John

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14932-1521114,00.html

Six strings good, four strings better
Chris Campling

In the classic rock line-up, the bassman is often disregarded (the drummer at least gets derision). Open your ears

THE bass guitar is unusual in that while it takes great skill to play it well, any talentless loser who’s best friends with the singer can get into a band and plod his way through a song provided the others don’t go too quickly. (Then again, Sid Vicious was deeply impressed by his fellow Pistols’ ability to get to the end without missing their place and giving up.) Some bands, such as Keane, think they can go through life without a bass in the line-up; others, such as the much lamented Morphine, regarded it as a more essential instrument — even if Morphine’s had only two strings — than a guitar.

Played well, it is sublime. One of the best bits of last year’s DVD rerelease of Jeff Stein’s documentary The Kids are Alright came buried deep within the bonus material, where John Entwistle was to be found picking his way through two of The Who’s greatest songs, We Won’t Get Fooled Again and Baba O’Riley.

Apart from a bit of leakage picked up by the mixing desk you hear nothing of the rest of the band, so the music as a whole plays in your head as he adds incongruous — but utterly in keeping — baroque flourishes to the songs, all the while looking about as detached as a country mansion.

Of course, he had played the songs hundreds of times and had established to his own satisfaction that those were the only notes that would do, but he might have looked a bit more pleased about it. Then again, they didn’t call him the Ox for nothing.

The Who were a famously upside-down band. The engine room of drummer and bass player contained the virtuoso musicians, while the traditionally Fancy Dan guitarist was left to cut great gashes of sound through the air. But even while Entwistle was the one with all the training — back in the Sixties, mods would tell each other, “He plays the French horn, you know” — he was still only the bassist. And he knew his place — stage right, immobile in the shadows, possibly thinking of his tea or, in later years, a post-gig smorgasbord of coke and strippers.

But deep within that mighty chest lurked a desire to be the leader. So he made solo albums and started his own band. The fruits of those labours are about to be commemorated on a double CD called So Who’s the Bass Player? Is it any good? Well, no. Entwistle couldn’t sing, his most famous song is about a spider and he sounded strange away from The Who, so he was on a bit of a loser all round. But give him his due: at least he tried. In the same way as he was the first bass player to make people stop and really listen to what he was doing within the band, he was among the first to step away from it into his own patch of limelight.

Not that there weren’t famous bass players before him. The name of at least one springs unbidden to mind: Jet (born Terence) Harris, who was the first British musician to own an electric bass. With his fellow Shadow, the drummer Tony Meehan, he had a No 1 hit with Diamonds in 1963 — the first drum and bass chart-topper.

Even so, the bass was a minor instrument. Everyone knows Scotty Moore was Elvis’s first guitarist, but who could name the bass player (Bill Black)? The sound of Tamla Motown, too, pivoted on the rhythm section, but you’d have had a hard time picking them out onstage.
As with so many good things about pop, it took the Beatles to drag the bass player out of the shadows, if not the Shads. When he took over on bass after the departure of the romantically doomed Stuart Sutcliffe, McCartney made it an instrument real musicians played because McCartney was by far the best musician in the best band ever. When asked if Ringo was the best drummer in the world, McCartney said he wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles. He could have said something along the same lines about George Harrison’s guitar playing. Harrison might have been a top bloke, but he had to have Eric Clapton in to do the solo on one of his most famous songs or it would have come out as While my Guitar Sort of Snuffles. McCartney could have taken Harrison in an axe contest any day, quite possibly playing right-handed.

So there was no chance he was going to remain “just” the bass player. Even on the simplest pop tunes there was something that required more than the ability to count. All My Loving is two songs — one sung, and one played on a dancing Hofner violin bass by a genius.

And, après McCartney, le déluge. Jazz musicians such as Jack Bruce became part of groups called Cream because everyone in the band (even if there were only three) was deemed, if only by himself, to be at the top of his particular instrumental tree. Noel Redding, a “proper” guitarist in his own right, was willing to lose a couple of strings in support of Jimi Hendrix. Reggae took pop music in a whole new direction, the low, stoned pulse of the bass underpinning the skittering scratchiness of the rhythm guitar.

By the Seventies, prog rock had, in its whimsical way, created the monster bassist. Not only could musicians such as Mike Rutherford of Genesis and Chris Squire of Yes keep up with the guitarist note for note, they could match the drummer beat for beat.

Pointlessly complicated time signatures? Bring ’em on. There was nothing too flash for these boys. Squire, in fact, found time to prance around the stage looking like a big girlie at the same time as wrenching torrents of notes from his mighty Rickenbacker.

Did they play solos? When these guys took solos, the rest of the band left the stage, had a drink, went out for dinner, got married, raised children, saw them off to university.