The bass player's function, along with the drums, is to be the engine that drives the car... everything else is merely colours.
A song has to be hummable and memorable at it simplest form, and that's what bass does for me. I feel like the glue to everything.
In 1972, I got my first electric bass and started playing the kind of instrument I play now. I found that the majority of musicians couldn't bear that. They are not used to listening to the bass because they think the bass is in the background to support them.
The bass should be the note of the bass drum, and then you've got the engine of the band that everything else builds on. Everything else, the guitar, the keyboards, is a colour.
Dee Dee very much filled in the bottom of our sound as opposed to supplying the rhythm.
Because Larry, by then, was a drummer, who would sort of get bored and tired, and rather stand up and blow kisses to people. So we needed the bass to sort of drive along.
Plus, I grew up with Steve Cropper. There were so many good guitar players another one wasn't needed. What was needed was a bass.
The bass, no matter what kind of music you're playing, it just enhances the sound and makes everything sound more beautiful and full. When the bass stops, the bottom kind of drops out of everything.
I'm a little more of a lead instrument in the Meatbats.
So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument.
As a bassist he could never really be a sideman. He was always the anchor. He drove the beat. even if it was behind Miles Davis'a horn.
The main thing that those two albums have in common aside from my music, which of course, a sense of it, you can recognize, it is that the bass on Infinite Search was playing much, much less like a bass.
