What most influenced you in how you play now?

[dohhhhh6]

So I was reading the Led Zeppelin thread (don't worry, I only got to the end of the second page) and was reading how so many people were influenced by JPJ and Entwhistle.

 

This is interesting to me because I'm not really inspired or influenced by anyone at the moment. Sure I admired Family Man and worshipped Flea (long ago), but I really feel that I've come into my own with bass playing. It's amazing because looking back 4 years ago, I never thought I'd be able to play like I do now.

 

So while I don't think that I take after a particular bassist (though I admire a nice groove), I think that the two influences that have most shaped me are being in a worship band that basically jams to chord charts and the high school jazz band that I was in for 2 years. Without these two inspirations, I don't know where I'd be now.

 

It's amazing how everything that's happened to you has eventually lead up to where you are now. So what got you were you are today?

[Kramer Ferrington III.]

Originally posted by dohhhhh6:

I think that the two influences that have most shaped me are being in a worship band that basically jams to chord charts and the high school jazz band that I was in for 2 years. Without these two inspirations, I don't know where I'd be now.

 

It's amazing how everything that's happened to you has eventually lead up to where you are now. So what got you were you are today?

I agree with you about the way that your musical environment often has a much bigger influence on your eventual playing than some individual player(s) that you might like.

 

In my case, what really formed my own personal style was that a band I was in could not find a guitar player. There were heaps of great players around, sure, but we wanted to do synth music and most guys were into metal. Not a good fit. Not back then anyway.

 

We tried out 27 of them and as we were raring to go out and gig, we decided that I would try and do bass AND guitar parts. You know, play straight basslines and then do some power chords in the choruses. And, funnily enough, it worked. So yeah, my main influence is not another bass player but simply a situation.

[JonathanD]

I was influenced by pink floyds overall sound a great deal. The song on buffilo 66 by YES. I think it is called heart of the sunrise. I grew up on sax music, classical and jazz, and that has had the biggest influence on me. Honestly, I have never really listened to much music. when I was reaaallly young my father paid the bills in a rock/metal band that played mettalica and ozzy. This was in about 1986-1990. The it was jazz fusion like Via and Satriani. That kind of guitar "virtuoso" type music influenced me to NEVER play that kind of music. I now hate solos unless they are tastful and am some what jaded to them all together.

 

Overall Main influences, Krishnamurti, Robert Anton Wilson and A.C. David Bohm is up there also.

 

I'll agree, chord charts and theory are very big influences for me also. Sometimes I wish I could get away from the theory based thinking more often for writing.

 

OH ... also, good bluegrass and the BLUES. oh how I love to hear the same thing played 1000 different ways. That is my favorit thing to hear and play. It has a grove but is very musical.

 

Thanks for asking.

Jonathan

[thanny XIII]

The pure shexy evilness of black metal inspired me, my sound and my playing. And to some degree a desire to meet rock chicks

[Phil W]

I guess a teacher I had a couple of years back. He turned my playing around and helped my playing meet my own expectations more often. I love his playing - he has a great ear and is so lyrical and melodic in his playing. Since that influence my playing is quite different and my technique is much improved.

 

His name is Steve Billman. You can hear him here:

 

http://www.liraproductions.com/samples/pm.mp3

 

or more tracks here:

 

http://www.liraproductions.com/Continuum_Music.html

[Chad Thorne]

Unlike when I was learning guitar, I haven't spent much time learning one particular bass player's lines or licks. Since I only started playing bass seriously about 6 years ago (in response to a need for bassist in the church worship band!) I listen to any bassist to hear how he/she negotiates different chord progressions/grooves, and I imagine (know) that I assimilate some of that info as I go along. There are so many wonderful bassists out there that there's a wealth of info at my disposal all over the place.

 

The other defining factor in how I play bass, particularly, is the limitation of my left (plucking) hand due to an injury. I usually pluck with first and second fingers but they won't move fast enough for fast passages (nerve damage) so I switch to "picking" with my thumb for those, in a motion very similar to my guitar picking, which I can move around at faster speeds.

[jcadmus]

Everything I play was informed by Jack Bruce's playing on Cream's version of "Crossroads."

 

The man was brilliant on that song.

[SteveC]

The last two bands I have been in did it for me. The first was the funk/soul horn band. I never listended to much of that before. The 2nd was the "smooth jazz" 4tet. That got me into Spyro Gyra and the Yellowkackets.

 

Both genres are pretty obvious in my plauing.

[h364]

I was happy playing bass for around 8 months, happily fingering off scales, chords, all things jolly. Until i discoverd Flea that is, i went and still in am almight slap phase. Totally changed my out look on bass, and how in often smaller 3 peice of 4 peice bands, the bass plays key roles.

[Max Valentino]

When I was 7 years old I heard Miles Davis' "Kind Of Blue" and was mesmerized (I still remember that event as if it were yesterday). Three days later I heard a recording of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony...and that did it. I wanted to be a musician. I wanted only to make those glorious wonderful noises.

 

I started playing trumpet that same year.

 

A few years on someone played "A Love Surpeme" for me. It changed my life.

 

The next 10 years were spent both playing trumpet thru HS, and classical piano studies.

 

Somewhere along the line I picked up guitar...but sucked very bad at it (ironically, I now teach guitar...)

 

In High School I was turned on to Ornette Coleman. Whew! It wasn't so much Ornette, but more Charlie Haden who blew my mind. Then someone played me some Bill Evans with Scott LaFaro. I took to bass.

 

I also was quite rapt with the electric period of Miles career (I wore out a vinyl copy of Bitches Brew)..Dark Magus, Live/Evil, Jack Johnson, Pangea and Agartha...all shaped my listening and playing styles (at this time everyone I knew were so caught up in Cheap Trick, Ted Nugent, Led Zeppelin etc...and I tried to like them, but just could not "get it". My listening tastes had moved to Messiaen, Stravinsky, Mingus,Coltrane...and Sly and The Family Stone, TOP, the Meters (odd mix, ya think?)

 

I went to college to study composition. One professor was Phillip Glass, another was Steve Reich.

 

I never got into rock until one week when I was taken to 2 rock concerts (which I think were my first ones...) U2 (this was 1980, mind you..) and the Clash. I finally got it.

 

Since then I have listened to and learned from everything I can possibly lay my ears on. Currently in my CD rotation (this week): Vietnamese Opera, John Cage, Miles,Brad Paisley, Bob Marley, Yellowman, Sonic Youth, Glenn Branca, assorted Bill Laswell stuff (a BIG influence), Salif Keita, Pavarotti, Johnny Cash, Buck Owens,

Bill Frisell, Tool, Audioslave,Laura Love, Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Diamond, Nels Cline, David Torn, Michael Manring, Sinatra, Bad Brains....and my favorite cd of train sounds!

 

I am a musician...I love music and have learned not to be subjective in my listening or in my influences. The more I listen to the more I learn.

 

Max

[Chad Thorne]

Originally posted by Max Valentino:

When I was 7 years old I heard Miles Davis' "Kind Of Blue" and was mesmerized (I still remember that event as if it were yesterday)...

Just last night the alto sax player at the blues jam called "All Blues". Happy, happy, joy, joy! A nice change from the "Got My Mojo Workin'" and SRV-wannabe fare we usually get (nice as that is).

 

As for overall musical influence, not specifically bass, I should have said Miles is it.

[Eric VB]

What a wonderful post, Max. You made another awesome statement recently that life experiences shape our musical voices. I see a connection between the two here. With music, we speak of our life experiences, and we put it in the vernacular and colloquialisms we grew up with.

 

I think most people are familiar with "y'all", a contraction for "you all", part of a dialect most often associated with the southern U.S. If you grew up somewhere else, like a non-rural area in the north, this did not become part of your everyday speech. (My Polish neighbors said "yous guys" instead, pluralizing "you".) If a kid from the suburban north lived in the deep south for a few years (like me), he might be able to assimilate "y'all" in a more-or-less authentic drawl.

 

I made it a point never to say "y'all" when I lived in Atlanta; kind of a stupid pride thing, I guess. I've since moved back north, so I don't hear it as often. But every now and then, when talking to somebody that does use that word, it slips out of my mouth as well. I guess I just got used to hearing it, and it does seem right friendly to serve up some "down home" hospitality. As I put it, I have a "license" to use "y'all", because I did my time in Georgia.

 

If you grow up listening to only one kind of music, influenced by your family and/or peers, you're only going to learn to "speak" with that "dialect" musically, I think. This is why I think everyone suggests that we as musicians try to listen to as wide a variaty of music as possible. To give us a bigger vocabulary.

 

So we learn phrases, styles, tones, etc., from the music and musicians we listen to and study. Sometimes we copy exactly, sometimes we paraphrase. If you find yourself in the right context, you may even catch yourself quoting your influences.

 

If you've been over to the KC recently, you may have caught a thread about jazz improvisation. One musician stated that this kind of learning leads to copy-cat musicians. He certainly has a point.

 

At one family gathering in particular my father, brothers and I were all sitting in the same room. Our spouses all got a kick out of the fact that we looked like a bunch of clones, all exhibiting the same mannerisms at what not.

 

Back to the KC thread, it was proposed that by simply following some theoretical guidelines it is possible to improvise in your own singularly unique voice, instead of just regurgitating a string of phrases you've picked up over the years. This idea certainly has merit, but I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, so I'm not sure where to place it in the analogy.

[Eric VB]

Originally posted by dohhhhh6:

So what got you w[h]ere you are today [musically]?

My older brothers and peers introduced me to mostly rock music. Before that all I remember is Johnny Cash, BJ Thomas' "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head", and Boots Randolph.

 

Ego, being what it is, also helped steer the course. I tried out for the school talent show in 5th grade with "On Top Of Old Smokey" on trombone. (It was supposed to be a round with trumpet, by my friend ditched me.) I didn't make the cut. The next year I was in a bass, drums, trombone and trumpet quartet, and we won with CCR's "Proud Mary". Which type of music do you think I was more interested in pursuing after that?

 

I was introduced to jazz-rock fusion then, too. To me, this was jazz, from A to Z, because it was so different from rock and it was the only jazz I knew. It wasn't until after I was presented with the Louis Armstrong Jazz Award as a senior in high school that I really felt obligated to study jazz beyond the few big band tunes we played.

 

Oh, there was a stint of disco, too. My defense is that I wasn't in charge of picking the music and I didn't know any better. Victim of the times. [To this day I prefer Amii Stewart's version of "Knock On Wood" to all others. ]

 

But I still played trombone in the school band and orchestra for several years (and later tuba). I got used to hearing the counter melody, harmony, and the occasional melody coming out of my trombone. This also shaped my bass playing, as I try to incorporate these non-traditional roles on bass. This was allowed to develop because I played in a lot of duos and trios where the bass was given more ground to work with (and cover).

 

So, it's not just the music and the players I've listened to -- the first two being JPJ and Tom Hamilton (Aerosmith) -- it's also the opportunities I've had and the way music is received. The latter part is sad but true -- being drum major of the marching band just isn't the same as captain of the football team, even if the stands clear out after half-time -- but like all kinds of peer pressure, this too diminishes with time. Even now I find I'm allowing myself to compose music I wouldn't be caught dead being associated with in the past.

 

So I guess just living life has gotten me where I am today, musically.

[hertzdem]

anything by the great Joe Osborn,also-Tommy Cogbill,P McCartney--------mostly Joe

[jlrush]

I would have to say that everything I've ever listened to, or anyone I've ever played music with has affected me one way or another.

 

BTW, I enjoyed reading Max's post about his musical influences. That's quite a list of what you're currently spinning Max, and you are living the dream that many of us secretly (or not) wish we could live.

 

When I was a kid in the 50's, hearing my Grandpa singing old Hank Williams tunes and others from around that era was the first time I saw how the average person could love music. He truly enjoyed his music, and sharing it with his grandkids.

 

In the 60's I was influenced by Top 40 AM radio. Stones, Beatles, Hendrix, Steppenwolf, were some of the first records I owned. My Dad hated 'The Pusher', (I was oblivious to the blatent drug reference), and I came to enjoy almost all that was on AM at the time. I especially liked Motown and soul music, and Led Zep, Mitch Ryder, The Rascals, and The Animals were at the top of the list too.

 

About the time that FM radio became popular and AM all but died, I moved from KC to Columbia in 1972. I fell in with a crowd of hippies and was introduced to a bunch of different music. David Bromberg, Leo Kotke, James Taylor (not just his hits), Jazz Crusaders, The Section (with Lee Sklar and Russ Kunkel), TOP, Duke Ellington, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, Leon Russell, Buddy Miles, Miles Davis, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings. These were some of the people I listened to through the 70's.

 

I got a guitar in 1966 and toyed around for many years, then in 1979 got an opportunity to join my first real band, but they needed a bass player, so I took up the bass. I've played blues, rock, country, rockabilly, soul and Motown, and now contemporary Christian music in church. Playing for God is by far the most rewarding gig I've ever had.

 

I went through a period of wanting to play music for a living but life happened, actually reality hit me in the face, and I decided music would be my hobby instead. I'll always play, as long as I'm able, and I'm happy with my life decision.

[theTragicRich]

My main influences for bass are Jaco (of course) and Sean Malone. For slappin, it's probably Tony Choy. But as I'm now getting into more R&B and Funk as a bassist, the list will most likely grow.

 

When I played drums, it was mainly Neil Peart and Sean Reinert; guitar, had to be Chuck Schuldiner and Andy LaRocque (with some Satch in there I guess).

[nadu]

What most influenced me, at the begining was queen, with the "another one bites the dust" song. I really liked the bass and then i started listening to different basses in music, mostly heavy metal like iron maiden. But until now what influenced most is flea from the red hot chilli peppers. I always wanted to play like he does but now, of course, i like other bassist like Pascal Mulot or Steve Harris.

[BenLoy]

I started playing because I loved Pink Floyd. I learned all of Roger Waters' and David Gilmour's basslines note-for-note and learned a lot in the process about how to play functional bass parts.

 

Then I picked up "Delicate Sound of Thunder" and heard crack session bassist Guy Pratt play those same basslines with a crisp, funk-influenced sound. I immediately set about learning those songs all over again, only this time trying to match his tight articulation and punchy ghost notes. In the process, I learned a lot about how one can radically alter the feel of a song from the bass through seemingly subtle methods.

 

Then a high school friend of mine gave me a copy of Peter Gabriel's "So" and Tony Levin bowled me over, showing me how far one could take the bassline in a pop song while still holding things down.

 

At this point I started buying Bass Player Magazine and kept reading about this guy Jaco Pastorius and how amazing he was supposed to be. I was a freshman at NYU and found a vinyl copy of his live album "Invitation" in the library. I put on some headphones in a listening booth, dropped the needle into the groove of the title track, and was absolutely floored. Then "The Chicken" came on and I found myself drumming on the desk of the listening booth so hard that the library staff came over to tell me to quiet down! I never did learn to play like Jaco, but I was quickly hooked on his use of harmonics and set about diligently learning about this extended range that the bass had.

 

During this fertile period in college, I absorbed the playing of Stuart Zender, Horace Panter, Pino Palladino, Will Lee, Marcus Miller, Les Claypool, Paul Chambers, Chris Wood, Flea, Tommy Shannon, Michael Anthony, Michael Manring, George Porter Jr., Bootsy Collings, Bernard Odum, James Jamerson, and Victor Wooten. I grabbed something from all of them, though I admit I never really learned to play like all of them.

 

I guess all of this shaped some sort of style and gave me a wide bag of tricks to draw from. I usually make drummers happy when I play with them so I must've gleaned SOME wisdom from these guys...

[Eric VB]

Originally posted by BenLoy:

I learned a lot about how one can radically alter the feel of a song from the bass through seemingly subtle methods.

Amen!

 

Although not exactly how I would choose to do so, if you listen to my example bass playing on my jam track, each time through the 12-bar blues I play something different. It makes the two alternating lead guitar lines sound different every time they play, even though I'm not doing anything different on guitar (except the faltering execution).

 

Just the difference between staccato and legato make for a whole different feel. It's really hard to hear the root quarters on the first pass because they're staccato and hide behind the rest of the mix (except for the awful timing that sticks out here and there).

 

In my last band, we could take a simple song and turn it into a half hour jam. In order to keep it from becoming mind-numbing, each time through I'd change something, or the drummer would, and we'd all adjust accordingly. Those improv jams were often more exciting than trying to nail a cover or even our most recent original. (You know, the newest one is always the coolest.)

 

I wish I had consciously studied Jamerson more when I was first learning bass.

 

And a big to Floyd. When I was starting out, "Money" was one of those few songs I could play by myself and my friends could recognize.

 

Nice post and good insights (as always), Mr. Loy.

[soulsurfer]

Listening to jazz at a young age helped me develop a lot of my harmonic and rhythmic sensibilities. My dad was into Miles, Trane, MJQ etc. and it got me into understanding what a groove was, and how to swing. My grandmother was a jazz pianist, and she wrote some awesome tunes.

 

Pop and R&B/funk had a powerful effect on me, and like jlrush I was also under the spell of '60s(and '70s) radio, especially WABC and WBLS in NY, two of America's most popular stations.

 

However, my influences are still flowing into me. If I hear a song I like, whether old or new, I try to get a handle on it. It gets to me, so I try to get to it and make it mine.

[Basshappi]

I've been around music all my life. Both of my parents listened to alot of music. My father liked classical and jazzy stuff like Herb Albert. My mom played piano and loved showtunes especially Henry Mancini, but she also listened to a lot of Motown.

 

When I was very young we had a cheap Magnus electic organ. It had buttons on the bass side and the keys had numbers and the note names written above them. The music books that came with it were written like a chord chart.

 

I played this thing constantly and would make up little songs of my own.

 

Some years later my mom bought a real piano. I began playing and making up my own songs on it.My mother could not improvise but she could read music very well

 

I took up trumpet in 4th grade and played through jr.high school, I quit before high school because I didn't want to be in marching band. Along the way I took about 2.5 years of piano lessons.

 

It was through piano lessons that I got involved with bass. The teachers son was starting a rock band and I wanted to be in it bad, so when the only available instrument was the bass I jumped at the chance! All I knew about bass was that Gene Simmons played one. But I had always gravitated to the bass and harmony lines in music (I preferred the lower section chairs in band because I enjoyed playing harmony more than the melodic parts.)so bass and I were a perfect match.

 

In fact it became so apparent to my piano teacher that I had a natural affinity for the bass that she spoke to my parents and made arrangements for me to meet a bass teacher whom she played with in the Lubbock symphony orchestra.

 

Which brings me to my first real influence, Mike Robberson. Mike was a member of the Lubbock and Amarillo Orchestras and played in the top Jazz band at Texas Tech University and around town.

 

Mike taught me so much about bass and set me firmly on "the path". He taught me to drop my prejudices of musical style and listen to everything. I remember him telling me "There are only two types of music, good music and bad music, and you can learn valuable lessons from both kinds. Remember, the most important skill for a musician is to listen well."

 

The other important thing Mike did was introduce me to the playing of Jaco, Stanley and fusion in general.I never forget the day I was walking up to his door and I could hear him playing this awesome riff. I walked in and asked if that was something he made up and he said no it was a tune called "Teen Town" by Jaco Pastorius. I said "Who?". He just smiled at me, walked across the room and put on the record. I stood absolutely frozen in the middle of his living room and listened to the whole album. I haven't been the same since!

 

Mike got the bass chair for the Joe Ely band and went on tour opening for the Rolling Stones. I have always wondered what he's doing now.

 

The other person who has most influenced my playing is Ed Friedland. I had the privilege to study with Ed for a little over a year. He has opened my eyes to so much both technically and philosohpically about playing bass and being a musician that it would take a book to relate it all.

 

Ed has relocated to Austin Texas and for those of you that in or near there avail yourselves to the opprotunity to study with Ed! He will definitely make a better musician out of you.

[tnb]

Work. The stuff I listened to in my teen years was not the stuff I playing at gigs. Work has influenced how I play more than anything else, especially on upright. I was never in a "garage band". I had been gigging for years before I ever got together just for fun.

[butcherNburn]

What no one credited drugs and alcohol?

Me either, I'm just surprised...

 

Oddly enough, I was most influenced by the sounds of machines and the music I was listening to at the time I had that dreadful job. I spent many an hour with music popping in my head as I ran a folding machine in a printing company.

[tnb]

Drugs and booze NEVER help. And I would know.

[cloclo]

what has most influenced me is playing a lot of live gigs with a large amount of improvisation with the same musicians/friends.

[alexclaber]

My big four bass playing influences are Jaco, Jamerson, Larry Graham and Family Man. However, I've liberally stolen from everyone I've heard!

 

Watching University Challenge this evening (a good workout for the grey matter) there were a series of questions about some Johnny Cash covers, and who had performed the original and it dawned on me what an influence he has been in helping me realise that you can pitch your voice way down there and make it work. Since then I'm always singing along with different things an octave down to loosen up my lower range and it's working!

 

Alex

[jeremy c]

I've been playing music with other people for 47 years now and playing bass for over 40 years.

 

Everything I've heard and everyone I have played with has influenced me.

 

My listening tastes have been extremely broad over the years. They include AM radio as I was growing up and during the years that I made a living in a top-40 band. (That's a cover band which played the top tunes of the day). I remember the day when I was six or seven that I realized that I was tall enough to stand on a chair and change the station of the radio which was on top of the refrigerator.

 

Later I strung up lots of wire in the attic so that I could hear stations that were further away. I listened to Murray the K on NYC radio even though I lived 200 miles away.

 

I also listened to every record in my parents' extensive classical collection. The school bands I played in were concert bands and our public schools were taken to the symphony once a year so I was always exposed to classical music. I remember the jr. high school band playing The Great Gate of Kiev by Mussorgsky like it was yesterday.

 

At some point I started listening to the local jazz radio station. I also went to the Newport Folk Festival and heard many great musicians.

 

In college I played in the folk rock scene, listened to what was then called psychedelic, hung out with the local rockers, went to avant-garde concerts (contemporary classical music), and stayed up all night listening to the jazz that was coming out: Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, The Jazz Composer's Orchestra, Cecil Taylor, etc.

 

Later I got deeply into funk after hearing Sly Stone's "There's a Riot Going On". That was a life-changing moment for me.

 

Nowadays I listen to lots of fusion and world music and play r&b, Motown and disco oldies, straight-ahead jazz, and various kinds of Jewish music for a living.

 

I love music and have been playing with other people almost since the days I started playing an instrument (when I was eleven). My brother and I would host jam sessions at our house before we were teenagers. We played out of books called "combo-orks". Does anyone remember those?

 

Over the years, I have been privileged to play with many fine musicians, some of whom are now nationally known.

 

My teaching has also influenced me. At one point, I sat down and transcribed dozens of songs for a series of classes I taught on "classic bass lines". This is where I gained an appreciation of Sir Paul McCartney's style. I'm of the generation which bought all the Beatles records (I was already in a band when the Beatles appeared) but I hadn't really paid attention to the bass parts until I taught my class.

 

My favorite bass players have always been studio players or "hired guns" and there have been many who were strong influences on me: Harvey Brooks, Carl Radle, Carol Kaye, Chuck Rainey, James Jamerson, all of James Brown's bassists, Family Man Barrett, Rocco Prestia, Larry Graham, Byron Miller, Nico Assumpcão, Cachao, Lee Sklar, Ronnie Baker,,,I could go on for pages.

 

I suppose that my love of the mountains, the ocean, and the deserts of my adopted state, California, have also influenced my music, as well as my love for my wife, son, family and friends.

 

Everything is connected to everything else.

[picker]

I have been pelted with music from an early age. Literally. I have been really sensitive to music for as long as I can remember, so much so that I have always been able to get lost in it. My first records were 78's, the little yellow Disney records, and the bigger black ones with songs by Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. I was listening to that stuff when I was 3, man. Then there were the Warner Brothers cartoons with everything from Strauss waltzes to fractured classical, and after them the later ones that had jazz tunes with those amazing walking bass lines. By then, I was living within shouting distance of Detroit with r&b and soul music saturating the airwaves that my brother's little brown Airline transistor radio picked up in the evenings when we weren't watching Bonanza or the Lucy Show in it's first post-Desi Arnaz airings. And speaking of TV, there was Dick Clark with doo-wop and rock & roll everyday after school. My parents loved music, the Dorsey Brothers, Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller when they were kids, and later on Hank Williams, Johnny Horton, Jim Reeves, Johnny Cash, Patsy Kline, Floyd Cramer and many more. Then my mom fell in love with the Ventures, and there was this neighbor kid from Virginia who's dad loved Johnnie & the Hurricanes and Duane Eddy. When we went to Guam, Armed Forces radio was playing Fats Domino and the Four Seasons and a thousand one-hit wonders a day. And then there was that fateful Sunday night when Ed Sullivan introduced those four British guys and the world turned on it's ear.

The five or six years that followed that were a blur of amazing sounds and learning to play the guitar, and then there was this day when I was listening to the guitar solo on The Vanilla Fudge's "Break Song" off the "Near the Beginning" album, and it hit me like ton of bricks that they were playing the blues. I recognized it, I felt it, and it was like the shape of my brain changed or something. I have never been the same since.

 

My playing has been informed and influenced by the amazing minestrone of music that has permeated my life from it's beginning. I think that I have built upon my earliest influences, but I have never really improved on them. I count myself incredibly fortunate to have grown up in a time when there was so much music of so many different sorts so easily accessible.

[slowfinger]

I suppose it was the blues that got me in. A couple of events coincided when I was about 20 - I got my first ($10) guitar, and I started going to coffee shops that had 'folk singers' playing. I kind of liked the blues songs best, and after a while I taught myself to strum and pluck simple 12 bar blues. When Jimi and EC and the like appeared I recognised the blues in what they were playing. Funny thing I've realised only recently, is that when I played their songs in my head over the years I had been 'playing' mostly the bass lines - eg the descending sequence in 'White Room' and the bass part of 'Red House' (I always thought Jimi was somehow doing that with his thumb). Now that I've been playing bass for a year I know that I have been listening to the bass parts without realising it. Now I hear bass in everything.

[Phil W]

Fascinating reading!

 

 

Byron Miller

 

Yes, he now hosts a jam session every week in Pasadena; I keep meaning to go there when I'm down. I certainly enjoyed some of his playing in the past.