Passion of the Fender

It was early in the second period of the women’s basketball game on ESPN. Number five Tennessee was playing number four LSU in Knoxville, where LSU had a 0-16 record going into the game. A loss by Tennessee, which did happen, would effectively knock them out of a chance for the SEC championship. Tennessee was on a scoring run, cutting into LSU’s lead and finally making the game interesting. From down the hall floated the haunting refrains from the Beck CD, “Guero,” accompanied by a small voice singing along with music. My daughter may only be six years old, but she’s really into music. I’m glad I’ve got a little Beck fan in my household, and I’ve been able to introduce her to other bands and music with a reasonable degree of success, such as the Foo Fighters, Rush, the Ramones, The Strokes, Death Cab for Cutie, the Andrews Sisters (!). I think she’s ready for Led Zeppelin and The Who, definitely ready for The Byrds, and at least seven years away from listening to Tool. But I also have this fear that we’re living on borrowed time, that sometime within the next few years she’ll be seduced by the dark side of music, the side of the music industry that continually fills the market with crap because crap sells. You know what I’m talking about, the Britney Spears and Ashlee Simpsons of the world, lacking in substance and all about style.

As I listened to her sing along in her bedroom it occurred to me that I was about the same age as she when music really began to make an impact in my life. Music always seemed to be playing in our house, be it on the radio or on the record player. Indeed there are plenty of pictures of me holding a toy guitar or playing a set of bongo drums. I can clearly recall hearing Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin, or Jim Croce on the radio. Croce, I can say, was the first musical artist that I was a fan of, and I never turned the radio off during the summer of 1973 whenever “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” was being played. About ten days before my birthday that year as I was eating breakfast before heading off to school, my mother told me that Croce has been killed in a plane crash. I still recall that day as though it happened yesterday. But hearing all these wonderful songs on the radio made me think, “That’s what I want to do, I want to play music.”

Most people like music, they’re content listening to their favorite artists and going to concerts. Then there are people like me, for whom music goes beyond like or love and into the area of passion, the ones who desire to pick up a musical instrument and learn to play it in a quest to create music of their own. We’re the ones who drop large amounts of money on musical equipment, guitars, amplifiers, and effects pedals. We’re easily detectable in music stores, going in for a simple set of guitar strings and wind up staring at the line up of guitars hanging on the wall. We have dark bags under our eyes because we lay awake in bed trying to figure out how to finance that 1962 Gibson we just found or concocting some elaborate scheme to covertly purchase a new guitar, sneak it into the house, and convincing our spouses that it’s not new, we had that guitar the whole time.

Growing up listening to guitar-driven music in the 1970s, I thought I wanted to play a six-string electric. After all, they got all the cool guitar solos. It wasn’t until I heard musicians such as Chris Squire from Yes, Geddy Lee from Rush, and to an extent Sting while with The Police that I realized a bass guitar could be more than just something caught in the background with the rhythm section. Despite my passion for music and my multiple requests for at least an acoustic guitar as a birthday present, I was a late bloomer when it came to actually picking up a guitar; I was an ancient twenty-three years old when I finally bought my first bass guitar. It wasn’t much to speak of—it was cheap (which I could afford), the fretboard was very wide, the action was set too high, and the strings required quite a bit of effort to get them to resonate—but it was mine and it was a bass I could learn on. It wasn’t until just over a year later when I purchased my first real bass, a Fender Jazz Bass, that I realized what a clunky guitar that first one really was. In comparison, the jazz bass was an absolute gem, a nice, narrow rosewood fretboard and an excellent action that didn’t require that I hit the strings nearly as hard.

It was roughly six years from the time I bought my first bass guitar to the time I thought I was ready to join a band. I met my friend Jon at the beginning of 1994, having been told in advance of our meeting that he played guitar. It’s funny in hindsight that we hit it off well but were both wary when bringing up the prospect of playing together. About six months after that meeting, Jon and I traveled to Birmingham, Alabama to go see the Rolling Stones. It was there that I first met Jon’s friend Bear; it would be many, many months before I even knew what his first name was! The following weekend the three of us gathered at a local watering hole for pitchers of beer and to discuss our ideas for a band. Before too long we were practicing at least three or four times per week, working up a few sets worth of original material. Our practice space was very small, about the size of a walk-in closet, and was barely large enough for all of our equipment. About a month after moving in another band who had a larger, neighboring space moved out and we promptly took over their former home. We decorated our digs with a patina of 1000 Christmas lights, posters, a couch, and the unusual composite images I created for fun—including one of Wayne Gretsky firing Sinead O’Connor’s head into a hockey goal.

Practice sessions were numerous over the next few months, as we fine-tuned the songs we had and wrote new ones. Most of our tunes were loud and raucous, with a few slower ones mixed in for good measure, and most of them were under three minutes long (one three-verse tune clocked in at a blazing fifty-seven seconds). We finally got to play our well-rehearsed songs in early 1995, opening a show at one of the larger venues in town for the band Dash Rip Rock. It was a good show, but we’d played better in rehearsal and it was a start. More shows were in our future over the next few months, including opening for some friends of ours who were also basement practice space dwellers like ourselves. Unbeknownst to us our last show would come toward the end of 1995 at a club now converted into a dining/brewery establishment. The evening started with pitchers of beer at our favorite bar, which just so happened to be conveniently located upstairs from our practice space. By the time showtime arrived, we were perhaps not in the best condition to play. Still, we played very well given the amount of beer we had drunk. For all the time we spent rehearsing our songs, it was well that the band went down like a drunken, fiery comet; we wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Most of the members of the band we opened for liked us, especially the bassist. The singer, however, reacted very coolly to our set; perhaps that's the typical reaction expected when you’ve just seen your band get its ass kicked by the openers.

Our band kind of dissolved/morphed into something else with the remnants of our friends’ band for who we had opened for just a few months earlier. The new band/project (depending on who you asked) just wasn’t that fun for me, and I eventually showed up one Saturday and moved all my gear out. For the longest time I did not pick up my bass, and it wasn’t until 1998 that I played in public again, a brief set for a fundraiser. Another drought in playing followed, and it wasn’t until 2003 that I played in something resembling a band setting again. But the time off from playing made me a better bass guitarist as I spent a lot of time just listening to songs, how they were constructed, and how the bass line wove the melody.

My friend Jon called me up this past weekend. Answering the phone, from the other end I heard, “We’re putting the band back together,” a line from the movie “The Blues Brothers,” which I understood immediately. It seems it’s time to dust off our guitars and re-embrace our love/hate relationship with music. And why not? As we like to say, “Hell, it’s cheaper than therapy.”