My very first job was selling pop off the back of a wagon. Then I went to work in a timber yard to save up for my bass amp and joined The Smiths.
Without the Fender bass, there’d be no rock n’ roll or no Motown. The electric guitar had been waiting ’round since 1939 for a nice partner to come along. It became an electric rhythm section, and that changed everything.
As a rock band, you’re slightly one foot in the past, playing instruments like guitar, bass and drums.
I played recorder in assembly, then I became passionate about the guitar, I don’t know why. I started on electric then moved to acoustic – my brother was playing bass in the next room.
It will be the first time I’ve played live with a double bass.
It’s really hard for me to sing and play bass.
Our songs did not transcend being R&B hits. They were R&B hits that white kids were attracted to. And if people bought it, it became rock & roll. That’s marketing. Why couldn’t it still be R&B? The bass pattern didn’t change. The song didn’t change. It was still ‘Yakety Yak’ and ‘Searchin’.’
I never liked socially conscious rap. I like rap that’s physical, that’s about a beat and bass and repetition.
From the very beginning, I had a lot of female role models in music. I would go to shows, and there were always women fronting bands and playing guitar or backing up and playing drums or bass in a band. That probably contributed to my belief in myself to go out and perform for people.
When I’m playing with my band, I designate different parts to feel different things. The bass pounds in your chest when you go to a concert. It almost replaces your heartbeat. Then the drums you feel on the floor.
I never forget the first time I was on ‘Top of the Pops’, my bass player said: ‘You’ve made it!’ I did used to think, when I was younger, that I’d be on there one day.
Bristol is known for having quite a good success rate of music – Massive Attack and Portishead, that drum and bass, dance music scene. I never listened to that stuff when I was a kid, but my parents did, and my parents knew some of those people.
Being a bass player in these big-time rock bands is hard work.
I didn’t play a lot of bass as a kid, but I sang it.
We’re basically a rock band – guitar, bass, drums and vocals. But we take it further than that. We can be rotten, dirty, and heavy as anyone, but at the same time, we’ve got a lot of melody.
As Mick Jagger will tell you, performing is an aerobic work-out. I’ve got the bass guitar, which is the heaviest of all the instruments, and I’m a little girl, in boiling-hot leather under the lights. You have to keep the fitness level up if you want to look good up there.
Your time is spent making records, planning, touring – not counting the days until another guy’s concert. There are some newer artists I like in a casual, passing way, but I couldn’t tell you the bass player’s name or name two songs off of their new record.
From the first moment that I can remember, I had identified myself as a bass player and it had everything to do with my father, who was a bass player. And he loved music, you know, as much as anybody I’ve ever seen. And that dynamic I just thought as somehow was a straight pass to me.
But when I was a teenager, I was in my room learning how to play bass by listening to Rush and the Sex Pistols. I wasn’t reading Karl Marx.
‘Hear My Heart’ was constructed with the deaf in mind. I wanted a bass line that felt like a heartbeat. I wanted to be able to touch the speakers and feel a clear sense of rhythm.
From 11 to 17, I just toured my butt off with my dad and my sister. We hit the road and I was singing all kinds of different songs and different types of genres. But I knew from an early age what I wanted my sound to be, which was country on bass, and I wanted to be a country artist.
But Dennis was a really solid musician, and we really needed somebody who could play bass like him.
My favorite guitar now is my Martin HD-7 because it’s got everything. It’s got the jingle-jangle thing from the twelve string, it’s got the flexibility of the six string, and the bass notes where you can do bass runs and that sort of thing.
When you listen to a symphony orchestra, and the basses don’t – there’s no bass part, there’s not that much depth. That’s why I’m attracted to the instrument, the bass. It brings depth. It’s like playing in a rainforest.
I love pop music. I love drum and bass, Calvin Harris, all these electronic things, but it’s nice to have something organic as well.
I find the production in ‘A&E’ very beautiful, it reminds me of Ace Of Base, the way the bass has that space and the reggae.
Because nobody wanted to play bass, I was instantly in a band.
I stepped back from being out front to playing bass. So we started switching: I’d play bass on one song, we’d switch on the next song; I’d play piano… we’d play mandolin.
I’ve got different drum machines that I use for different things, but I think the older ones are always the best when it comes down to getting that 808 bass.
I had an upright – it took me years and years to get enough bread to get it. I’m from Florida, so one morning I woke up, go in the corner, and the bass is in a hundred pieces ’cause the humidity is so bad. I mean, the upright just blew up. I said, ‘Forget it, man. I can’t afford this anymore.’
That’s what Joe Don Rooney and I do. He plays guitar and I play bass – and there’s no reason to call it a band if you’re not gonna have the guys in the band playing on the records.
I always tell girls who say they want to start a band but don’t have any talent, ‘Well, neither do I.’ I mean, I can carry a tune, but anyone who picks up a bass can figure it out. You don’t have to have magic unicorn powers.
I played a bass player and a singer in a movie once, but I totally lip-synced to everything.
Dorsey played the upright bass and steel guitar, as well as acoustic guitar. Johnny played acoustic guitar and together they were fabulous songwriters and singers.
Every time I want to impress someone about samples and hip-hop, I play ‘Portrait of Tracy.’ It’s one of the greatest bass players ever doing a whole composition with only the two harmonics of electric bass; then a three-second loop in it became every great R&B song in five-year intervals.
I wasn’t originally a bass player. I just found out I was needed, because everyone wants to play guitar.
I wish I could play bass like Larry Graham or Bootsy Collins. My God, I’d give up just about everything else for that.
When I make a record with My Morning Jacket, I love what those guys do, so I don’t have a need to play bass or drums or anything, because we’re doing that as a unit.
So I’ll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I’ll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top.
The energy in the banjo, and the beef in the bass. They’re good tools to express yourself.
We had a bunch of instruments around the house. Like, I played different instruments, trumpet, bass, drums, piano, all that, but whatever I could get my hands on.
Vocally, I don’t think analogue makes that much difference, but with guitars, it definitely makes some difference. With drums and bass, absolutely.
But yeah, I played bass guitar in high school and in college and then I actually fractured my thumb, so my bass career went bye-bye.
We’ve got an electric organ, a sax, drums, guitar and bass guitar. We sound less like the Beatles than most of the groups.
I’ve always been fascinated with sound, since I was a little kid when my mother Dorothy Dean took me to my first piano lesson. Later on, my guitar, bass guitar, and synthesizer were my secret weapons.
More traditional guitar, bass, drums – it’s not something completely natural to me. It’s, in a way, exotic.
I picked up the bass kind of postpunk-style. There’s a real art to not learning how to play an instrument and being able to still play it.
Without getting real personal, we liked our bass player Ed. He was a great guy and he was a good bass player but his playing was suited for a different style of band.
It would be obvious for me to do conceptual art, and I think I’ve done it already with smashing bass guitars and whatever – I consider that as conceptual.
Black Sabbath was written on bass: I just walked into the studio and went, bah, bah, bah, and everybody joined in and we just did it.
I had left the music business and became a conflict journalist. The conflict journalism started for me in the Gulf and the oil spill. When Skynyrd needed a new bass player, they knew me from the Black Crowes.
Someone may offer you a freshly caught whole large fish, like a salmon or striped bass. Don’t panic – take it!
Being a bass player in a band without a drummer for seven, eight years has been kind of weird.
Meditation is really good. I do that a lot with my bass player Bob, and we do TM: transcendental meditation.
No, but a cello is the perfect string bass for an accordion. Works with it beautifully.
Bounce music is uptempo, heavy bass, call and response.
It’s been fun to just play bass in a band and play live but be in the background.
Age isn’t a barrier to playing the bass, and I’ve definitely improved over the years, although maybe I’m not as flash as I once was. But looking back, I can’t imagine a life without a guitar.
