the photographer along the boardwalk. The tourists are old enough to remember the boardwalk and the City’s glory days. They line for the photograph in the shadow of the hotels along the boardwalk, the hotels which also once knew – if not hosted – those long-gone glory days, their flanking facades a persistant motif throughout the film, themselves lined as a backdrop before the camera of cinematographer László Kovács. Autumn years all around, for nearly everything and everyone. For the pensioners, for the hotel owners throwing in the towel and putting the whole kit & kaboodle up for sale, perhaps even for the enterprising young hustler who wanders onto the scene and thinks that maybe there's an opportunity of a lifetime to be wrung from it all.

But initially, before any of that: You’re confronted by the fact that It’s a bold move to begin a film with a full six-minute monologue. With a tight close-up of a face floating in darkness, pensively spinning a morbid tale. Especially when that monologue – in lieu of any other contextual prompts – at first appears to be some sort of confession, the sort of confession that usually only turns up in the course of a group therapy session. It’s only well past the five-and-half minutes that the viewer is given any sort of clue as to what’s going on.


^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

The story:

David Staebler (Jack Nicholson) is a writer living in Philadelphia, residing in mid adulthood at home with his elderly father. It’s difficult to tell what sort of writer he is exactly, aside from being a somewhat dark and dejected Jean Shepherd type – sending his stories out over the airwaves of a local radio station between 2-3 AM, relating them to whoever’ll bother to tune and listen during such lonely hours. But it’s clear that his life is cloistered and hermetic; a life devoted or resigned – we gather – to a peripheral existence.

Or so it's been up until the night he receives a call at the station during a broadcast. It ends up that the call is from his older brother Jason, to whom he hasn’t spoken with in a number of years. As it turns out, his brother is summoning him. Jason (Bruce Dern) has a new enterprise in the offing, he's in the process of taking over an Atlantic City hotel that was recently put on the auction block by its owners. "The Essex Carlton – the Oldest and Finest Accommodations on the Boardwalk." And Jason wants David to aid in the venture – to help him bring the deal to a close, with handling the outgoing management as things change hands, with the wheeling and dealing of roping in investors. And Jason also wants his younger brother to share in the eventual reward of the enterprise.

Thing is, it soon becomes apparent that Jason didn’t swing the deal on his own, but has instead fallen in league with some questionable business associates – organized crime, by all appearances – to help him leverage the purchase. What's more, David arrives to find his brother holed up in one of the hotel’s suites with a pair of female companions – the older Sally (Ellen Burstyn) and the much younger Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson), the latter apparently being the former’s stepdaughter by a previous marriage. Jason's not sure what's going on between the three, about the exact nature of the sexual relations involved, and he’s fairly sure he's better off not knowing.

Throughout, David remains skeptical about many of his older brother’s boasts and claims, if not about the business venture as a whole. Still, he wants to be a part of it – maybe for the sake of joining the larger world that Jason inhabits, maybe with the hope of reviving the fraternal ties and ambitions of years-gone-by, maybe both. Despite these misgivings and the feeling of being a peripheral latecomer to the whole affair, David plays along at times and finds that he actually enjoys the opportunity of walking in someone else’s shoes – enjoys, for instance, playing the role of co-owner and pitching the hard sell to a pair of potential Japanese investors over dinner. But at other times his doubts aren’t so easily shaken; at which point Jason harangues him for his chronically sadsack demeanor, his defeatist pessimism, his pragmatic caution and his chronic lack of faith. Even though, as soon becomes apparent, Jason is blithely sailing into treacherous waters.

Bass Oddities

Thanks to Tina Weymouth, there were a number of early Talking Heads songs that were anchored in strong, prominent bass lines -- “Psycho Killer” and “Take Me to the River” being the first that come to mind. It looks like Simon concurs, since he's singled her out for attention. Yes, Fear of Music sports its fair share of tunes where Weymouth delivers. But “I Zimbra” in particular has never failed to amuse me over the years, mainly because of how the bass pattern alternately accents and punctuates the rhythm engine of the ensemble with an eccentric logic all its own.

And then there's this obscure items from the Chicago soul-jazz scene of the late 1960s...








Melvin Jackson had spent the previous several years playing with Eddie Harris (in fact, a few tunes on Funky Skull are reversionings of tracks he’d cut with Harris a year or two beforehand). Jackson had electrified his upright bass by hooking it up to a series of amps and effects boxes, much the same way that Harris had done with his own tenor saxophone. And to achieve a trippier effect, a number of songs on the album feature Jackson’s bass soaked down with liberal amounts of reverb and delay. The LP also features a lot of session players drawn from the ranks of Chicago's jazz scene of the late '60a (particularly those affiliated with the AACM) -- with the likes Lester and Byron Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Leo Smith, Jodie Christian, Phil Upchurch, Pete Cosey, and drummer Billy Hart helping put the whole thing over.

Riddim Killers, II

(Bass & Infrastructure, Installment the Second - Mirrorball Edition)

I suppose it goes without saying that a strong bass line was central in the funk & disco eras, and there's a lot of tunes that make the cut. Far too many to include from the funk canon, so here's a few favorites of my own from the disco...






As 1978-9 rolled around, a lot of disco was becoming more and more generic, more pro-forma, part of which may've contributed to the inevitable backlash. Still, in those years there were still a few songs that featured hooky, poppin' bass lines. Here's a couple of other favorites, featuring (as above) another tune notable for being sampled by TCQ, and another jawn from the P&P label...






And then of course this big hit, in which the bass pretty much takes center stage:




In his first post on this topic, Simon mentions the Larry Graham-derived style of "slap" bass, which become so pervasive and overused by various post-punk and dance acts in the early 1980s. A Certain Ratio used it to good effect before things tipped past the point of maximum saturation:






Always deeply liked the way the bass glides over the surface of that latter tune. And of roughly the same vintage:





Another favorite bass line was from “Regiment”, from Byrne and Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Not complex, but it had a smoldering darkness to it. The duties are attributed to one session musician going by the name of (ugh) Michael “Busta Cherry” Jones, who -- if dodgey search-engine results are to be believed -- had around the time had brief stints playing with Parliament and Gang of Four. I suppose I wasn't the only one, judging from the number of times (like the above) it was sampled a decade or so later.

Riddim Killers, I

(or, Bass & Infrastructure, Installment the First)

And speaking of the Decades blogs, it looks like the time has come again; the time when one of the old inter-bloggal musical rifferama/shootout things gets underway. We’ve done riffs, intros, geetar solos, and drummige. And now it looks like Simon Reynolds has chosen this season’s topic -- bass!

Quite frankly, I had been waiting on this one some time ago. My own listening affinities have always tilted toward the low end. But still I think I might this one a bit challenging, given the fact that I a difficult time separating the bass out from its interlocking role in a given rhythm section as a whole.

To get the ball rolling, one of the first things that leaps to mind was prompted by my having recently seen the documentary The Wrecking Crew, which I deeply enjoyed. The thing was an endless parade of pop tunes I knew from my childhood in the early 1970s, lots of songs that were -- well before the advent of "Oldies” or "Classic Rock" radio formats -- still fairly ubiquitous at the time. What’s more, I was struck by the number of times I learned that specific parts of these tunes -- the instrumental hooks or portions that had first grabbed my ear, that had been my favorite part due to the way it made the tune exceptional or snappy, the parts that stood out and stuck with me -- were those parts executed by one or another of a network of (seldomly credited) studio musicians who played on countless West Coast sessions throughout the 1960s. Sometimes it was a guitar riff or what had been laid down by the drummer, but more frequently these tended to the bass parts. Once instance would be when Joe Osborn’s bass gallops ahead of the rest of the backing on the Fifth Dimension's version of "Let the Sunshine In." But most often it was the work of bassist Carol Kaye...








Soon as the film was over, I found myself picking through my record shelves, checking to see if any of the musicians in question turned up on certain favorite records. Sure enough, the first two I reached for featured Carol Kaye and "Wrecking Crew" drummer Earl Palmer, serving as the elegantly-played rhythmic backbone for the arrangements on David Axelrod's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience LPs...






Serge Gainsbourg and arranger Jean-Claude Vannier cooked up a similar type atmosphere a few years later on Gainsbourg’s album Historie de Melody Nelson, complete with a similarly laid-back, funky grooves from the sessions’ bassist and drummer...




More to come, naturally.