HEART AND BLOOD

The joke goes like this….A young man finds a teacher and asks if he’ll teach him to play bass guitar.“Come on Saturday,” says the teacher. At the lesson, the teacher tells him to pluck the bottom string.“That’s an E,” he says.  “Now go away and practice that string and come back next week.”The following Saturday, the teacher tells the student to play the next string up.“That’s the A string.  Now go away and practice playing the E and the A alternately.”The following week the student doesn’t show up, so the teacher calls him.“Is everything ok?  You didn’t come for your lesson….”“Oh, no, I’m sorry about that,” explains the student, “But I’m getting too many gigs.”This is a joke premised on the belief that bass guitar is easy.  It isn’t, no instrument is easy.

In Liverpool and Hamburg, The Beatles played with Stuart Sutcliffe on bass.  He wasn’t in the group because he was a great bassist - in fact he faced away from the audience so they couldn’t see the amount of bluff involved - he was there because he was John Lennon’s friend.  And when he left the band to pursue his career in painting (he was a great painter), they had no bass.  Who should take over?  Not Ringo, he was the drummer.  Not George, he was essential as the best guitarist.  Paul was prejudiced against the bass, and of course John just refused.  So finally it was “agreed” that Paul would fill in.In an interview a few months ago, I was asked about my influences for bass.  I wanted to say Jaco Pastorius or Pino Palladino.  But I didn’t because, even though they are,literally, the best, I didn’t discover them till much later.  I did say John Entwistle - despite playing with The Who he could be so melodic it was sometimes almost funny - and Noel Redding - who seemed able to hold things together through Jimi Hendrix and Mitch Mitchell’s amazing excursions into other worlds.  And it’s true, I love their playing…..I don’t know why I didn’t say James Jamerson, who played those fantastic bass lines on 1960s Motown tracks, whose name I didn’t know at the time, but whose grooves are to die for and embedded into the psyche of my generation….But the biggest influence?  When NTP started recording, and Jel and I were still struggling to learn, we acquired a bass (we became very adept at “acquiring” equipment of all sorts!) and both of us played it.  Simply (or “basically?), I’d just play the root note, ie C in the chord of C, G in the chord of G and so on, sometimes with a few joining-up notes in between.   Simple stuff.And then…….TAXMAN. Revolver, side 1, track 1.  Upbeat, sardonic, beaty, with lots of space between Harrison’s snap chords, space filled with McCartney’s bass.  Very fine it is, too.  But wait until the choruses - the bass goes mad!  “Declare the pennies on your eyes” - higher up the neck, it’s like a freight train speeding through a station, eventually earning the right to go simple again for the verses.  It’s FANTASTIC.That was my influence.  A wonderful bassist who willingly just plays the roots when required, but who can soar into melody and harmony when it’s right for the piece, and for whom the bass guitar is there to tell its own story in the context of the other instruments.Playing bass to Al’s drums in The Ultra Smooth Swagger Band felt terrific. We were the rhythm section, and I would listen to him more than I listened to Johnny or Dave.  Because it was up to us to keep things together.  The drums were the heartbeat and the bass delivered support to the guitars. We were the heart and the blood.