Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is Bassis Extraordinary Tony Levin. Tony, you
Speaker 1: have a new album. Tell us about it?
Speaker 2: Well, I will, and first of all, thanks for having
Speaker 2: me on. Great to speak to you and great to
Speaker 2: have a chance to talk about my album. I'm a
Speaker 2: bass player. It's called Bringing It Down to the Bass,
Speaker 2: kind of fitting title, and I've been working on it
Speaker 2: for years. And the reason I've been working on it
Speaker 2: for years is I have this big problem, which is
Speaker 2: a wonderful problem. I love playing on the road and
Speaker 2: I get a lot of chance to tour with King
Speaker 2: Crimson and Peter Gabriel and stick Man and Leven Brothers.
Speaker 2: So because of that, I keep getting going on the
Speaker 2: album and that's stopping. But this year I resolved to
Speaker 2: take a few months and finish it up, get some
Speaker 2: great drummers on. It's some of my great musician friends,
Speaker 2: and I got to finish. It'll be out September thirteenth.
Speaker 1: Tell me more about the album itself.
Speaker 2: Largely instrumental. Sometimes I'm moved to do a vocal, but
Speaker 2: usually it's in a comedic way. I either either speak
Speaker 2: a poem or there's one track I decided to, Hey,
Speaker 2: what if I did a vocal song with a chorus
Speaker 2: of me singing only using the names of drummers I
Speaker 2: played in played with Excuse me. I spent the whole
Speaker 2: of the Lockdown year doing that because I didn't have
Speaker 2: a whole lot else to do. So there's that piece
Speaker 2: called on the Drums, which just has drummers names for
Speaker 2: the lyrics. And on most of the pieces I try,
Speaker 2: I started them out with trying to find a bass
Speaker 2: groove or a bass sound, or a technique like a
Speaker 2: fingernail playing or funk fingers. This way, I played the
Speaker 2: bass and I began the composition with that. Then I
Speaker 2: spent some time finishing it the composition, and then then
Speaker 2: things got good because I turned it over to some
Speaker 2: of the great players I know to join me on
Speaker 2: the album.
Speaker 1: Okay, when you say you turned it over to players,
Speaker 1: you sent him the tracks and said do what you
Speaker 1: want to. Yeah.
Speaker 2: My way of doing this is to pick the right
Speaker 2: player and not have to tell him what to play,
Speaker 2: because he's the guy I wanted on and especially with drummers.
Speaker 2: The drummers I know, the excellent drummers, they don't love
Speaker 2: being told what to play, and there's no need if
Speaker 2: you want that drummer. So each each piece, as I
Speaker 2: got really the sense of it, and I finished my
Speaker 2: bass part, I thought, well, of the many great drummers
Speaker 2: I know, who would be the guy I would want
Speaker 2: on this? Maybe it was Steve Gadd, my old friend,
Speaker 2: or Mono Kach whom I tour with with Peter Gabriel
Speaker 2: and any others. Vinnie Keludo and I chose that player,
Speaker 2: and luckily they all said yes, and I sent them
Speaker 2: the files.
Speaker 1: Okay, you talk about doing this during lockdown? Were the
Speaker 1: songs written during lockdown? Or it was type of thing
Speaker 1: where you were accumulating stuff for years and you finally
Speaker 1: laid it down.
Speaker 2: A good question, and the answer is all of the above.
Speaker 2: What the one I took the whole of the lockdown
Speaker 2: here was that were really quirky? One where I used
Speaker 2: the names of I just had pieces of paper all
Speaker 2: over the place with names of drummers that might not
Speaker 2: rhyme with each other, but that might go together in
Speaker 2: a certain section. Some of these pieces I wrote quite
Speaker 2: a while ago. There's one poem about just chatman stick
Speaker 2: as an instrument I play and there's one with me
Speaker 2: reciting this poem about John Lennon and playing the Chapman Stick.
Speaker 2: And there are others that I composed as recently as
Speaker 2: two months ago.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you're in the studio. What do you actually
Speaker 1: lay down on it's not tape anymore, on the hard
Speaker 1: drive or the solid state drive before you send it
Speaker 1: to someone? How much is there?
Speaker 2: These are really great questions. I appreciate it, and they're
Speaker 2: making me think about how we do it. It turns out
Speaker 2: it varies a whole lot. There's one one or two
Speaker 2: pieces that I just did the bass to a click track,
Speaker 2: so there's a tempo, and then I sent it to
Speaker 2: the drummer, and then I sent that after he did it,
Speaker 2: I sent that to the other players. However, there's somewhere
Speaker 2: I did every part except for the drums, because the
Speaker 2: Chapman Stick can also play guitar parts, and then I
Speaker 2: began thinking about what guitar player to have really play
Speaker 2: what I envisioned and likewise, so a wide variety of
Speaker 2: ways to do it, and I probably over the few
Speaker 2: years I've been working on this, I probably did all
Speaker 2: of those varieties.
Speaker 1: Okay, do you ever call somebody you don't know, or
Speaker 1: everybody who's on the record you have a pre existing
Speaker 1: relationship with.
Speaker 2: In this case, I know all of the folks. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I know they're playing very well. I know I
Speaker 2: know them. Maybe we've been on the road together, but
Speaker 2: I know they're playing, and that's why I chose them
Speaker 2: for the particular song.
Speaker 1: Now, you mentioned three different drummers, my new Gad Calayuta.
Speaker 1: What's the difference as a bass player between those drummers?
Speaker 2: All right, how many hours do we have have because
Speaker 2: we'll see, Yeah, we bass players and drummers really spend
Speaker 2: our time together, are learning or then enjoying each other's
Speaker 2: feel and the slight differences that nobody else knows between us. So,
Speaker 2: by the way, there are much many more drummers than
Speaker 2: that Mike Portnoy played on the album. Pat Mascellato, Jeremy Stacey,
Speaker 2: and Jerrey Maratta. Uh yeah, some guys, some of the
Speaker 2: I'll only speak about the really excellent players. Each of
Speaker 2: them has their own feel really different than other players. Ideally,
Speaker 2: each of them is going to play within the time
Speaker 2: parameters we have, in other words, that are going to
Speaker 2: speed up or slow down. Most of the guys that
Speaker 2: I work with do not do that. So within those
Speaker 2: parameters or rules, there's a lot of space for playing
Speaker 2: on top of the beat or behind the beat, and
Speaker 2: how you phrase things and how how Some drummers will
Speaker 2: will make the whole kit sound like one instrument, but
Speaker 2: others h Manu, Vinni Caliro will, Steve gadd also will
Speaker 2: articulate some of the the element of the drum kit
Speaker 2: more than others, so it feels not like a drum kit.
Speaker 2: It feels like better really kind of like a drum
Speaker 2: kit that it is alive. And let me just tell
Speaker 2: a short story. I toured with Peter Gabriel when he
Speaker 2: did a joint tour with Sting in twenty sixteen, and
Speaker 2: the two bands alternated songs, but I stayed on stage
Speaker 2: because I love being on stage during Stings stuff. And
Speaker 2: I was standing or sitting right in front of Vinnie
Speaker 2: Caludo playing drums, So there I was sitting on his
Speaker 2: riser through all of the Stink pieces. It was a
Speaker 2: great thrill for me and actually a learning learning experience
Speaker 2: because that's when I realized how much subtle phrasing he's
Speaker 2: doing within the part that he's playing.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna ask a really dumb question about to ask
Speaker 1: it anyway. What's the difference between Jerry Murrada and Rick Murata.
Speaker 2: Well, Rick's a little older. I began playing with Rick
Speaker 2: way back when I was a studio musician, and he
Speaker 2: he is a great drummer. But he kind of moved
Speaker 2: on even beyond studio playing and moved to Los Angeles
Speaker 2: and became a writer for TV stuff and very successful
Speaker 2: at that and a very good producer. His younger brother Jerry,
Speaker 2: maybe not so young anymore, but still to me, the
Speaker 2: baby in the family, the younger Jerry. I toured with
Speaker 2: a great deal I think the first Peter Gabriel tour. No,
Speaker 2: the second one needed a drummer. The first drummer drummer
Speaker 2: the first tour didn't want to do it anymore, and
Speaker 2: Peter asked me who we should use, and I said, well,
Speaker 2: my good friend Rick Murrauda would be great for that.
Speaker 2: And Rick was busy and suggested his younger brother, Jerry Murta. Hence,
Speaker 2: I asked Peter to use Jerry in the band and
Speaker 2: it worked out really well for a number of tours
Speaker 2: in a number of years. And by the way, they
Speaker 2: play with a field that's similar but quite different. I
Speaker 2: don't think I'll waste everybody's time by analyzing everything about it.
Speaker 2: But I can tell hearing a record of them, which
Speaker 2: one it is.
Speaker 1: Okay. You know, in this world, people are always saying,
Speaker 1: you know, this person's the best, that person's the best,
Speaker 1: certainly in terms of you know, guitarists, but also bassis
Speaker 1: and drummers. Is that something you can even apply to
Speaker 1: these people? Or at this level, everybody's great and their
Speaker 1: sound is a little bit different.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's about the sound or about the level.
Speaker 2: It's about who's making that decision. So I know about
Speaker 2: my One thing I know about is bass playing. Another
Speaker 2: thing I know about is myself. And I don't tend
Speaker 2: towards having favorites of anything or thinking that anything is
Speaker 2: the best, except a football team or something that's provably
Speaker 2: the best. So with the arts, with painters, with writers,
Speaker 2: with musicians, with drummers, I'm capable of really thoroughly enjoying
Speaker 2: bass players. I hear, for instance, many of the bass players,
Speaker 2: and I'm not moved to pick a favorite or even
Speaker 2: begin to think who's the best. I don't think there's
Speaker 2: any such thing among us musicians.
Speaker 1: Now you know, everything's totally findable online. So you're in
Speaker 1: your late seventies, most people they want to get off
Speaker 1: the road. What do you like so much about being
Speaker 1: on the road.
Speaker 2: That's very simple. It's the two hours or three hours
Speaker 2: a night that I get to play the music that
Speaker 2: I love to play. That's why as a child I
Speaker 2: decided to be a bass player, hoping i'd get to
Speaker 2: play good music with good players. How lucky I am
Speaker 2: that I do that. Yes, the other twenty two hours
Speaker 2: a day have got more difficult, and as you get older,
Speaker 2: they're still a little more difficult, and especially not because
Speaker 2: of age, but the last few years travel We all
Speaker 2: know travel has become hard or more fraught. But those
Speaker 2: do those two hours make up for it more than that.
Speaker 2: Those two hours are priceless, and we are I know
Speaker 2: at this age, how lucky I am. How lucky anyone
Speaker 2: is who can not only play the music they really
Speaker 2: like and get an audience that enjoys that music to
Speaker 2: come and it and share the music with them, but
Speaker 2: actually do it professionally and actually make a living from it.
Speaker 2: Very special, very lucky.
Speaker 1: Some superstar bands what they do when they go on tour,
Speaker 1: they'll base in Atlanta Chicago, and they'll take it jet
Speaker 1: to every date, so they stay in the same bed. Now,
Speaker 1: when you tour with Peter Gabriel, how do you do it?
Speaker 2: The last few tours there was Yes, there was a
Speaker 2: private jet, which involves a whole lot of interesting factors,
Speaker 2: like doing what we call a runner off stage. I
Speaker 2: would prefer to meet my many friends who came to
Speaker 2: the show in a hospitality room, hang out and use
Speaker 2: that wonderful energy you have when you come off stage
Speaker 2: because something very special has happened. I would prefer to
Speaker 2: stay in town. That's not what the band does. We
Speaker 2: don't run off stage, but we walk off stage. But
Speaker 2: then we put a robe over ourselves and jump into
Speaker 2: a van and go to the nearest airport fly either
Speaker 2: to a hub, as you said some bands do that,
Speaker 2: or to the next city, so we wake up in
Speaker 2: the next city that we're going to play in, which
Speaker 2: has big advantages to it. Of course, if it was
Speaker 2: up to me, I would stay in the town, but
Speaker 2: I believe me, I do plenty of other kinds of
Speaker 2: tours with Stickmen Jief. Sometimes we go looking for the
Speaker 2: hotel after the show. We haven't even had time to
Speaker 2: check in, and sometimes we leave very early in the
Speaker 2: morning for a long drive to the next town. So
Speaker 2: we have private jet is way better than that. I
Speaker 2: would add that being a professional musician, some of the
Speaker 2: job and some of the life is being adaptable to
Speaker 2: those two situations where you're at the top of the
Speaker 2: world and everybody's excited about you, and you're at the
Speaker 2: bottom of the world. I have lots of experience in
Speaker 2: my career, including recently, when suddenly the bottom falls out
Speaker 2: and you're sitting in the corner of an airport waiting
Speaker 2: for someone to pick you up. We didn't show up,
Speaker 2: and suddenly you realize you don't know where your hotel
Speaker 2: room is, or what you're going to do for dinner,
Speaker 2: or you don't have any money of that currency. Those
Speaker 2: things happen all the time to us.
Speaker 1: Okay, you play on stage for a couple of hours,
Speaker 1: that's a very intense experience. You really want to talk
Speaker 1: to people after the show?
Speaker 2: Actually, good question in some situations, Yes, in the hospitality
Speaker 2: room without too many people. Yes. What are we do
Speaker 2: in smaller bands now, which is most of the bands
Speaker 2: I play in what we call merch the selling of
Speaker 2: CDs and tour. T shirts is a necessary part of
Speaker 2: the tour because all the expenses went up. The gas
Speaker 2: went up, hotels went way up, but the price were
Speaker 2: paid by the club didn't go up. Okay, that's no problem.
Speaker 2: Well that's a bit of a problem. But if we
Speaker 2: sell enough CDs and merch, if we come out the
Speaker 2: same at the end of the day, and so to
Speaker 2: enhance that, we'll have a table out in the entrance
Speaker 2: way and we'll go out there at some point. Myself,
Speaker 2: I like to grab a sip of wine first to
Speaker 2: kind of finish off the music part of the But
Speaker 2: then yeah, we go out to sign and sometimes if
Speaker 2: we have to take pictures with people wearing a mask
Speaker 2: is an issue for me. I try to be safe
Speaker 2: and not pass on germs one night to another, and
Speaker 2: certainly don't shake hands and pass on germs in that way.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot to it. It's a little bit fraud,
Speaker 2: but there's something we do, okay, So that do I
Speaker 2: love that. No, I do it, and I'm okay with it.
Speaker 2: But what I would rather do is have finished the
Speaker 2: couple classes of wine and then go into a backstage
Speaker 2: room that has maybe ten friends or family or even
Speaker 2: fifteen or twenty, but not fifty.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's say you're running an arena tour, not that
Speaker 1: it really matters in this case. You play for two hours,
Speaker 1: you're done at eleven o'clock. How long until you can
Speaker 1: fall asleep?
Speaker 2: These are good questions me a long time, but I've
Speaker 2: I've used I've learned to use that time in ways
Speaker 2: that work for me. I keep a road diary online
Speaker 2: with lots of photos I take during the day, so
Speaker 2: when I finally get whenever it is I get to
Speaker 2: that hotel room, I will work for an hour or
Speaker 2: two on Photoshop a lot, downloading the pictures, seeing what
Speaker 2: I've got, maybe writing a little redal diary about it,
Speaker 2: and hopefully when I wake up in the morning, I'm
Speaker 2: I have it in shape to upload the right pictures.
Speaker 2: So I, frankly I enjoyed that. I really love that
Speaker 2: the web. One thing about the web is that I
Speaker 2: found out in the nineties I was early to have
Speaker 2: a web page, and it seemed that it took down
Speaker 2: some of the barrier between our artists and the audience,
Speaker 2: and it allowed fans who happen to see it to
Speaker 2: see an experience, not only what's backstage, but actually how
Speaker 2: they look to us on stage and allowed them to
Speaker 2: get it, how important they are to us who perform.
Speaker 2: So it's worth the because I enjoy it. It's worth
Speaker 2: an hour or two after the show. When I get
Speaker 2: back to the hotel room and let me just say this,
Speaker 2: we're going to talk I hope a little about the
Speaker 2: Beat tour that's coming up starting. Oh believe we were
Speaker 2: getting there a bus tour. The band is traveling by bus,
Speaker 2: and that's that's a whole different thing. So when you
Speaker 2: say hit the bed, you're hitting the bus. And some
Speaker 2: guys just can't sleep on the bus. I sort of can.
Speaker 2: But those two hours, at least two hours, I'll be
Speaker 2: doing photoshop, either in the lounge room depends on how
Speaker 2: loud the music is there, how much it distracts me,
Speaker 2: or I'll crawl into my bunk and with my laptop.
Speaker 1: So, you know, I know people who've been you know,
Speaker 1: household names have been on tour for a year straight
Speaker 1: and it took them a year to recover. Now you know,
Speaker 1: everything's changing. People say, you know, all the scientific studies
Speaker 1: say you really do need eight hours of sleep. There's
Speaker 1: a badge of honor sleeping little. But the nature of
Speaker 1: the game. Are you always trying to catch up on
Speaker 1: sleep or if you've done this long enough to figure
Speaker 1: out how to get enough shut eye?
Speaker 2: Good question for me. It's not about sleep. Maybe for
Speaker 2: some people it is, I think for singers. I've heard
Speaker 2: Paul Simon Wentz told me not too long ago, too
Speaker 2: many years ago, that he needs twelve hours of sleep
Speaker 2: for his voice to be okay on tour. Me I
Speaker 2: don't have that problem, and I'm one of those people
Speaker 2: who can't sleep more than six hours. Maybe I read
Speaker 2: the article you were talking about, but what I never
Speaker 2: read is, Okay, I don't sleep eight hours. How do
Speaker 2: I get to sleep eight hours? Drinking a sip of
Speaker 2: milk before bed won't do it. So I just never
Speaker 2: sleep more than six And if some night on the
Speaker 2: road I only get four hours, that's not really a problem.
Speaker 2: I don't do all nighters the way I used to
Speaker 2: be able to do. That's for sure.
Speaker 1: Well they do say in the articles is some people
Speaker 1: just don't need that much sleep. It's not the majority,
Speaker 1: but that's one of you.
Speaker 2: What if you need it but you can't do it,
Speaker 2: the body wakes up.
Speaker 1: That's a whole another thing. Okay, you talk about alcohol.
Speaker 1: You've been doing this for decades. What has your history
Speaker 1: been with drugs and alcohol?
Speaker 2: Wow, getting right to the deep stuff. I never was
Speaker 2: a drug guy. I can I drink moderately. I think
Speaker 2: I think there was a tour or two where I
Speaker 2: was not happy for various reasons, and I drank more
Speaker 2: than moderately. Didn't get drunk every night or anything like that.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's no fun in my answers about drugs
Speaker 2: and alcohol. And in fact, I haven't been in many
Speaker 2: bands where the other guys were doing drugs and alcohol.
Speaker 2: I don't want to go through every individual on every tour.
Speaker 2: I've got really a lot of tours, but generally the ones,
Speaker 2: you know what, fans of King Crimson probably realized that
Speaker 2: the band is playing such difficult music that we're we
Speaker 2: just wouldn't be capable of playing that show if we
Speaker 2: were less than one hundred percent. In fact, that's a
Speaker 2: band that needs days off between shows and needs to
Speaker 2: have there to be rested, because any mental laps will
Speaker 2: mess up the whole rest of the band's The pieces
Speaker 2: are not in four to four, so if somebody gets
Speaker 2: off an eighth note, there's no way for any anyone
Speaker 2: else does say one through three, four years where you are?
Speaker 2: And the secret to me seems to be for us
Speaker 2: all to stay rested.
Speaker 1: Now today many people are follically challenged shave their heads. Well,
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, you had a shaved head and a mustache,
Speaker 1: you know, decades and decades ago. My question is to
Speaker 1: what degree when you're out and about are you recognized?
Speaker 2: Good question? Again, it varies if I'm playing in the town,
Speaker 2: if I'm playing with Peter Gabriel or King Crimson in
Speaker 2: the town, I'm likely to get recognized a bit walking
Speaker 2: around in the streets. If I'm not playing there, I
Speaker 2: never get once in a while, but very rare for
Speaker 2: me to be recognized. There was once I was a
Speaker 2: customs going into Italy and not yeah customs, and the
Speaker 2: guy wanted to go through all my stuff, even I had, Hey,
Speaker 2: what do you call it? A bar of shaving? Not cream,
Speaker 2: but it's all soap bar and he wanted to cut
Speaker 2: it in half. I thought, I don't mind that that
Speaker 2: that's pretty extreme. And then I heard him, he speaking Italian,
Speaker 2: and I heard him say there's something to his associate,
Speaker 2: and he mentioned pink Floyd, and I realized that he
Speaker 2: was just enjoying being spending some time with one of
Speaker 2: the guys who would have recorded with Pink Floyd. He
Speaker 2: didn't hear me, He didn't know that. I heard him
Speaker 2: say that I.
Speaker 1: Know someone who was a photographer for Led Zeppelin, and
Speaker 1: don't forget this before digital And he said, I've been
Speaker 1: around the world and seen nothing. So you've been around
Speaker 1: the world. You know, you're writing, taking pictures. You the
Speaker 1: type of person. Oh, I'm in Prague. There's somewhere I
Speaker 1: want to go in Prague. Many people you know, this
Speaker 1: is a classic line in rock and roll. You know,
Speaker 1: Hello Cleveland, and there in Chicago, they got no idea
Speaker 1: where they are. What kind of guy are you?
Speaker 2: It's all true. I try, when I used to try
Speaker 2: harder than I try now. It depends on the schedule,
Speaker 2: but generally there is no time. Sometimes there's no time
Speaker 2: to see even a street downtown. You just go right
Speaker 2: to the venue. You do your sound check, you do
Speaker 2: your setup for the show, you have dinner backstage, you
Speaker 2: play your show, and then you either go somewhere else.
Speaker 2: So you go to hotel at midnight and you wake
Speaker 2: up at eight o'clock and leave eight am and leave
Speaker 2: for somewhere else. Yeah, that happens a lot. Of course.
Speaker 2: I have, as you said, been I had it a
Speaker 2: long time, and I've made the rounds a lot, and
Speaker 2: sooner or later I'll have a day off in most
Speaker 2: places and try to enjoy it. Do I have the
Speaker 2: initiative and energy to go to museums and things like that? No,
Speaker 2: I'm not that guy. I wish I was, but I'm not.
Speaker 1: So if you have a day off, what do you do?
Speaker 2: A lot of times I have friends. I'll meet him
Speaker 2: for a meal or hang out. Sometimes I'll go to
Speaker 2: a club and hear another band that's a treat and
Speaker 2: inn a rarity. And sometimes it really depends where it is.
Speaker 2: If it's Italy, I'm going to go out for as
Speaker 2: many meals as i can, and I'm going to meet
Speaker 2: friends because I've been there a lot and have a
Speaker 2: lot of friends. And if it's someplace I haven't been,
Speaker 2: I'll hopefully the hotel is downtown and I'll just take
Speaker 2: a walk and really spend hours walking around and taking photos.
Speaker 1: I have found in my travels, which are not as
Speaker 1: extensive as yours, that the places where people don't speak English.
Speaker 1: I find those exotic places are the most interesting, you know,
Speaker 1: whether it be Bogata, Brazil, India. What are the couple
Speaker 1: of fascinating places you've been to?
Speaker 2: Oh hard to think back on, you know. I've been
Speaker 2: a lot of places I have been, not to Bogata
Speaker 2: and not to India, actually almost to India. My friend
Speaker 2: Shankar asked me to do a tour with him once
Speaker 2: quite a while ago. Uh, and I just didn't feel
Speaker 2: comfortable about the fact that I didn't have a visa.
Speaker 2: He said, oh, we'll get you that when you get here.
Speaker 2: And I didn't have an itinerary. He said, oh, we'll
Speaker 2: do that when you get here, and I said, you
Speaker 2: know what, that's just too deep, a diving into a
Speaker 2: deep pool that I don't want to take a chance on.
Speaker 2: So it didn't. I can't remember one place that stands out,
Speaker 2: but I've had a lot of great times and a
Speaker 2: lot of great places, especially maybe especially as a photographer.
Speaker 2: So for instance, in La Paz, when I'm on the
Speaker 2: tram that people get around on because it's so hilly
Speaker 2: and it's the altitude is extremely high, then I could
Speaker 2: get amazing photos to me of the tram coming the
Speaker 2: other way with a lady in it with that kind
Speaker 2: of very distinctive hat that they wear in Bolivia that
Speaker 2: looks like old fashioned, but that's the way they go
Speaker 2: around on the streets. So stuff like that I get
Speaker 2: a big kick out of. And by the way, when
Speaker 2: I have a chance to share those photos on the
Speaker 2: road diary or once every decade putting out a photo book,
Speaker 2: I really enjoy the chance to share with others, with fans,
Speaker 2: especially what it's like behind the scenes on tour.
Speaker 1: So how'd you get into photography?
Speaker 2: I don't remember. It was so long the earth was cooling.
Speaker 2: There was this stuff called film, and there was no digital.
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, I don't know, But I do know from
Speaker 2: the time. I know from thinking back on my photos
Speaker 2: that from the time I joined King Crimson, which is
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty one, I was pretty intent on documenting, really
Speaker 2: for myself, documenting what was going on. I know that
Speaker 2: because the first show we played was in Bath in
Speaker 2: a club called Moles in nineteen eighty one, and I
Speaker 2: set up a tripod with a foot pedal, an analog
Speaker 2: foot pedal to choose air into a trigger that would
Speaker 2: trigger the pick, and I wanted very much to get
Speaker 2: a picture of the first note that I played with
Speaker 2: King Crimson in that context, and I did so. By
Speaker 2: that time, the early eighties, I was pretty intently into it.
Speaker 2: Let me just say another story about the same almost
Speaker 2: the same year. One regret I have about the John
Speaker 2: Lennon Yoko Ono albums that I did very quickly was
Speaker 2: I had my camera with me. Of course, that was
Speaker 2: in late nineteen eighty and on a break in the
Speaker 2: control room, John and Yoko were listening to playback and
Speaker 2: I came in with my camera and I said to John,
Speaker 2: do you mind if I take a photo? And he said, well, yes,
Speaker 2: I'd rather you didn't. I do mind, And that was fine.
Speaker 2: But I'm kicking myself. That was nineteen eighty I'm still
Speaker 2: kicking myself because the professional photographer would have taken the
Speaker 2: picture and then asked, and I'm sure he wouldn't have
Speaker 2: booted me off the session for doing that. He would
Speaker 2: have just said, please don't do that, and I would
Speaker 2: have that one picture that I don't have from that
Speaker 2: very special experience.
Speaker 1: Yes, but anyone who has met famous names and is
Speaker 1: meeting them as opposed to on the meet and greet level. No,
Speaker 1: there are certain rules and you don't violate those rules.
Speaker 1: So I'm sure that's why you asked first.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but boy, I wish I had that picture.
Speaker 1: And many people, if writing is only secondary to public speaking,
Speaker 1: is their greatest fear. You know, you're right your blog,
Speaker 1: which is very readable and articulate. Was this easy for
Speaker 1: you or how did you decide to do that?
Speaker 2: First of all, I did start what's called a web
Speaker 2: blog before there was that word blog early nineties. I
Speaker 2: fell into having a website and I thought I'll just
Speaker 2: write about what it's like backstage. I have any very
Speaker 2: easy time writing a lot. I have carry journals like
Speaker 2: a lot of people do. Sometimes it lends itself to poetry.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it's just a log of what happened that day.
Speaker 2: So very happy to share it with people actually talking
Speaker 2: this kind of of this kind of adventure. I'm not
Speaker 2: so good at it, as you can tell, because I
Speaker 2: stumbled on the words and I don't dislike it. But
Speaker 2: I'm very comfortable as a writer.
Speaker 1: You know, what people don't realize is a lot of
Speaker 1: times household name musicians and you're one of them. They
Speaker 1: know certain fans because they come to certain gigs I
Speaker 1: don't want to, you know, encourage people, but do you
Speaker 1: know your super fans?
Speaker 2: I know a lot of them. I'm not great with
Speaker 2: names of friends and everybody, so I'm not always aware
Speaker 2: of their names, but I know a lot of them,
Speaker 2: and by look, I know just about all of them
Speaker 2: to look at them. And one thing that's changed all
Speaker 2: that for me is Adrian Blu and Pat Maslato and
Speaker 2: I have a yearly music camp where we share almost
Speaker 2: a week in the Catskill Mountains actually near where I live,
Speaker 2: with fans or anybody who wants to sign up for it,
Speaker 2: all of whom are musicians at some level, but very
Speaker 2: few are professional musicians. There are people who do other
Speaker 2: things and are fans of King Crimson. And the first
Speaker 2: year I went to that with the reluctance because I'll
Speaker 2: tell you why. I don't mind being around fans, but
Speaker 2: I don't like being in the position where I'm the
Speaker 2: guy who knows the stuff, where I'm going to be
Speaker 2: giving a bass class about how to play the bass.
Speaker 2: I just don't lend myself to that, and so I
Speaker 2: thought I'll do it, but I'm not sure this is
Speaker 2: going to work out well. What happened is and I
Speaker 2: got to have meals with them and talk to these
Speaker 2: maybe fifty people who and learned their journey, something about
Speaker 2: their journey, what brought them there, and what they love
Speaker 2: about music and what they play. I was captivated by that,
Speaker 2: and we just finished doing our twelfth year of that.
Speaker 2: So a lot of the campers, by the way we
Speaker 2: call them the campers, a lot of these people are
Speaker 2: the same people. I know them very well. Twelve years
Speaker 2: of spending four or five days together every summer and
Speaker 2: by the way, jamming and making music together. So that
Speaker 2: kind of put me more connected not only with them,
Speaker 2: but with understanding the mindset of the people who just
Speaker 2: are mad fans of King Crimson or Peter Gabriel, but
Speaker 2: really have their own story which is just as valid
Speaker 2: as my own.
Speaker 1: I remember when the first King Crimson album came out
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy I could have been sixty nine, had a
Speaker 1: gatefold cover, had a sort of a green to the cover,
Speaker 1: and you know the first song some by Greg Lake
Speaker 1: courd to the Crimson King. What was your experience discovering
Speaker 1: King Crimson.
Speaker 2: Very different than yours? In nineteen eighty I had played
Speaker 2: on Robert I met Robert Fripp on Peter Gabriel's first
Speaker 2: solo album in seventy six, when Peter left Genesis. By
Speaker 2: the way, I did not know of Genesis when I
Speaker 2: met Peter Gabriel and played on his album, and I
Speaker 2: met Robert Fripp. We toured together with Peter, and then
Speaker 2: Robert at some point after that asked me to play
Speaker 2: on his album called Exposure. So I was very familiar
Speaker 2: with his music, but I did not listen to King Crimson.
Speaker 2: Didn't even know the band when Robert said, I'm thinking
Speaker 2: of forming this other band, not King Crimson, but what
Speaker 2: do you say you come to Let's just play together
Speaker 2: and see how it works out. With Bill Rufford and
Speaker 2: Adrian belou Later, maybe decades later, I found out that
Speaker 2: really I was being auditioned and they had other bass
Speaker 2: players come in also. But so I came into that
Speaker 2: not knowing anything about King Crimson, not knowing none of
Speaker 2: us knew that we would later name that combo King
Speaker 2: Crimson because it seemed appropriate to Robert. So I had
Speaker 2: no history at all. In fact, if I remember correctly,
Speaker 2: at that audition slash let's get together and play. They said, well,
Speaker 2: let's play Red, and I said, well, I'm a few
Speaker 2: bars something like I'm a few bars to me because
Speaker 2: I don't know it. And I was at that stage
Speaker 2: of my youth pretty quick at learning stuff, so probably
Speaker 2: they were impressed with how quickly I learned red. But
Speaker 2: that first year or two of touring we did, we
Speaker 2: steadfastly refused to do any Crimson classic material from before
Speaker 2: that incarnation. Later, when we did some, that is when
Speaker 2: I listened to King Crimson and that's when I learned that,
Speaker 2: and that's when I was introduced to the iconic parts
Speaker 2: of Greg Lake and John Wetton and became a fan
Speaker 2: of them much later.
Speaker 1: So tell me about the Bead Tour.
Speaker 2: Okay, Adrian Blue had this idea I can't quite speak
Speaker 2: for him, but quite a few years ago of doing
Speaker 2: the music of the eighties of King Crimson and finding
Speaker 2: not doing it with the King Crimson members but other guys. However,
Speaker 2: he brought me on board. And it took years. You know,
Speaker 2: the COVID came along, and when you have players who
Speaker 2: are in different bands, their bands take precedence the schedule
Speaker 2: of their bands and the tours. So it took quite
Speaker 2: a while until we could finally zero in on September thirteenth,
Speaker 2: September twelfth, I think twenty twenty four as the time
Speaker 2: to start it. Steve I is going to play guitar,
Speaker 2: and he's going to play something like the parts of
Speaker 2: Robert Fripp, probably differently, I hope differently. But he's challenged
Speaker 2: by that and quite quite well known that he's publicized
Speaker 2: that he's practicing a lot to do that. And Danny Carey,
Speaker 2: a wonderful drummer, the drummer and tool, has signed on
Speaker 2: to do it, and myself, So I'm excited to be
Speaker 2: revisiting that music, but also I think a little more
Speaker 2: excited about hearing I haven't heard yet, but we haven't
Speaker 2: hearsed yet where Steve I and Danny Carey will take it,
Speaker 2: where in what ways it'll be different, And I will
Speaker 2: be sure to join them in the adventure of taking
Speaker 2: this great material in other places if that's what happens.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know, when Robert was still on tour, Adrian
Speaker 1: was not in the act, and now you're going out
Speaker 1: playing Robert's music, not that it wasn't collaborative with Adrian
Speaker 1: sons Robert. Has anybody been in contact with Robert got
Speaker 1: his take.
Speaker 2: On this, Yes, not me. I wouldn't even have thought
Speaker 2: of that. I am I'm the bass player. I just yeah,
Speaker 2: I'll show up, I'll play bass. But yes, Adrian contact
Speaker 2: in him. Robert is one hundred percent in favor of
Speaker 2: the tour and he gave it. Robert gave it the name.
Speaker 2: Why don't you call it the Beat tour? Beat is
Speaker 2: the name of one of the albums we did, one
Speaker 2: of the three albums we did in the eighties.
Speaker 1: And what material will it actually will be all that material,
Speaker 1: any new material, any material outside that decade when you
Speaker 1: work together.
Speaker 2: At this point, because we haven't been together in the
Speaker 2: studio and we're close to going together, it'll just be
Speaker 2: any day now. I don't know exactly, but Adrian sent
Speaker 2: me a list of pretty much all of the music
Speaker 2: of all those albums. We can't do all of that
Speaker 2: in one show. We'll choose among those, and my hope
Speaker 2: is that we will also vary it on different nights,
Speaker 2: because I have the feeling a lot of fans will
Speaker 2: be coming to more than one show. Would be nice
Speaker 2: if they're not all exactly the same show.
Speaker 1: Okay, who knew Steve I.
Speaker 2: Adrian? So as many questions will that's taken me outside
Speaker 2: my experience. I had not played with Steve. I still
Speaker 2: have not played with Steve Vibe, but I'm going to
Speaker 2: play with him sixty five shows in the next few months,
Speaker 2: and that's going to be great. I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 2: I've heard him. He's great with Danny Carrey the drummer.
Speaker 2: I have played with him a little bit because he
Speaker 2: sat in with King Crimson for a few shows in
Speaker 2: a multi drummer situation. But it's it's all going to
Speaker 2: be very exciting, and it's all going to be for
Speaker 2: as you can tell from my talking about it. It's
Speaker 2: going to be classic material but a bit new, fresh
Speaker 2: and wild, and we don't know what's going to happen,
Speaker 2: and that's pretty exciting.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you've been talking to Adrian about this or
Speaker 1: agents working on it for years now it's finally happening.
Speaker 1: Sixty five shows A lot of shows.
Speaker 2: I did notice that.
Speaker 1: And then you're talking about the economics or such. It's
Speaker 1: not like playing arenas. You're playing smaller venues and you're
Speaker 1: going on a bus. Are you saying I love this
Speaker 1: music so much, I want to play it, or I
Speaker 1: love hanging with these guys, or I'm not doing anything
Speaker 1: else these three months. You now, how much of a
Speaker 1: hurdle is it? Or do you kind of commit yourself
Speaker 1: and then say, holy fuck? What did I get myself into?
Speaker 2: All of that can happen? A tour like this has
Speaker 2: to be booked way in advance, you know, at least
Speaker 2: a year in advance, so you have to get the
Speaker 2: venues in the right size. And in the case of
Speaker 2: this tour, sales were so good that they revised their
Speaker 2: thoughts about what size venues and sometimes we were playing
Speaker 2: the same area twice. That's all in the hands of management,
Speaker 2: not me. But yes, I had to commit to it
Speaker 2: one hundred percent about a year ago, and I wage,
Speaker 2: as I always do when I'm a call to do
Speaker 2: something musically, it sounded great. Maybe I'm trying to how
Speaker 2: can I summarize digging deep into my personality in my
Speaker 2: sense of what made my mouth water about it was
Speaker 2: these other guys that are really great players that haven't
Speaker 2: played with and so the two together the eighties music.
Speaker 2: By the way, I didn't bother to stay playing with
Speaker 2: Adrian Blue is great. I love it. Been doing it
Speaker 2: a little every year for ever since the eighties. Can't
Speaker 2: get enough of that. That's great, but the whole package
Speaker 2: as a whole made my mouth water, made me want
Speaker 2: to do it musically. Then the typical musician thing, Okay,
Speaker 2: we'll work that out, someone else will work it out.
Speaker 2: I don't know, so yes, it could be. As you mentioned,
Speaker 2: I'm on the bus thinking what did I get myself into,
Speaker 2: because that's a lot of days on the bus. But
Speaker 2: probably it'll be fine. I know they're really good guys,
Speaker 2: and almost undoubtedly the music will will overcompensate for anything
Speaker 2: that's less than perfect. When I played with Chuck Mangoni
Speaker 2: and jazz in the sixties, when I was living in Rochester,
Speaker 2: he had an expression of the kind of the eleventh
Speaker 2: Commandment is thou shalt never really groove. It's kind of
Speaker 2: jazz player's way of thinking about digging and touring because
Speaker 2: there's so many things that can get in a way
Speaker 2: of an ideal jazz performance where you really need to
Speaker 2: be free to improvise the way you want. And that's
Speaker 2: some groove not true in rock and these stories I
Speaker 2: can groove, but yes, there are many things that can
Speaker 2: make it less than ideal, and almost always the music
Speaker 2: compensates for that.
Speaker 1: Okay, there have been records that have actually literally been
Speaker 1: made on the road, made in hotel rooms. Certain people
Speaker 1: go back to the hotel room practice. Certainly Frip himself
Speaker 1: does that. Oh yeah, to what degree do you find
Speaker 1: being on the road and I realize every situation is different.
Speaker 1: Is their camaraderie and contact with the other people on
Speaker 1: the road and at times musical collaboration, experimentation all stage.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, a lot of good times. I think in
Speaker 2: my experience, the bands that don't get along great just
Speaker 2: don't stay together long. So all the bands I've been
Speaker 2: a long time, there's great camaraderie. There's a lot of
Speaker 2: hanging out and a lot of joking. Even even King
Speaker 2: Crimson is a very serious band, has been on stage
Speaker 2: and the music is very intense. But even while we're
Speaker 2: on stage, if you really could see that the little
Speaker 2: communications among the guys that we're having fun and joking
Speaker 2: with each other, even about our mistakes. Robert Robert, especially
Speaker 2: Robert Fripp, who's used to seem very serious to audiences.
Speaker 2: In the last few years they've on Facebook, they've seen
Speaker 2: behind the other side of him, which is what I've
Speaker 2: seen for years the kids around a lot. We'll get
Speaker 2: off stage and he'll look at me and he'll say, yes,
Speaker 2: when in doubt, play CE sharp because he'll have heard
Speaker 2: that I came in when I was supposed to play
Speaker 2: an E. I came in with a C sharp and
Speaker 2: he doesn't rate me for it. He said, oh yeah,
Speaker 2: I went in doubt play C sharp. And once I
Speaker 2: got a note when I in the nineties, I got
Speaker 2: a note under my door at a hotel from Robert saying,
Speaker 2: you have the rare opportunity to lend me money. And
Speaker 2: who signed Robert Fripp? I think I said saved that
Speaker 2: it's one of the only things I have that he signed. Sorry,
Speaker 2: I went off on that. To play together off stage
Speaker 2: is something we just don't have the opportunity to do
Speaker 2: very much well at all in the bands that I
Speaker 2: tour with. I know some bands that set up a stage.
Speaker 2: If they're playing an arena, they set up a stage.
Speaker 2: Bon Jovi did this, This set up a stage backstage
Speaker 2: to jam before the show, after the show, to have
Speaker 2: fun and play other stuff. That's just not a possibility
Speaker 2: in the tours I do. If it's a big one
Speaker 2: like Peter Gabriel's, the crew immediately is on stage tearing
Speaker 2: down the stage right the second after you stop. And yes,
Speaker 2: you could go to if you had the energy, you
Speaker 2: could go to a club somewhere in jam with other players.
Speaker 2: And maybe I used to do that a little bit
Speaker 2: a long long time ago, but not anymore.
Speaker 1: So you have this summer camp. Did you go to
Speaker 1: camp as a kid? I?
Speaker 2: Oh, I forgot until you asked that I did. I
Speaker 2: went to classical I was a classical player and I
Speaker 2: went to one or two years at the University of
Speaker 2: mass in Amherst, Mass. Yeah, and it was influential on me,
Speaker 2: but only in a classical way, and later I stopped
Speaker 2: playing classical. But it was kind of cool, very different
Speaker 2: than this kind of camp with adults. I say adults,
Speaker 2: but this year there was a eight year old drummer
Speaker 2: who was amazing. Came with his parents.
Speaker 1: Okay, you grew up in Brookline and outside of Boston.
Speaker 1: What'd your parents do for a living?
Speaker 2: Wow, you've researched me a lot. I appreciate that.
Speaker 1: Well, I spent a lot of time in Brookline. Anyway,
Speaker 1: we really have a friend who grew up absolutely.
Speaker 2: My mother was the head of the children's department at
Speaker 2: a Boston public library, first at a branch, then then
Speaker 2: at the main branch, and then the overall library. So
Speaker 2: we read a lot. My brother and I had a
Speaker 2: lot of children's books. My father was an engineer, a
Speaker 2: radio engineer at first at WHDH, which later became also
Speaker 2: a TV station, and I grew up visiting the station
Speaker 2: a lot and seeing what radio is like behind the scenes.
Speaker 2: That was fun. And they both my older brother, Pete
Speaker 2: was a French horn player at first and then became
Speaker 2: a pianist, and he went to Juilliard for classical and
Speaker 2: I went to the Eastman School for classical. So my
Speaker 2: parents did what they felt was the traditional thing of
Speaker 2: educating us musically, first playing piano and then picking our
Speaker 2: own instruments. And then they were kind of daunted when
Speaker 2: first Pete and then I became professional musicians. That wasn't
Speaker 2: what they had in mind at all, but that's the
Speaker 2: way it went, and they were quite supportive of it.
Speaker 1: Okay, so when did you start piano lessons?
Speaker 2: I don't remember that, good question. Let me think I
Speaker 2: probably I was playing bass at twelve years old, so
Speaker 2: probably from nine years old I played piano and then
Speaker 2: I know this as an adult when my parents were
Speaker 2: quite old, I asked them if they remembered if I
Speaker 2: said anything about why I chose to play the bass,
Speaker 2: because I don't know what I did. And they said, no,
Speaker 2: you just said you liked it. They actually had asked
Speaker 2: me that I liked the bass. And that sounds like
Speaker 2: a pointless story, but think about how many years later
Speaker 2: I'm seventy eight now and I still just like playing
Speaker 2: the bass, and I just want to play good music.
Speaker 2: So I'm glad I didn't think with that part of
Speaker 2: my brain that had a plan, And I'm glad I
Speaker 2: didn't say, well, I want to be this or I
Speaker 2: want to do this. I wanted to play the bass,
Speaker 2: and I'm very lucky that I am still doing that.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, and a lot of Jewish families in
Speaker 1: the era, they made you take piano lessons, and most people,
Speaker 1: you know, had mixed feelings about that. When you started
Speaker 1: with music, we're saying, oh, this is my thing. Oh
Speaker 1: my parents are making me do this.
Speaker 2: They had urged me to practice. What kid wants to practice, well,
Speaker 2: one in a hundred kids wants to practice. I didn't
Speaker 2: want to practice, but I did, and I liked it.
Speaker 2: I liked being able to play better the piano, and
Speaker 2: then once I was playing the bass, they didn't have
Speaker 2: to ask me to practice. I just did practice. And
Speaker 2: you're right, it was a tradition to educate it. And
Speaker 2: before had I been born ten years earlier, the tradition
Speaker 2: was to take up violin. I was kind of I
Speaker 2: don't know why, but in the Eastern Europe that's what
Speaker 2: you did. And I'm glad I didn't have to become
Speaker 2: a violinist because it would have been ten years to
Speaker 2: master it instead of or sorry, twenty years instead of
Speaker 2: ten years the master of that instrument, and I wouldn't
Speaker 2: be able to play rock and roll the way I do.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you know, I'm a little younger than you,
Speaker 1: and I remember hearing the show tunes and our parents
Speaker 1: takings to young people's concerts. Prior to playing the piano.
Speaker 1: Was there music in the house and what kind of
Speaker 1: music was that.
Speaker 2: I'm very much a product of my older brother three
Speaker 2: years old, or the records that he got or the
Speaker 2: records that I grew up with because he could afford them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: my dad brought home music too. There was there was
Speaker 2: a lot of music being played and we had. We
Speaker 2: were pretty early to have a Hi Fi and and
Speaker 2: even a TV that I think I remember my dad
Speaker 2: building it out of components to have a TV in
Speaker 2: the early fifties. So it's a musical household somewhat. And yeah,
Speaker 2: plenty of culture in Boston and in Brookline. Take I
Speaker 2: was taken to see concerts almost all well, there was
Speaker 2: no rock and roll, but I was taken to classical
Speaker 2: concerts and grew to love that music.
Speaker 1: Okay, I don't have any brothers. I have two sisters.
Speaker 1: What's it like having an older brother? Did you always
Speaker 1: worship him and get along? Did you fight what was
Speaker 1: going on there?
Speaker 2: In our case, we never fought. And I don't think
Speaker 2: I worshiped Pete, but I just quietly followed him.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: He learned at an early age to take all the
Speaker 2: gigs because they might lead to something else. There might
Speaker 2: be a really good player. He was a jazz player before.
Speaker 2: I think of Pete as a jazz player, classically trained,
Speaker 2: a jazz player who plays rock, and I think of
Speaker 2: myself as a rock player who plays jazz. In that
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't really live the life, live the
Speaker 2: base parts of jazz, and I hear that when I play,
Speaker 2: I play it, I think pretty well, but not as
Speaker 2: well as I would if that was my whole musical life.
Speaker 2: But anyway, Yeah, I learned from him many things, but
Speaker 2: including take the gig. You might meet a really good
Speaker 2: drummer and then you'll get to play with him. Other
Speaker 2: things like that and those. A few years ago we
Speaker 2: decided to form a band for the first time, quite
Speaker 2: only a few years ago, to form a band and
Speaker 2: to play the style of music that he first listened to.
Speaker 2: So we grew up with in the fifties, which was cool.
Speaker 2: I guess you'd call it the cool jazz. And the
Speaker 2: bass player Julius Watkins was the French horn player. That's
Speaker 2: why Pete was getting those records because he was a
Speaker 2: French horn player, and Oscar Peterford was the bass player,
Speaker 2: great bass player. So really, in my later years I
Speaker 2: realized that I grew up listening to Oscar Petterford, whose
Speaker 2: choice of notes and whose taste and whose six think
Speaker 2: solos were pretty exceptional, and I didn't think about it
Speaker 2: at the time. It's only now that when I look
Speaker 2: back and I think that in a deep way, I
Speaker 2: tried to become that bass player. But playing rock, in
Speaker 2: other words, trying to. I wasn't thinking I'll be like Oscar,
Speaker 2: but I do try to find the right notes and
Speaker 2: the right feel and the right sound, and not not
Speaker 2: do any more than not be flashy necessarily unless it's
Speaker 2: called for. And yeah, so I was greatly influenced by
Speaker 2: my brother's records.
Speaker 1: Okay, talking about you and your brother at a young age,
Speaker 1: you go to school. What kind of student were you?
Speaker 1: Did you have friends? Did you play sports? We always
Speaker 1: one step remove what we you like.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm never asked that I have to think a
Speaker 2: minutecause it was a long time ago. I enjoyed school.
Speaker 2: The Brookline Public schools were pretty good, so I got
Speaker 2: a decent education, not as good as I wish I had,
Speaker 2: but pretty good. And I was in a band, in
Speaker 2: an orchestra and a chorus the whole time, as soon
Speaker 2: as there was a chance to be in those, and
Speaker 2: some of those did out of town concerts. So in
Speaker 2: a way, I was on the road as a thirteen
Speaker 2: year old a little bit, and that prepared me for
Speaker 2: being on the road when I was in the music
Speaker 2: school and college or university, and not prepared me for
Speaker 2: being on the road even more it. There's a piece
Speaker 2: on my new album called road Dogs, and it was
Speaker 2: intended as an instrumental, and it wasn't instrumental, and I
Speaker 2: just was singing along with it, and I went road
Speaker 2: Dogs with that kind of voice of road Dogs, and
Speaker 2: I decided, well, I'll leave that in there and I'll
Speaker 2: write some other lyrics to fit that, because even though
Speaker 2: that it wasn't intended to be about that, I and
Speaker 2: the guys I work with are indeed road dogs.
Speaker 1: So if I was growing up in Brooklyn in the fifties,
Speaker 1: brookline excuse me in the fifties, say oh yeah, Tony,
Speaker 1: he's the music guy.
Speaker 2: I was, indeed one of the music guys I was.
Speaker 2: When the Beatles came around, kids came up to me,
Speaker 2: are they any good? Tony? I didn't know what to say,
Speaker 2: because I, you know, i'd heard them, but I didn't
Speaker 2: judge that about you know, like you know, I had
Speaker 2: nothing to do with classical so I didn't judge. Later
Speaker 2: I would have, you know, years later, I say they're
Speaker 2: very good. Indeed, there there's more to them than just
Speaker 2: a pop band. But I do remember being asked that,
Speaker 2: and I was not the only person in that in
Speaker 2: that UH world, you know who was spending his time
Speaker 2: practicing in the in the band room, and I picked
Speaker 2: up tuba in those years. I didn't have a tuba
Speaker 2: at home, but it was sort of normal for for
Speaker 2: a bass player to be a tuba player, and the
Speaker 2: and the school, the high school had one. I had
Speaker 2: a few of them for us to play, and I
Speaker 2: actually formed a love for playing in concert bands, which
Speaker 2: I carried with me later into UH into I think
Speaker 2: I end. I'm trying to think. When I stopped playing
Speaker 2: the tuba, they wouldn't let me play it at Eastman
Speaker 2: at is where they wanted you to have only one
Speaker 2: instrument that you that you focused on. But then when
Speaker 2: I played Peter Gabriel's first album, I I talked to
Speaker 2: him and let me play tuba on one piece and
Speaker 2: subsequently on the road. So we had a tuba on
Speaker 2: the road.
Speaker 1: Okay. I heard from somebody who's a road guys were
Speaker 1: from you work with you that you played the White
Speaker 1: House in JFK's era.
Speaker 2: Yes, what's to say about that? Oh? Yeah, that's right. Yes,
Speaker 2: the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra took us on the road.
Speaker 2: I was was it early in the early sixties. I'm
Speaker 2: guessing sixty two, but I could look it up for sure.
Speaker 2: And we played in two places, at Carnegie Hall in
Speaker 2: New York and on the White House lawn President Kennedy.
Speaker 2: Kennedy came out and gave a speech before the show,
Speaker 2: saying that he was too busy to stay for it,
Speaker 2: but that he promising he would keep his window open
Speaker 2: from his study. I'm not sure he actually did that,
Speaker 2: but somewhere I have a tape of the speech, and
Speaker 2: it's it's times have change, because he really gave speeches
Speaker 2: very well and eloquently, saying how precious it was to
Speaker 2: have our youth educated in music. And that's not the
Speaker 2: kind of thing you would lately you would hear from
Speaker 2: the White House. I think, so we're pretty special.
Speaker 1: Where were you and Kennedy was shot.
Speaker 2: I was in high school and I was heading for
Speaker 2: work at the library, Boston Public Library, where I worked
Speaker 2: in the music department, doing whatever I could. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: when John John Kennedy, when John Lennon was shot, I
Speaker 2: was in my New York City apartment developing photos. That's
Speaker 2: what I did all night because I didn't have a
Speaker 2: darkroom that was dark during the day, so I'd stay
Speaker 2: up late and the phone rang and it was I
Speaker 2: can tell this story now without choking up, but for
Speaker 2: many years I couldn't. It was a newspaper saying, not
Speaker 2: that he had been killed, but it hadn't been shot
Speaker 2: and was injured, and did I have a quote for them?
Speaker 2: I don't remember. I think it was a Rochester newspaper,
Speaker 2: and I was shocked and puzzled by how they had
Speaker 2: my phone number, and doubly shocked, and then I said
Speaker 2: I don't know and hung up. And then another newspaper
Speaker 2: called shortly afterward, was asking for a quote saying that
Speaker 2: he had died. I, like everybody, I was traumatized by that,
Speaker 2: and I think for about ten years after that, if
Speaker 2: anyone asked me anything about the John Lennon sessions, I
Speaker 2: just would say, that's not something I can talk about.
Speaker 2: And then I think I released a book called Beyond
Speaker 2: the Bass Cleft, with short stories of different situations I've
Speaker 2: been in as a musician through my life, and it
Speaker 2: had the John Lennon Yokohona sessions, and the editor said,
Speaker 2: correctly to me, you really have to address this. You're
Speaker 2: just kind of dodging the reality that everybody knows. And
Speaker 2: that's when I finally, ten years later, came to emotionally
Speaker 2: came to grips with it well.
Speaker 1: Jack Douglas, producer of Double Fantasy, he said, you know,
Speaker 1: the deal was, if anybody finds out the record's over,
Speaker 1: totally a secret. How did you end up on Double Fantasy?
Speaker 2: It was Jack who I assume it was Jack who
Speaker 2: told John that I was a good bass player and
Speaker 2: worth head having the John's first words to me where
Speaker 2: they say they tell me you're good, just don't play
Speaker 2: too many notes. And I smiled and laughed. I smiled
Speaker 2: because that's such a New York in your face attitude,
Speaker 2: which I was fine. I was a New Yorker at
Speaker 2: the time that I'm very comfortable with that, and I knew,
Speaker 2: but he didn't know that I wouldn't play too many notes.
Speaker 2: It's just not the kind of bass player I am.
Speaker 2: And I kind of understood that he was directly addressing
Speaker 2: the fact that somebody told him I'm good. That could
Speaker 2: mean I'm a real flashy player who's going to do
Speaker 2: just horrible things on his song. So I had a
Speaker 2: smile and I said, don't worry, I won't play too
Speaker 2: many notes, and we got along musically really great. We
Speaker 2: got along fine in every way. But I could tell
Speaker 2: he was very happy with the bass parts I played.
Speaker 2: And that's a nice feeling. When John Lennon's happy, he
Speaker 2: doesn't have to gush about it. But I could just
Speaker 2: sense that he liked it a lot. There was something else,
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, secret sessions.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They told me not to tell anyone. I believe someone
Speaker 2: told me not to even tell my wife where I
Speaker 2: was working. I only lived across town and listen to this.
Speaker 2: The second day after I was told that, I took
Speaker 2: a taxi over from the East Side to the west Side.
Speaker 2: I believe it was a hit factory forty eighth Street
Speaker 2: between eighth and ninth, and I asked to get off on.
Speaker 2: I just said to the taxi, just take me to
Speaker 2: ninth and forty eighth and he said, oh, that's near
Speaker 2: where John Lennon's recording And I thought, yeah, secrets as
Speaker 2: the cab drive and I'm not even going to the studio.
Speaker 2: And the taxi driver knows he had heard it on
Speaker 2: the radio.
Speaker 1: By the way, that morning, were you starstruck when you
Speaker 1: met John Lennon.
Speaker 2: I can't say that. I was no I was pleased
Speaker 2: to be part of it. Maybe it's just not the
Speaker 2: way I'm made up that I get starstruck from people.
Speaker 2: And also I had worked with other famous musicians, so
Speaker 2: I think I just I haven't analyzed why it is.
Speaker 2: I didn't get starstruck, as you can tell. I just
Speaker 2: think I entered situations on a musical level, and that's
Speaker 2: about the music. And I hoped that I would like him,
Speaker 2: that he would be nice and likewise with Yoko, and
Speaker 2: that worked out fine. But in a way, it was
Speaker 2: the music that that it was all centered on to me,
Speaker 2: and that's just kind of the way I work.
Speaker 1: Well, you a lot of times they lay down the
Speaker 1: drums in the bass and you disappear. How long did
Speaker 1: you work on the Double Fantasy sessions and to what
Speaker 1: degree were the songs pre written or work down in
Speaker 1: the studio?
Speaker 2: They were the whole whole length of it was only
Speaker 2: two weeks, and then they made a second album out
Speaker 2: of outtakes that were Yeah, they weren't finished that In
Speaker 2: the case of that album, we did the full rhythm
Speaker 2: track rhythm section together. There were no overdubs. You could
Speaker 2: fix a part if you made a mistake, but there
Speaker 2: wasn't much of that. John would simp lay his song
Speaker 2: and sing it to you, and I would think, goodness,
Speaker 2: there's there are thousands of bass players who could do
Speaker 2: a great job on this. How lucky am I that
Speaker 2: I'm the one who's here? And that was kind of
Speaker 2: the extent of all. Okay, Having put that thought aside,
Speaker 2: I just had the happy ride of hearing a new
Speaker 2: song and playing a wonderful song, and we alternated songs
Speaker 2: with Yoko's songs, would do John's, and Yoko would be
Speaker 2: in the control room with Sean, young Sean and kind
Speaker 2: of helping, just coordinate the control room with John. Then
Speaker 2: we would do a Yoko song and John would be
Speaker 2: the tea boy. He'd be in the control room take
Speaker 2: looking at Sean and bringing out tea for Yoko, which
Speaker 2: was sweet. Her songs were a lot more problematic to
Speaker 2: do because she doesn't play the instrument. She had had
Speaker 2: an arranger come in and do charts, but the charts
Speaker 2: weren't really didn't tell you much about how you should
Speaker 2: do it, so hers work became a a search to
Speaker 2: find the groove that she wanted, to find the tempo
Speaker 2: that would work, and to find where we're going with
Speaker 2: this piece, and then we would get that, and then
Speaker 2: we're back to John and all there. He placed this
Speaker 2: big guitar, he sings and it's all there for you.
Speaker 2: It couldn't be easier. So it was an interesting experience.
Speaker 2: None of it was difficult, but it was unusual, and
Speaker 2: that we alternated between two writers.
Speaker 1: And hey, are you ever starstruck with anybody, whether a musician, politician, scientist, whatever.
Speaker 2: Good question. I can't remember being start what I would
Speaker 2: call starstruck. No, it doesn't mean that I feel I'm
Speaker 2: equal to these these really special people. It's just kind
Speaker 2: of not not in my makeup so much.
Speaker 1: We've been doing this a long time. But if you
Speaker 1: go back seventies eighties when you were called for a session,
Speaker 1: did you ever feel somewhat uptight? You know, I don't
Speaker 1: want to make the exact equivalent stage fright, but it's
Speaker 1: sort of the same thing. You know, the band wrote
Speaker 1: a song. You know they've been on there at stage
Speaker 1: a million times with Ronnie Hawkins and Dylan, yet they're
Speaker 1: still uptight when they hit the stage. When you'd be
Speaker 1: called to work with an act, would you say another day,
Speaker 1: I've got this or it would be party. You had
Speaker 1: spilkiss say, well, you know, I got to get it right.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think I'm thinking of a couple times in my
Speaker 2: concert life that I was nervous. Once, when I was
Speaker 2: a kid, I played a tuba concerto with the high
Speaker 2: school band and I didn't a factor in that your
Speaker 2: mouth gets dry when you're nervous. And we did one
Speaker 2: away out of town concert and a piece I had
Speaker 2: played before. But we got to the cadenza and my
Speaker 2: mouth was just dry as a bone. I couldn't even
Speaker 2: play the tuba, let alone go to the high note.
Speaker 2: Excuse me, a high note on the tuba. And so
Speaker 2: I was very nervous, and it grew on itself as
Speaker 2: nervous as well will the more I realized, oh, I'm nervous,
Speaker 2: and that's making my mouth dry. So there was that,
Speaker 2: and then way many years later, I played with Paul
Speaker 2: Simon Jimmy Carter's inauguration week. It was in a theater
Speaker 2: and full theater, and Jimmy Carter was at the front
Speaker 2: of the balcony with his wife and looking down and smiling,
Speaker 2: big famous smile and a lot of teeth, and I
Speaker 2: looked up and I'm behind Paul and I'm not the
Speaker 2: lead guy at all, and I thought, I'm nervous. This
Speaker 2: is this is really special, and I'm a little nervous.
Speaker 2: And I thought, that's great, that's pretty cool that I'm nervous.
Speaker 2: I thought this, and a few times I've been nervous
Speaker 2: since then, since the Oh, I just thought of another one.
Speaker 2: I'll borri you with. But a few times I've got nervous, I.
Speaker 1: Think bors What was the other time, Yeah, with.
Speaker 2: That same orchestra that played the White House when I
Speaker 2: was older, I was playing a concerto with them, the
Speaker 2: Kusavisky Bass Concerto at the Boston University Theater, and I
Speaker 2: wore cuff links a thing back then. I was dressed
Speaker 2: up and I wore cuff links, which I had never
Speaker 2: worn at a rehearsal. And the piece, I think is
Speaker 2: in B minor. But when there's an e, which happens
Speaker 2: a lot when you're in the KYB minor, my wrist
Speaker 2: was at the shoulder of the bass, shall I put
Speaker 2: it that way? And the cufflink when I did vibrato,
Speaker 2: the cufflink was banging against the shoulder of the bass,
Speaker 2: making a let's call. It a machine gun sound, much
Speaker 2: louder than what I was playing, much louder than the orchestra,
Speaker 2: and the audience couldn't help but be aware of that.
Speaker 2: And as I got nervous about it and about the
Speaker 2: upcoming ease the note e that I knew there were
Speaker 2: plenty of them coming, it got faster, as vibrato will
Speaker 2: do when you're nervous.
Speaker 1: So that.
Speaker 2: Was a great example to me of when I didn't
Speaker 2: embrace it, and it kind of got out of hand,
Speaker 2: and it was a dreadful performance for me, and I'm
Speaker 2: sure the audience was scratching their head about why I
Speaker 2: played the machine gun notes along with the concerto.
Speaker 1: Okay, so your brother is buying these jazz records. Rock
Speaker 1: starts sometime in the early fifties. You know, I turn
Speaker 1: a rocket eighty eight rock around the clock. Then comes Elvis.
Speaker 1: At what point did you become infected with rock?
Speaker 2: Interesting question? Not then? Not even in high school when
Speaker 2: the Beatle I mentioned the Beatles coming around around, I
Speaker 2: wasn't too interested. I listened a little bit, went to
Speaker 2: music school, started playing a little jazz, Still not interested
Speaker 2: in rock. I think I might have taken an ad
Speaker 2: out in Rochester when I was twenty looking for a
Speaker 2: rock band. I had never been in a rock band,
Speaker 2: and the Beatles had got more sophisticated, and I was
Speaker 2: kind of interested in it, So it really was. I think.
Speaker 2: I was out of school and went to New York
Speaker 2: City and was a session player when I started playing. Well,
Speaker 2: I did a lot of kinds of music as a
Speaker 2: studio player in New York, and I became kind of
Speaker 2: attached to the rock stuff and trying to get the
Speaker 2: right sound for rock and trying to change my sound
Speaker 2: something you never did in classical never did in jazz,
Speaker 2: but you could do with an electric bass. I never
Speaker 2: thought until now about the what's the first rock I
Speaker 2: listened to or enjoyed? But it was pretty late in
Speaker 2: my formative years.
Speaker 1: Okay, how about you. You're coming of age and Top
Speaker 1: forty and there was great Top forty radio in Boston.
Speaker 1: Were you even listening to it?
Speaker 2: No? No, I was immersed in classical music at that time.
Speaker 1: Okay, at the time, were you playing a double bass?
Speaker 1: And at what point did you play the electric bass?
Speaker 2: Yes, I played double bass only, and we called it
Speaker 2: double bass, and since then you call it spring bass
Speaker 2: or acoustic bass. And graduated high school, got into the
Speaker 2: Easton School of Music, played in the Rochester Philharmonic, and
Speaker 2: I was very lucky that Steve Gadd, a great drummer,
Speaker 2: was in school with me, was my classmate, and he
Speaker 2: didn't have any bass players who wanted to do gigs.
Speaker 2: We were all classical geeks, but I was a classical
Speaker 2: geek with a little bit of a streak of playing jazz.
Speaker 2: I had played a little jazz, and Steve somewhat. We
Speaker 2: began to work a lot with gap Maan Joni and
Speaker 2: then with Chuck Mangoni, and then with both of them
Speaker 2: a lot, like I mean, two gigs a day, six
Speaker 2: and a half hours a day, playing a lot, and
Speaker 2: he sort of mentored me in a quiet way, letting
Speaker 2: me learn how to play the feel of jazz, which
Speaker 2: I really wasn't good at at all. I was a
Speaker 2: classical guy, very interesting, and we put the time. We
Speaker 2: put the beat in a different place in jazz, or
Speaker 2: many different places, but a different place than classical, which
Speaker 2: just puts it right smack in the middle of where
Speaker 2: it could be. And yeah, so that was an education
Speaker 2: for me. And then soon after a few years after that,
Speaker 2: when I started playing rock, and when I came to
Speaker 2: New York, I had to adjust that to playing on
Speaker 2: the beat or behind the beat to play rock.
Speaker 1: Okay, going to the Eastman's School of Music in Rochester.
Speaker 1: Your older brother had gone to Juilliard. Was there any
Speaker 1: doubt that you would go to music college? Why not
Speaker 1: that it's not a great place, but why Rochester.
Speaker 2: I don't really remember why that school. But I had
Speaker 2: never had doubts. Once I was in high school, I
Speaker 2: had no doubt that I was going to play bass
Speaker 2: in whatever way I could making a living for it
Speaker 2: would from it would be a bonus. But that wasn't
Speaker 2: in my thoughts the way it isn't in any sixteen
Speaker 2: year old thoughts. I knew I was going to play bass,
Speaker 2: and that's what I did. And probably I seem to
Speaker 2: remember applying to a few schools. I didn't really I
Speaker 2: didn't apply to Juilliard. I could have, but I didn't
Speaker 2: because my brother had gone there, and I thought I'll
Speaker 2: go off in my own direction. And maybe the Eastman
Speaker 2: School was a very good school for sure, and maybe
Speaker 2: the yes says I think back. They accepted me kind
Speaker 2: of early, and they said, if you let us know
Speaker 2: right away, you can come here and you'll get a scholarship.
Speaker 2: Whereas if I started looking into other schools. I think
Speaker 2: I applied to one in London, the Royal Royal Academy
Speaker 2: or something like that, but I never heard back from them,
Speaker 2: and I accepted the Eastman offer.
Speaker 1: Okay, another dumb question. Double bass, acoustic bass, whatever referring
Speaker 1: to it, has no frets. How do you decide and
Speaker 1: learn where to put your fingers and out of play?
Speaker 2: Wow? Well, I think my first teacher said this is
Speaker 2: ten years. It's going to take you ten years, but
Speaker 2: be glad you don't play the violin that will take
Speaker 2: twenty years. You learn it by practicing your hand position
Speaker 2: and putting it in the right hand, sorry, and putting
Speaker 2: it in the right place, and you practice a lot,
Speaker 2: a great deal. It's way harder than having threats. And
Speaker 2: the day that I switched to an instrument with frets
Speaker 2: was an interesting day for me because I missed having
Speaker 2: no frets. And later I found what's called a fretless bass,
Speaker 2: an electric bass that's fretless, and was very comfortable with that.
Speaker 2: I think it's more interesting to find bass players or
Speaker 2: guitar players who learned with frets and then make the
Speaker 2: switch to that fretless base. That must be very hard.
Speaker 1: Okay, you go to Rochester for six hours away from Boston.
Speaker 1: It's a cosmopolitan city, but kind of in the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere. Good experience, bad experience.
Speaker 2: Well, I love the musical scene in Rochester. I was
Speaker 2: too young to know what the scene is in Boston. Frankly,
Speaker 2: there was the Berkeley School, but it was not even
Speaker 2: a legitimate school yet when I was there, And there
Speaker 2: were jazz clubs, but I couldn't get in them as
Speaker 2: a kid. So when I went to Rochester, it's really
Speaker 2: a mecca of really very good players, the cats of
Speaker 2: jazz players I'm talking about. There is a cultural affinity
Speaker 2: for orchestra also, of course, because of George Eastman and
Speaker 2: the Eastman School of Music. But I liked hanging out
Speaker 2: with those jazz players and I learned a lot from them.
Speaker 2: And it was intimidating, yes, being a a kid and
Speaker 2: a new player to jazz and going to clubs and
Speaker 2: trying to sit in when you're not really sure what
Speaker 2: the songs are and things like that. So I went
Speaker 2: through that. An interesting thing that happened. I couldn't hear
Speaker 2: myself particularly with the acoustic bass with the double bass,
Speaker 2: and so I got an electric one. Ampeg made one
Speaker 2: called the Baby Bass. Maybe they still make it, I
Speaker 2: don't know, but it didn't sound like much, but it
Speaker 2: was you've got an app and you could hear it.
Speaker 2: And I wasn't loving that. When I went to hear
Speaker 2: a band in Rochester that came into town. Jackie and
Speaker 2: Roy was the jazz band and Andy Musson was the
Speaker 2: bass player, and he was playing a Fender bass, which
Speaker 2: I had not heard of. Can you believe that I
Speaker 2: had never heard of a Fender base? And the kid
Speaker 2: I was, I want to to go up to Andy
Speaker 2: after the show. I know him now. He lives in
Speaker 2: the New York area like I do. I guess he's
Speaker 2: always lived in the New York area. Yeah, And I said,
Speaker 2: what's that you're playing? Where do I get one of those?
Speaker 2: And this is interesting? He told me, Okay, go to
Speaker 2: New York, go to Dan R. Strong's music guitar store
Speaker 2: in the village. But he said, this is important. Don't
Speaker 2: get a new one, get a used one. Those are
Speaker 2: the words he used because the expression vintage guitar or
Speaker 2: vintage bass didn't exist at the time, a used one
Speaker 2: was cheaper than a new one, and I did go
Speaker 2: to New York exactly. I took the train downs exactly
Speaker 2: he said to do, and the prices were exactly what
Speaker 2: he said. A new one at that time, we're talking
Speaker 2: mid sixties, a new Fender base was about two hundred
Speaker 2: twenty dollars, and a used one, by which I mean
Speaker 2: a nineteen fifties had their precision, it was one hundred
Speaker 2: eighty dollars. It was cheaper, so I got one. I
Speaker 2: brought it back on the train to Rochester and I
Speaker 2: played that only that bass for many, many years. Interesting,
Speaker 2: how the times have changed.
Speaker 1: You still have that bass?
Speaker 2: I do not. I lost it in the fire. Sadly,
Speaker 2: I lost a lot of my basses in a fire
Speaker 2: in my barn in the mid nineties. By that time,
Speaker 2: to be fair, I had stopped playing it, or I
Speaker 2: would have had with me on the road where I was.
Speaker 2: But still I wish I had it. Of course, I've
Speaker 2: had a lot of basses in my life, and I
Speaker 2: really came to appreciate and value them much more after
Speaker 2: I had lost some in that fire, and I switched
Speaker 2: in the late seventies early eighties, I switched to music
Speaker 2: Man bases designed by the way by Leo Fender, which
Speaker 2: were similar and similar in feel, but had more versatility
Speaker 2: and had more of the sound that we wanted at
Speaker 2: that time. We wanted more lows, more low end, and
Speaker 2: maybe sometimes more highs on rock records. Then the Fender
Speaker 2: precision could give me. The engineer could compensate, but it
Speaker 2: seemed like a better deal to walk in with the
Speaker 2: sound that's going to be appropriate for the piece. Then.
Speaker 2: Ever since, I've primarily played a music Man bassis.
Speaker 1: So what caused the fire and what did you lose
Speaker 1: in the fire? Oh?
Speaker 2: What caused the fire was it became winter and I
Speaker 2: had foolishly left papers on top of the heater in
Speaker 2: my garage. It was a barn kind of garage, and
Speaker 2: so the whole place started on fire, and I lost
Speaker 2: all my bases and amps. I have forgotten what but
Speaker 2: a lot of not a lot, six let's say, six
Speaker 2: really good basses and four or five amps. It's a
Speaker 2: shame to lose them. I have one bass which I
Speaker 2: could show you, but it won't come across an audio
Speaker 2: which survived it. It got half burnt. It was a
Speaker 2: base that was cream colored, light cream colored, and it
Speaker 2: turned amber in color, and part of it turned to charcoal,
Speaker 2: and I sent it very carefully back to Ernie Ball
Speaker 2: music Man with a note with a note that was
Speaker 2: it out of warranty, could fix it was a joking note,
Speaker 2: and they injected epoxy into the burnt part. And interestingly,
Speaker 2: I still play that bass a lot. I don't take
Speaker 2: it on the road because it would break if it
Speaker 2: fell down. But it lost all its moisture, so it
Speaker 2: changed and it's a little more thumpy and a little
Speaker 2: less sustained in a way that's really cool and really
Speaker 2: has its own I love basses that have their own sound,
Speaker 2: really most of them do. And part of part of
Speaker 2: my joy in this album bringing it down to the
Speaker 2: bass was was expressing how much I like the particular
Speaker 2: bass on each track. I wrote a little essay or
Speaker 2: poem about each bass, and I took a portrait of it,
Speaker 2: not in a studio, but out in the in the world,
Speaker 2: in a place that seemed appropriate. And it was important
Speaker 2: to me with this album to have a booklet that
Speaker 2: had room for all of those photos of the basses.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know the guitars, you know, let's assume it's
Speaker 1: a new guitar. Guitars have them set up. They might
Speaker 1: change the pickups, the actions, et cetera. If you were
Speaker 1: to get a new bass from the fact factory, maybe
Speaker 1: in this case they make it to your specs, but
Speaker 1: I don't know. But generally speaking, you get a new bass,
Speaker 1: what would you change to make it the way you
Speaker 1: like it?
Speaker 2: Good question is this has to do with the way
Speaker 2: the person is, the musician is here's the way I am.
Speaker 2: If it sounds great, then I get it. I want
Speaker 2: that bass and I like it, and I don't change
Speaker 2: it at all. If it doesn't sound great, I don't
Speaker 2: really want that bass. I don't want to. Well, that's
Speaker 2: kind of the end of the story. I don't want it.
Speaker 2: I never was one who's who has the expertise to
Speaker 2: make a bass that doesn't sound good sound good. I mean,
Speaker 2: I can play the bass and change it a little
Speaker 2: bit with how I play it, But I'm not a
Speaker 2: bass redesigner, and I don't want to be. Why should I,
Speaker 2: Because there's basses that sound great when I pick them up.
Speaker 2: In fact, I gotta love what the basses give to me.
Speaker 2: I was very aware of this. Is I did this
Speaker 2: album so some basses just have a rock sound. You
Speaker 2: just play half of the rock sound. Songs are in
Speaker 2: the kivs right, So sometimes I'm just playing eighth notes
Speaker 2: on an E and it sounds really cool and really great,
Speaker 2: and I really appreciate you appreciate the bass gave that
Speaker 2: to me. I didn't. It was not my fingers doing that.
Speaker 2: It's just a gift from my friend, that bass. And
Speaker 2: you can bet that I play that bass a lot
Speaker 2: if it has that to give me. In a similar way,
Speaker 2: I play the NS electric upright. Need Steinberger designed that
Speaker 2: quite a while ago, and it sounds like very much
Speaker 2: like a double what we call it a double bass,
Speaker 2: but not exactly like it, but it has such a big,
Speaker 2: full round sound that if it's a ballot. This happened
Speaker 2: years ago. Peter Gabriel had a ballad and I took
Speaker 2: out that bass and I played a low G, just
Speaker 2: a G a long note, and Peter was like, oh, yes,
Speaker 2: that's what I want, and the engineer was, oh, that's great.
Speaker 2: If there was a producer, he was and there they're saying, well, man, Tony,
Speaker 2: you're great. And I am very happily taking credit for
Speaker 2: this instrument that gave me that. And by the way,
Speaker 2: ever since, whenever Peter does a ballad, he wants that
Speaker 2: bass on it, and I'm more than happy to do that,
Speaker 2: to be the guy that plays that bass. So I
Speaker 2: really appreciate how instruments are each different. And luckily, through
Speaker 2: the year, you know, one way or another, through the years,
Speaker 2: I've got a bunch of them. I could possibly get
Speaker 2: more in the future, but I have enough basses. Each
Speaker 2: sounds its own way in a very subtle way. The
Speaker 2: bass players would understand and would hear the difference, and
Speaker 2: they give me what I need, and I try to
Speaker 2: return the favor by making good music on them.
Speaker 1: How many basses do you presently own?
Speaker 2: I don't know exactly, but I recently did something I
Speaker 2: had never done. I assembled them all in one room
Speaker 2: and took a picture and made a jigsaw puzzle lot
Speaker 2: of it. In the title of the jigsaw puzzle is
Speaker 2: too many basses question mark. I don't know why I
Speaker 2: did that. I was just moved to do that. It was,
Speaker 2: frankly a lot of work, and I think I had
Speaker 2: about about sixteen or eighteen you know why, I don't
Speaker 2: know exactly, because it wasn't enough to fill up the room.
Speaker 2: And my good friend Scott Potito is a bass player
Speaker 2: and a bass collector, and I borrowed twenty of his basses.
Speaker 2: So in the end I had a room full of bases.
Speaker 2: I forgot to exactly account how many were mine.
Speaker 1: So let's say, for whatever reason you want a new bass,
Speaker 1: music Man will just send you something and you'll say
Speaker 1: yes or no. Well, you go to the factory and
Speaker 1: play five. How does it work?
Speaker 2: Well, in the old days I would go to the factory,
Speaker 2: but not anymore. Music man comes out. They're very Ernie
Speaker 2: Ball music may. When Ernie Ball bought the music Man
Speaker 2: Company from Leo Fender and Company, they didn't It's unusual.
Speaker 2: They didn't change it and lose what was special about it.
Speaker 2: They made tiny changes that made it more versatile. And
Speaker 2: so through the years, I'm the guy who was playing
Speaker 2: them and endorsing them before that, and I can appreciate
Speaker 2: that they never lost that. I don't know what, and
Speaker 2: I could never figure out what, but that magic that
Speaker 2: was special about that base. So once in a while,
Speaker 2: when they make an improvement, would they consider improvement? They'll
Speaker 2: ask me if I want one, and sometimes I don't,
Speaker 2: And sometimes if they'll say, well, this is really you're
Speaker 2: going to like this, Frank. You know what this happened
Speaker 2: about four years ago. They redesigned all of the elements
Speaker 2: to make it lighter weight, the five string, and they
Speaker 2: told me about it and I said, that's great, but
Speaker 2: I don't need it lighter weight, and they said, it's
Speaker 2: really a lot lighter weight. And at some point I
Speaker 2: don't remember where, I got to pick one up and
Speaker 2: it was like, wow, it's a lot lighter but it
Speaker 2: sounds the same and it hasn't lost anything. And I
Speaker 2: decided to try one out. And I then realized that
Speaker 2: the two hours I talked about the show, that's not
Speaker 2: a problem. But the six hours of rehearsing I do
Speaker 2: every day in some periods, boy, it's great having a
Speaker 2: light instrument. So once again I'm grateful to them for
Speaker 2: convincing me and talking me into trying at this lighter
Speaker 2: weight base, which became my default base to use because
Speaker 2: if only because it's so friendly to rehearse with.
Speaker 1: So you're not changing the pickups, what about strings?
Speaker 2: No, I use the strings to come on it. I'm
Speaker 2: lazy about changing them. I'm not a technical guy. A
Speaker 2: when I'm lucky and it's a big enough tour that
Speaker 2: I have a bass tech. His name is Mikaelai Russolto.
Speaker 2: He's an Italian guy that comes out with me for
Speaker 2: many years, since about nineteen ninety when it's that kind
Speaker 2: of band, and glad to have him. And I believe
Speaker 2: he changes the strings and doesn't tell me. Probably he's
Speaker 2: swearing back there saying, oh, he hasn't changed this since
Speaker 2: the last tour, but I don't feel the need to
Speaker 2: do it when I'm recording. Yeah, I leave the bass
Speaker 2: set up the way it is. Let me say, it's
Speaker 2: obvious to plat bass players and guitar players. You can
Speaker 2: change the sound a lot with your fingers, with how
Speaker 2: you play, where you pluck the string, and other things
Speaker 2: in the tone controls. So it's not like I never
Speaker 2: changed the sound of the bass. What I do a
Speaker 2: lot is put dampers under the strings. Music Man's original
Speaker 2: basses had dampers built in with a screw that were
Speaker 2: under the strings, and that was I think a Leo
Speaker 2: Fender idea, and then they took him off for a
Speaker 2: bunch of years and then they brought it back. But
Speaker 2: I always carry dampening material like foam rubber and things
Speaker 2: like that on the road with me.
Speaker 1: Did you finish school at Eastman? I did.
Speaker 2: I have a bachelor's degree that I haven't found a
Speaker 2: way to apply yet. But it's only been forty or fifty.
Speaker 1: Years, so you graduate from college. What's the vision, right,
Speaker 1: I'm not a vision guy.
Speaker 2: I wish I was. I had the same ethic that
Speaker 2: I had when I left high school, which is, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm going to play the bass and I'm going to
Speaker 2: meet some good players and play some good music. But
Speaker 2: now I'm playing jazz. I had a curious path after
Speaker 2: I left Rochester. The Buddy Rich band needed a bass player,
Speaker 2: and the manager of that band knew me and asked
Speaker 2: if I wanted to do it, which in those days
Speaker 2: meant leaving you don't have an apartment and go on
Speaker 2: the road with this is permanently on the road. So
Speaker 2: I took a deep breath and I thought, that's for me.
Speaker 2: I'm going to do it. And I got rid of
Speaker 2: my apartment and my furniture and all that stuff, and
Speaker 2: I said goodbye to everybody in Rochester, drove in my
Speaker 2: station wagon where I had my little bit of clothing
Speaker 2: and things, to Boston, where I found out that I
Speaker 2: showed up at the gig and they said that Buddy
Speaker 2: had changed his mind and talked the bass player into
Speaker 2: staying and I had no gig, and that was not
Speaker 2: my happiest night, but it was sort of yeah, you
Speaker 2: want to be in the music business, okay. So then
Speaker 2: I gave some quick thought to a going back to Rochester,
Speaker 2: where I had said goodbye and got rid of everything
Speaker 2: I had b staying with my folks in Boston being
Speaker 2: a I don't know what a twenty four to twenty
Speaker 2: five year old guy going back home or c turning
Speaker 2: around and going to New York City. And I chose, see,
Speaker 2: I might never have had the gumption to go to
Speaker 2: the Big Pond, but I did and stayed with a friend,
Speaker 2: a school friend, because I couldn't afford a place in
Speaker 2: New York. And fast forward a year year and a
Speaker 2: half and I was doing okay as a studio musician
Speaker 2: and the Buddy Rich came to town. The Buddy Rich
Speaker 2: band came to town and needed a bass player for
Speaker 2: two or three nights in a club and then recording
Speaker 2: the album The Roar of seventy four. So I know
Speaker 2: this now we're talking nineteen seventy four, and they called
Speaker 2: me to do that, and I did that, and each
Speaker 2: night after the show, Buddy would tell the manager, Oh,
Speaker 2: this guy's okay, ask him if I'll go on the
Speaker 2: road with us, and each night I said no thanks.
Speaker 2: I tried that. Buddy had no memory of that incident,
Speaker 2: and I wasn't about to tell him. So I got
Speaker 2: to play with I got to play in that band.
Speaker 2: But my leaving Rochester was under strange circumstances. I might
Speaker 2: never have let left. I don't know. So I'm not
Speaker 2: the guy that you questioned about who has the vision.
Speaker 2: Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go
Speaker 2: to New York be a studio musician, and then I'm
Speaker 2: going to meet Peter Gabriel and go on the road.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to be a road musician for the
Speaker 2: rest of my life.
Speaker 1: So that two years what first, you stayed with your friend,
Speaker 1: what happens in those two years?
Speaker 2: Stayed with a lot of friends. And then later my
Speaker 2: brother lived in Danbury, Connecticut, and I stayed with him
Speaker 2: because you can't just show up in New York and
Speaker 2: gig and make enough money. And gradually I met the
Speaker 2: let's see, I joined I joined a few bands. One
Speaker 2: interesting one was called AH the Attack of the Green
Speaker 2: Slime Beast. Perhaps you never heard of that band because
Speaker 2: we only ever did one gig that was with three
Speaker 2: members of the Mothers of Invention. So it was a
Speaker 2: very creative and interesting band. But as bands will do,
Speaker 2: we rehearsed a lot and at somebody's cabin in Greenwood Lake,
Speaker 2: and then we did the one gig, interesting gig by
Speaker 2: the way, where Meredith Monks Dance Troupe was doing improvised
Speaker 2: dance while we improvised on stage, and they had their
Speaker 2: bodies painted red and they were wearing kind of diaper
Speaker 2: kind of things. And one of the those dancers, who
Speaker 2: was a young aspiring actor named Danny DeVito. So yeah,
Speaker 2: later when I saw him, when he became well known
Speaker 2: and I saw him on TV, I said, I know
Speaker 2: that guy from that one gig we did in Philadelphia
Speaker 2: without AH the Attack of the Green Slime Beast. Wonderful times.
Speaker 2: So I was in a few bands like that, and
Speaker 2: I fell into what we called rehearsal bands that would
Speaker 2: go into a studio at eleven at night when the
Speaker 2: studio had no more sessions going on, and play into
Speaker 2: the night, mostly to give horn players a chance to play,
Speaker 2: to really play. The successful horn players in New York
Speaker 2: would do sessions all day, jingles and pop songs. Kind
Speaker 2: of want to play that. They want to play jazz,
Speaker 2: so that's why they went into music. And from being
Speaker 2: in a rehearsal band called White Elephant, I met a
Speaker 2: lot of great players, did a couple of albums of that,
Speaker 2: and sooner or later those later. It took a while,
Speaker 2: but some of those players that I knew from the
Speaker 2: band got me on sessions and I met other people
Speaker 2: and came what you call the studio player in those days.
Speaker 2: There was such a thing later that that profession kind
Speaker 2: of went away because there weren't enough sessions being done
Speaker 2: in New York to provide a living to somebody. And
Speaker 2: I liked studio playing and I liked being that, but
Speaker 2: I felt unfulfilled. And when I had the chance to
Speaker 2: go on the road, which meant not being a session player,
Speaker 2: I jumped at that.
Speaker 1: Okay, In LA in that era, there were the a players,
Speaker 1: usually one person who might be getting double or triple scale,
Speaker 1: doing two or three sessions a day, and then there
Speaker 1: were a couple of other people, but really there were
Speaker 1: you know, one or two people who played when you
Speaker 1: were playing sessions as a bass player, at what level
Speaker 1: were you and who were the other bass players, if any?
Speaker 2: New York were were very different seeing in LA and
Speaker 2: most of the records that I knew about were not
Speaker 2: those the ones we've seen in the movie the famous
Speaker 2: this is going to be a hit record. Some of
Speaker 2: them were that way, but most of them were not.
Speaker 2: They were just more just a huge volume of records
Speaker 2: being made and coming out, and they were the players
Speaker 2: were equal. Nobody was getting No one that I know
Speaker 2: was getting double scale for anything. And in fact, we
Speaker 2: all had the same answering service. Would you call It
Speaker 2: was called radio registry who just had a list of
Speaker 2: bass players in The contractor would give him maybe eight
Speaker 2: names of bass players, he didn't care who showed up,
Speaker 2: and they would they the answering company would call, go
Speaker 2: down the list, and if you didn't answer the phone,
Speaker 2: they would go to And there were no cell phones,
Speaker 2: by the way, There were phones in every studio and
Speaker 2: sometimes a direct phone to this radio registry, and if
Speaker 2: you didn't answer, they just greet the second guy. So
Speaker 2: the contractor and the arranger didn't really know who's going
Speaker 2: to come to this session. So it was really very
Speaker 2: different than the much more refined thing that had going
Speaker 2: on in LA, where they really cared and they really
Speaker 2: had people who were going to construct, hopefully a hit record,
Speaker 2: whereas we New York, at least in the circles that
Speaker 2: I was in, we were reading charts and doing just
Speaker 2: regular records and sometimes film. There's also a lot of
Speaker 2: film in LA, but not so much in New York.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you said you were doing that, and then
Speaker 1: you got invited to go on the road. What was
Speaker 1: the first act you went on the road with.
Speaker 2: I was going spending weekends on the road with Gary Burton,
Speaker 2: a jazz wonderful jazz, a vibraphone player, and with Herbie Man.
Speaker 2: Herbie for years had different band every weekend, but I
Speaker 2: played with him for years, and mostly he intentionally did
Speaker 2: weekend shows. We'd go out for the weekend and let
Speaker 2: the guys get back to New York to do their
Speaker 2: sessions during the week. That wasn't so important to me,
Speaker 2: but it was okay, So I did that probably for
Speaker 2: a few years. I also played with This is really
Speaker 2: digging into my memory. I don't think about this very
Speaker 2: often Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary was a
Speaker 2: solo act, and later I did the same with Judy
Speaker 2: Call a lot of weekends, maybe a few others that
Speaker 2: I'm forgetting, So weekends were spent out on the road.
Speaker 2: But the big change for me was when producer Bob
Speaker 2: Ezrin asked me to play at this session for a
Speaker 2: young guy, Peter Gabriel, whom I didn't know, and I
Speaker 2: went up to Toronto and met Peter and met Robert
Speaker 2: Fripp and I played on his album. And when he
Speaker 2: asked me to go on the road, that wasn't for
Speaker 2: a weekend. That was for a real tour, a rock tour,
Speaker 2: and I was all one hundred percent into doing that
Speaker 2: because playing this music live is why I went into music.
Speaker 2: I don't mind recording, but I love playing live and
Speaker 2: having the audience be part of the whole thing that's
Speaker 2: going on. So that was the beginning of the end
Speaker 2: of my career as a studio player, but happily beginning
Speaker 2: of my career as a road player.
Speaker 1: How'd you know Israel? I don't know how I.
Speaker 2: First know him. That was not the first album he
Speaker 2: asked me to play on. I'll ask him how we met,
Speaker 2: I don't remember. I had played at that time on
Speaker 2: Lou Reed's Berlin album and on a number of Alice
Speaker 2: Cooper records. Those are the only ones I remember doing
Speaker 2: with Bob, and he just he thought of me. Bless him.
Speaker 2: He thought, this studio guy, he's a rock player. He
Speaker 2: wants to be playing distorted bass and that stuff. And
Speaker 2: he was right, and he heard that, and I happily
Speaker 2: went along.
Speaker 1: At what point did you develop your look of the
Speaker 1: mustache and the shaved head.
Speaker 2: I'm squeamish about the expression developed my look because that
Speaker 2: wasn't the way it came about, But I guess it's sort.
Speaker 1: Of how did it come up?
Speaker 2: Yeah, one summer it was hot, it was really hot,
Speaker 2: and I said, heck with this, I'm cutting off my hair.
Speaker 2: And I did it regularly that summer, and for a
Speaker 2: few years, as soon as it got cold at Chili
Speaker 2: in September, I would grow both hair and beard through
Speaker 2: the winter. I was certainly not concerned with how I looked.
Speaker 2: I looked pretty pretty strange both ways. At that time,
Speaker 2: which is a long time ago, it was unusual to
Speaker 2: be bald. I can describe it in this way. People
Speaker 2: of people on the street who just couldn't help but
Speaker 2: say something, would say, hey, you'll referring to yul Brenner.
Speaker 2: Later they would say hey, Kojak. Not much later, maybe
Speaker 2: you're half six months a year. And again these are
Speaker 2: people I don't care, but people without a filter. And
Speaker 2: that's fine. You just have to say something to a
Speaker 2: bald guy. Kids would point, you know, kids, oh look, daddy,
Speaker 2: that guy got no hair. So it was very unusual.
Speaker 2: It was interesting that I was that way. Then maybe
Speaker 2: there were some other rock players without hair. I don't
Speaker 2: really know, but not that many years later it became
Speaker 2: quite common because guys, you know, for a number of reasons,
Speaker 2: but one of them is guys realizing they have no
Speaker 2: more hair on top, might as well cut the whole
Speaker 2: thing off. And and for me, after a couple of
Speaker 2: years of the beard, uh, I would say a little
Speaker 2: bit of vanity crept in. And so many people told me, hey,
Speaker 2: you look good without the hair, and hey, you don't
Speaker 2: look so great with the beard and the semi hair,
Speaker 2: and I just kept shaving. So that was it. I
Speaker 2: don't really remember where the mustache came in.
Speaker 1: Do you ever change your look now? Do you ever
Speaker 1: say hey, I'm sick of this. I want to go incognitum,
Speaker 1: let my hair grow, shave my mustache.
Speaker 2: I can't do it so much I used to. I
Speaker 2: used to change be way into changing the look with
Speaker 2: different hair lengths. I've had shoulder length hair. I never
Speaker 2: had a lot of hair on top. But I had
Speaker 2: shoulder length hair and full beard. But it can't change
Speaker 2: it much. I think the I think once in a
Speaker 2: while I'll grow a little more of a beard or
Speaker 2: what do you call it, a vandyke, But pretty much
Speaker 2: I don't. And it's not because I wouldn't like to.
Speaker 2: It's just a I don't have the materials anymore. Through
Speaker 2: the hair is not growing, and I will say that
Speaker 2: I die my mustache, of course, because it would be
Speaker 2: almost invisible if I didn't.
Speaker 1: Okay, few technical questions. Traditional p bass four strings? Why
Speaker 1: four y five y six?
Speaker 2: Wow? I think the four decision was made maybe in
Speaker 2: the eighteen hundreds. My dogs have entered the house. By
Speaker 2: the way, I think the decision for four strings was made.
Speaker 2: What we call the upright bass was developed. I'm not
Speaker 2: sure the history of that. I only played four strings.
Speaker 2: I guess in classical we had an extender for the
Speaker 2: low east ring that would bring it down to a
Speaker 2: low sea, a little device, mechanical device on the top
Speaker 2: that you could have your base adjusted to have that,
Speaker 2: and it was necessary for some symphonies, but not for
Speaker 2: most of them. And then when I moved to Fender base,
Speaker 2: it only had four strings. Later, much later, when music banned,
Speaker 2: there were five strings, but I wasn't interested in trying them.
Speaker 2: It's funny when I think about myself, I guess I'm
Speaker 2: a combination of being very open to new ideas like
Speaker 2: the Chapman stick and the funk fingers and things that
Speaker 2: are really weird, and in a way being not adventurous
Speaker 2: at all and not trying a five string based because
Speaker 2: I just wasn't interested. But when Ernie Ball music man
Speaker 2: said we got a five string, and I think, I said, well,
Speaker 2: does the E sound the same? Because the other five
Speaker 2: strings I've played, the E doesn't sound the same. And
Speaker 2: the E is my life, that's where I live, that's
Speaker 2: what I want. I want that E to have that power.
Speaker 2: And they said it does and it did, so boom.
Speaker 2: I played five string and pretty much only five string
Speaker 2: for quite a while. Of course, at my home studio
Speaker 2: I have the four strings, which have their own sound,
Speaker 2: and I use them plenty. And by the way, on
Speaker 2: the upcoming beat the tour, I will do what I
Speaker 2: did in the eighties. I'll play that bass with the
Speaker 2: four strings and in the same bass, with the same sound.
Speaker 2: It'll be great. As for other the six strings I've
Speaker 2: never tried to this day, and I don't know why
Speaker 2: I haven't tried it. It just hasn't fallen into my hands.
Speaker 2: I do play the Chapman sticks, which mine has twelve strings,
Speaker 2: so I can handle more strings. But on all of
Speaker 2: these really what I'm looking for is to be able
Speaker 2: to do a versatile and worthwhile and meaningful bass sound
Speaker 2: on the low notes. And if it's got high stuff,
Speaker 2: that's good, that's a bonus. But it's those low notes
Speaker 2: that matter to me. When I first heard of the
Speaker 2: Chaplain stick, when I first tried it, I found it
Speaker 2: very different than the bass and really suitable for the
Speaker 2: progressive rock stuff I was doing, the odd of the
Speaker 2: ordinary of stuff I was doing in the early eighties
Speaker 2: with King Crimson, and also down low. It had not
Speaker 2: the big, fat sound that I always wanted, and not
Speaker 2: the powerful sound, but a lot of articulation so suddenly
Speaker 2: I could play very fast, very low, and I thought, well,
Speaker 2: there were some certain situations where I'm going to want that,
Speaker 2: and those situations are going to bring out this instrument,
Speaker 2: but only in those For years, I only brought it
Speaker 2: out in those situations.
Speaker 1: Okay, I certainly remember going to see shows all of
Speaker 1: a sudden the Chapman stick appearing to me. It seemed
Speaker 1: like it's sort of heat and it's not as popular now.
Speaker 1: For those who don't know, tell us exactly what the
Speaker 1: Chapman stick is.
Speaker 2: Yes, Emma Chapman in about I'm guessing nineteen seventy five
Speaker 2: invented it and it's or finished inventing his instrument and
Speaker 2: released it. That's designed to be played with a hammer
Speaker 2: on or a tapping technique. So you don't fret the
Speaker 2: note the way you do on a bass or guitar
Speaker 2: with your left hand and plunk plucket. You don't do that.
Speaker 2: You just touch the fret with your left hand or
Speaker 2: your right hand and the note comes out, which involves,
Speaker 2: of course the strings being set up very low action,
Speaker 2: so you don't have to really hammer on. I call
Speaker 2: that hammeron playing, but it isn't. You can just touch
Speaker 2: it and amme it at the same time developed an
Speaker 2: instrument vertical, not at the same angle as a guitar
Speaker 2: that hooks in your belt hook sorry, it hooks into
Speaker 2: your belt so you can play it in a vertical way.
Speaker 2: And his instrument had five bass strings and five guitar
Speaker 2: strings on the same neck with a stereo output. So
Speaker 2: for the first time I had heard of of any instrument,
Speaker 2: it had two outputs that are completely two different instruments.
Speaker 2: And if that wasn't unusual enough, the hammer on and
Speaker 2: the stereo output, Emmett decided to have the guitar strings
Speaker 2: be tuned in forth and the bass strings tuned in
Speaker 2: fifths and backwards. So you have a very unusual instrument
Speaker 2: outside of the norm. And it's kind of easy to
Speaker 2: pick in a way. It's easy to pick it up
Speaker 2: and play it because you don't have to have that
Speaker 2: fretting and plucking. You just touch a note and there's
Speaker 2: your note put in a way for some especially for
Speaker 2: some of us, it's kind of hard to get used to.
Speaker 2: So I jumped on it early for the reason that
Speaker 2: I used to play the I still do play the
Speaker 2: bass with a hammer on technique, and I thought I
Speaker 2: got to try this instrument. It's designed to be played
Speaker 2: that way and by the way. Eventually there became a
Speaker 2: twelve string instrument and that's what I play now. And
Speaker 2: a few years ago, quite a few ten fifteen years ago,
Speaker 2: I decided to form a group called stick Men, where
Speaker 2: we only played the Chapman stick, two of us and
Speaker 2: a drummer, Pat Macelado. And then after a few years
Speaker 2: the other stick players replaced by Marcus reuter Or, a
Speaker 2: great touch guitar player, who he played the Chapman stick,
Speaker 2: and then he developed his own instrument called the touch guitar,
Speaker 2: which is played the same way but has kind of
Speaker 2: different elements to it.
Speaker 1: So my perception is is it's not as popular as
Speaker 1: it was in the seventies. Is that correct or incorrect.
Speaker 2: I'm not the guy who would know. I could write
Speaker 2: an uncomfortable email to stick enterprises and ask them, but
Speaker 2: I have no idea. I know, once in a while
Speaker 2: I hear other players, and I'm always impressed with the
Speaker 2: things they do that I couldn't do, And maybe if
Speaker 2: I practiced, I could. It's kind of a Wild West
Speaker 2: instrument in that you can develop your own technique, you
Speaker 2: can have your hands wherever you want. So players are
Speaker 2: always finding things to do that the rest of us
Speaker 2: didn't think of. And that's a wild thing about the instrument.
Speaker 2: But how many people are buying it and how many
Speaker 2: people are playing it is really not something I know about.
Speaker 1: So when would you use it with someone else's music?
Speaker 2: Easy to talk about, Peter. I go show up at
Speaker 2: Peter gabriel session, which I did about a year and
Speaker 2: a half ago for what became the Io album, And
Speaker 2: I have in my trunk of basses a fretless and
Speaker 2: that NS electric upright, and a five string and a
Speaker 2: four string and a vintage four string, and I have
Speaker 2: the Chapman stick. And he plays the piece, and I
Speaker 2: don't think the musical part of my brain becomes quickly
Speaker 2: attached to whatever he's playing and singing, whether he's doing
Speaker 2: it live or playing a recording of what he's got
Speaker 2: down so far, And I become a fan of that
Speaker 2: piece of music. I'm saying with Peter Gabriel it would
Speaker 2: be the same somebody else. I become a fan of that,
Speaker 2: and I kind of start fashioning in my musical brain
Speaker 2: what sound might be good for it, and if it
Speaker 2: could be.
Speaker 1: Very low.
Speaker 2: Okay, the stick. Hey, the stick does that. Or it
Speaker 2: could be chords way up high in a way that
Speaker 2: the stick does well. Or it could be a big
Speaker 2: fat sound that the NS electric upright gives me. Or
Speaker 2: it could be a heavy rock sound that my music
Speaker 2: man four string might be good. So I don't think
Speaker 2: about it, but I kind of get a sense of
Speaker 2: what sound would be good, and then I look around
Speaker 2: at the instruments I have, and maybe I think, well,
Speaker 2: this bass would be good, but only if I put
Speaker 2: foam rubber under the strings or something like that to
Speaker 2: make it more dampened than shorter notes. And that's how
Speaker 2: I choose what to play. And by the way, Peter
Speaker 2: might hear it and say I think I'd like the
Speaker 2: upright on that, and case I make a quick switch.
Speaker 2: But it's a musical decision. Sorry for the long answer
Speaker 2: to your short question. Not an intellectual decision or not
Speaker 2: based on history. I just kind of go by what
Speaker 2: it feels like would be the right instrument for that
Speaker 2: particular piece.
Speaker 1: What about Jock Opustorius.
Speaker 2: Obviously a great player For those who don't know, he
Speaker 2: was maybe the most famously great jazz fretless bass player
Speaker 2: of all time. I met him a couple of times,
Speaker 2: and my brother played with him a lot. I'll tell
Speaker 2: you an interesting thing about his playing and mine intersecting
Speaker 2: in a funny way. I heard about him when he
Speaker 2: came out with a solo album and I heard it
Speaker 2: and I thought it was great, but not really kind of.
Speaker 2: It was very technical and almost phenomenally technical, and I
Speaker 2: wasn't interested in that. It was pretty musical, and I
Speaker 2: liked that, okay. And then two things happened. I found
Speaker 2: myself on a session. I don't usually play solos, but
Speaker 2: I was on a session one day in a studio
Speaker 2: and there was a bass solo and I said, you
Speaker 2: know what, I'll overdub it. So the other guys went
Speaker 2: out and into the control room and I'm playing a
Speaker 2: rare jazz bass and I see Jacko coming in to
Speaker 2: the control horrum and I thought, you couldn't script this
Speaker 2: better than this. You know, not a nightmare, but this
Speaker 2: is really awkward. I can barely play this file. And
Speaker 2: now Jacko was listening to me. So there was that.
Speaker 2: But also when he played on Joni Mitchell's Hegira record,
Speaker 2: that was a whole different thing for me. His playing
Speaker 2: was so sublime that I didn't want to hear myself
Speaker 2: play the Fretless anymore. So I put away the Fretless
Speaker 2: and for ten years I didn't play the Fretless at all.
Speaker 2: I thought I'll never play it again, because, yeah, I
Speaker 2: think I already expressed it well, but I couldn't. He
Speaker 2: was playing the way I dreamed I might be able
Speaker 2: to play. And I don't mean fast, just the right
Speaker 2: notes and the right sound and impeccably in tune and
Speaker 2: phrasing that's just doesn't get in the way of the piece,
Speaker 2: but on its own, the phrasing is magical. So I
Speaker 2: just couldn't hear myself doing that. And yeah, after a
Speaker 2: whole long time, someone asked me to play Fretless and
Speaker 2: I had, frankly to tell you the truth. I had forgotten.
Speaker 2: I've forgotten how I felt hearing Hajira, and so I said, okay,
Speaker 2: I'll try. I'll play Fretless again. And I've later a
Speaker 2: great deal since, and I've got over that hump of
Speaker 2: not comparing myself in any way to Jacko was playing any.
Speaker 1: Other bass players who you look up to or think
Speaker 1: are great and either have recognition or deserve recognition.
Speaker 2: I think names don't come to mind. But I am
Speaker 2: influenced by a whole lot of bass players, a whole lot.
Speaker 2: And from the beginning I mentioned Oscar Petiford back when
Speaker 2: I was ten years old, So I in a way,
Speaker 2: I think we bass players, not just me. When we
Speaker 2: listen to any music, we're sort of aware on some level.
Speaker 2: We're aware of what the bass player is doing and
Speaker 2: if it works, and if it doesn't work. It could
Speaker 2: even be even some record I'm not talking about live
Speaker 2: or in the here's something and jeez, names aren't coming
Speaker 2: to mind, but the base is just doing exactly the
Speaker 2: right thing, and I'll think, oh yeah, and I'll try
Speaker 2: and obviously I'll try and incorporate that into my musical
Speaker 2: sense of what might work, or I'll here in some
Speaker 2: way it could be sonically that the bass and drums
Speaker 2: don't work together or something like that, and I'll think, well,
Speaker 2: I don't want to do that. So I'm being influenced
Speaker 2: all the time, and I think a lot of bass
Speaker 2: players are by a lot of players, And the only
Speaker 2: thing that's changed in the last few years is the
Speaker 2: young players who are there on YouTube for us to
Speaker 2: hear doing things that I could never do. And I
Speaker 2: will never do also influence me. And I decided in
Speaker 2: that lockdown year, when I had time to I wasn't
Speaker 2: doing so many records, and I had time to listen
Speaker 2: a lot. I decided to look at them as more
Speaker 2: my teachers than where do I fit into what's being
Speaker 2: going on now? And in some cases I would if
Speaker 2: it's a video and I can see the person's finger
Speaker 2: and it's a woman player, and that's great. Now I
Speaker 2: can see how they held their wrists or something like that,
Speaker 2: or their fingers the palm of their hand to dampen
Speaker 2: the notes, and I'll try and learn from that.
Speaker 1: Okay, you work with Peter Gabriel on the Flour solo album,
Speaker 1: you meet Frip, you go on the road with Frip.
Speaker 1: It's his act, not yours. That two ends.
Speaker 2: Then what you mean the first Peter Gabriel tour, No,
Speaker 2: the way you said it.
Speaker 1: Okay, After you cut the Peter Gabriel album, the one
Speaker 1: with Salisbury Hill, et cetera, do you then go on
Speaker 1: the road with Peter or then go on the road
Speaker 1: with Frip.
Speaker 2: Both. Peter took that album on the road and Robert
Speaker 2: was one of the two guitar players Steve Hunter was
Speaker 2: the other and Robert, in his inimitable way, he was
Speaker 2: in the in the wings. He didn't want to be
Speaker 2: seen and he didn't want Peter to introduce him as
Speaker 2: Robert Fripp. Dusty Rhodes on guitar was what Peter would
Speaker 2: say every night, and the whole audience knew that it
Speaker 2: was Robert and they were looking in the wings anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so we did a wonderful tour, not an ideal tour.
Speaker 2: There was a problem with the sound that the band
Speaker 2: was just too loud on stage and there was no
Speaker 2: way the sound engineer could get us to turn down.
Speaker 2: I say us, but frankly, it wasn't me. It was
Speaker 2: the guitars and drums. It was too loud for the venues.
Speaker 2: So it was less than an ideal tour. But Peter
Speaker 2: was fantastic, and you know, he pretty quickly went into
Speaker 2: starting thinking about the next album and the next tour,
Speaker 2: and I was one hundred percent in for everything he's
Speaker 2: done since then.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess my question is, you know a lot
Speaker 1: of these are not traditional bands, and you make a record,
Speaker 1: you go on the road, and then you got nothing booked.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know somebody played on Elton's you Know
Speaker 1: Final tour. As soon as that tour ended, he was
Speaker 1: out with somebody else. Okay, so once she played that
Speaker 1: first album, the first tour has just been endless. Or
Speaker 1: you ever said, where's my next gig?
Speaker 2: Well, freelance anything. We all say when's my next gig?
Speaker 2: Where is it? It happens to us all at any
Speaker 2: stage of success, unless you're well, I think everybody, there's
Speaker 2: times when you don't have enough gigs. This is why
Speaker 2: my brother taught me, take all the gigs. You're going
Speaker 2: to need them. One day, you're gonna want them. I
Speaker 2: think I don't remember exactly what happened the year that
Speaker 2: Peter Gabriel's first tour ended, and I knew I wanted
Speaker 2: to do more of that, but I was able to
Speaker 2: do some stuff, and I think maybe it took me
Speaker 2: a decade or two to realize that it would be
Speaker 2: good to have my own music coming out so that
Speaker 2: I could form my own band and in a small way,
Speaker 2: to something to fill in the times between the big tours.
Speaker 2: And that's what we have all learned that I was
Speaker 2: slow to figure that out, and I've done that ever since.
Speaker 2: So eleven brothers the jazz band with my brother. We
Speaker 2: can book that on short notice and go do some shows.
Speaker 2: Stickman can group book at rock clubs moderately, short notice,
Speaker 2: maybe six months eight months out. Who're a band like
Speaker 2: King Crimson needs to be over a year out.
Speaker 1: Okay, do you have a manager or do you do
Speaker 1: this all yourself?
Speaker 2: I don't have a manager, and I don't really do
Speaker 2: it myself. I get these calls I'm laughing. Just the
Speaker 2: idea of having a manager, Yeah, that would be a
Speaker 2: good idea, But I'm not that kind of player. I
Speaker 2: just and myself, and people regularly find me and ask
Speaker 2: me to do play on their records and record from
Speaker 2: my home studio where I'm talking to you from, and
Speaker 2: that's really great. I missed it in the early two
Speaker 2: thousands when I started doing that and less and less
Speaker 2: studio playing in person in the studio. I was unhappy
Speaker 2: about it, of course, because I missed the experience of
Speaker 2: all being together in the studio. But now that it's
Speaker 2: become ninety percent more than ninety percent of the sessions
Speaker 2: everybody does, I've kind of learned tricks and ways to
Speaker 2: deal with it and get good music out of it.
Speaker 2: And I really enjoy that. When I'm home, I get
Speaker 2: to do that. Similarly, if I play on someone's album,
Speaker 2: I play on a lot of albums, and if they
Speaker 2: ask me to tour with them, if the music is
Speaker 2: right and if I'm free, then then I can do
Speaker 2: that and be glad that I'm free to do that.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's say you're going on the road with not
Speaker 1: one of your traditional acts. How do you decide what
Speaker 1: to charge?
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm terrible at that. Ooh, I don't know what
Speaker 2: to say about that. It's not something I do if
Speaker 2: it's not something I'm good at and not something I
Speaker 2: want to deal with. So I deal with it because
Speaker 2: I have to. Sometimes we ask to be paid what
Speaker 2: the other guys are getting. There's that trick, and it's
Speaker 2: kind of silly that amongst the musicians who are backing
Speaker 2: someone up, it's pretty rare that we even discuss it.
Speaker 2: It ought to be the first thing we talk about.
Speaker 2: But I'm guessing, as you can probably tell from listening
Speaker 2: to me talk that this about because most of us,
Speaker 2: like me, went into it for the music and they
Speaker 2: just kind of shy away from the business side of it.
Speaker 1: Okay, Back in the earlier days after you work with
Speaker 1: Peter Gabriel and you still have holes in your system.
Speaker 1: Your rep is not as big as it is now.
Speaker 1: To what degree did you network and try to find opportunities?
Speaker 1: And to what degree did you sit there and wait
Speaker 1: for the phone to ring.
Speaker 2: I never networked. I sit there and I don't sit
Speaker 2: there and wait for the phone to ring. I work
Speaker 2: on my solo albums and I and I call guys
Speaker 2: and ask them to jam. And you know, I do
Speaker 2: the other kind of music that we all do, but
Speaker 2: I do not. I don't know how to what would
Speaker 2: you call how to fish for work? I just don't
Speaker 2: know how to do that. And by the way, and
Speaker 2: by the way, at every you're talk to me about
Speaker 2: me like I'm extremely busy, and I am. As we
Speaker 2: talked today, I have a huge amount of touring coming up,
Speaker 2: but then actually have a little something in January and
Speaker 2: then I might I don't know. It could be months
Speaker 2: or even six months before I get anything good, in
Speaker 2: which case I'll finish the second another album.
Speaker 1: So let's say, I mean I know how to contact you.
Speaker 1: Most people do not. But assuming they can get to you,
Speaker 1: will you basically take any gig?
Speaker 2: No, not at all. I want to hear the music.
Speaker 2: It's become easy from the internet used to be more complicated.
Speaker 2: But what was the It wasn't Facebook. There was a
Speaker 2: MySpace that was it where they could play me the
Speaker 2: demo and everybody could find me. That was kind of cool.
Speaker 2: I don't know why it went away, but yeah, it's
Speaker 2: not only that it wants to be good music, but
Speaker 2: I want to hear that I have something to offer
Speaker 2: for that music. I'll take an extreme example. Let's say
Speaker 2: it's disco. If you today, Bob, you send me a
Speaker 2: disco track, and maybe I could technically do it, and
Speaker 2: maybe it's a really good disco track, but I have
Speaker 2: you know, the demo bass part would be fine, better
Speaker 2: than what I could do, or as good as what
Speaker 2: I could do. So I have nothing to offer to
Speaker 2: that track. So I would say with respect, I was
Speaker 2: saying sorry, not for me. And and a guy comes
Speaker 2: to mind, what's his name, really good h Nick di Virgilio,
Speaker 2: very excellent singer and drummer. And sometimes I play on
Speaker 2: his records progressive rock, wonderful stuff and one once in
Speaker 2: a while, I mean, he'll have me play on a track.
Speaker 2: And a couple of years ago he sent me one
Speaker 2: where he had played the bass, and I listened. Usually
Speaker 2: I only give one listen to the bass part that's there,
Speaker 2: and then I want to hear it without it. But
Speaker 2: I kept listening to it, and the bass part was great.
Speaker 2: He's a friend that I've worked with him a lot.
Speaker 2: But I had I had a writer him. I said, I,
Speaker 2: All the best I could do is do exactly what
Speaker 2: you did. Did. I couldn't even improve on the sound.
Speaker 2: So let's uh, you know, right on right on that
Speaker 2: track that the bass player said, you got it, you
Speaker 2: did it really well.
Speaker 1: So how'd you end up working with Paul Simon?
Speaker 2: I think because of the great engineer and producer Phil Ramone.
Speaker 2: He had used me in the same rhythm section on
Speaker 2: a number of sessions, and because he was doing Paul.
Speaker 2: My memory is not perfect of this, but I'm guessing
Speaker 2: I certainly didn't know Paul himself, and Phil was the producer,
Speaker 2: So it was Phil who brought in Steve Gadd and
Speaker 2: myself Richard t on piano, Eric Gale on guitar. We
Speaker 2: were sort of a rhythm section that had done a
Speaker 2: lot of records together, and the experience of working with Paul,
Speaker 2: of course was super special and remained that way for
Speaker 2: the few years that I worked with him, both live
Speaker 2: and in the studio.
Speaker 1: So what was it like being in the movie One
Speaker 1: Trick Pony? That was?
Speaker 2: That was not thrilling to me. I didn't I didn't
Speaker 2: really want to be an actor, but there I was
Speaker 2: the bass player in the band, in the real band,
Speaker 2: and trying to play the part of being the bass
Speaker 2: player in the pretend band. Yeah, it was. I only
Speaker 2: had a few lines, so it wasn't saying the lines.
Speaker 2: It was a lot of hanging around in Cleveland and
Speaker 2: having makeup put on and taken off and put on
Speaker 2: again and taken off to be to look like a
Speaker 2: band in a club, which is sort of what I
Speaker 2: look like to begin with. And I couldn't even use
Speaker 2: my name because, uh, for some reason, Paul had called
Speaker 2: himself Jonah Levin. That was the name of the lead character, Paul,
Speaker 2: and so I couldn't be Tony Levin. That would be confusing,
Speaker 2: even though we're only talking script because nobody says, hey, Jonah,
Speaker 2: how you doing, It's not not necessarily in the dialogue.
Speaker 2: So my name I got a big kick. My name
Speaker 2: was John de Bautista, John the Baptist.
Speaker 1: Okay, there's a scene in that movie. You were driving
Speaker 1: in the van, you're playing dead rock stars. I remember
Speaker 1: seeing that movie when it came out and said, oh,
Speaker 1: I know who's alive and dead? How come they don't know?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 1: I played that in mind as that I can't you know, remember,
Speaker 1: can you tell me anything about that scene?
Speaker 2: Yes, Paul had written it with his sense of humor
Speaker 2: and irony. You know Paul, what Paul's like as a writer.
Speaker 2: And the guys in the band could learn it. But
Speaker 2: but they didn't know what they were talking about because
Speaker 2: Richard T and Eric Gale and Steve Gad they didn't
Speaker 2: know any of those bands. They don't listen to. I
Speaker 2: don't know who it was at Fleetwood Mac now it
Speaker 2: was yeah, the plane going down? It was Plenty. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: they didn't They just didn't know. So they're reading that
Speaker 2: and the director who didn't realize that, Bob Young, very
Speaker 2: good director, who was in the band with us somehow.
Speaker 2: So okay, let's do it again, and this time you
Speaker 2: guys just ad lib, just make up names of bands
Speaker 2: that died. We couldn't do it. These are not actors
Speaker 2: and these are not guys a verse in the history
Speaker 2: of rock and roll. So yeah, it was awkward. Well
Speaker 2: you told me, Just tell you one more thing. There
Speaker 2: was for some reason, there was a thing about Tim Harden,
Speaker 2: Uh a joke. I think the scene ended with somebody
Speaker 2: saying Tim Harden and someone else saying scripted saying, oh,
Speaker 2: he's not dead, he just hasn't had a record out
Speaker 2: in a while or something like that, and the lawyers
Speaker 2: later said, you got to reshoot that scene. And then
Speaker 2: Tim Harden died, right, Yeah, so there was that about
Speaker 2: that scene.
Speaker 1: Okay, now you talk about some legendary people. You worked with,
Speaker 1: John Lennon, Peter Gabriel. What was it like working in
Speaker 1: the studio with Paul Simon.
Speaker 2: Terrific I did a lot over a long period of time,
Speaker 2: and Paul would well, of course, the songs are so great,
Speaker 2: they're really special. But he his process seemed to be
Speaker 2: an internal one and that he was going to search
Speaker 2: for the right field for that piece until it was right,
Speaker 2: and until it was right, it just wasn't going to
Speaker 2: He wasn't going to be happy, it wasn't going to work.
Speaker 2: It could take a month or it could take an hour.
Speaker 2: So typically he would play the piece. Sometimes it had
Speaker 2: all the lyrics, but if not, he would just hum it,
Speaker 2: and he would go over to Richard t the great,
Speaker 2: great keyboard player, usually on the Fender Roads, always on
Speaker 2: the Fender Roads, and play it as a duo until
Speaker 2: he was happy with Richard's part, which took about thirty seconds,
Speaker 2: because Richard always played great stuff, and then Paul would
Speaker 2: come over to me, or to Steve Gadd the drummer,
Speaker 2: maybe to Eric the guitar player, but usually Eric could
Speaker 2: kind of cop what Paul was doing on guitar, and
Speaker 2: Paul would come over to me and sing the melody,
Speaker 2: but he would also kind of hum or sing imply
Speaker 2: a bass part. And it was fascinating to me that
Speaker 2: it was a very melodic not surprising there, and more
Speaker 2: melodic than I would normally play. And I would start
Speaker 2: to play something like what he's doing, but also I'm
Speaker 2: the bass player and I need to ground it, and
Speaker 2: so the end product would be something. Pretty quickly we'd
Speaker 2: find something we're both happy with that's more melodic than
Speaker 2: I generally play. After a while playing with Paul, I
Speaker 2: became a more melodic player. I became more likely to
Speaker 2: go up high and play a chord way up high
Speaker 2: than I was before that. So I was very influenced
Speaker 2: by that experience, and you can imagine I treasure it
Speaker 2: a lot. But also he let me play the low
Speaker 2: notes and the simple parts. You know. A great example
Speaker 2: is Fifty Ways Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover, an
Speaker 2: amazing song lyrically, even I love the irony and the
Speaker 2: not just the chorus, the famous part, but the first
Speaker 2: verse starts in a wonderful way. But in the beginning
Speaker 2: I'm playing high and playing chords can be a melodic
Speaker 2: bass thing. But then the when the chorus starts, I'm
Speaker 2: just playing quarter notes down low in a gospel kind
Speaker 2: of way, just the way, very very simple, And I
Speaker 2: love the contrast between those two. And it reminds me
Speaker 2: if I hear that, it reminds me how much I
Speaker 2: learned from Paul melodically about what I can do on
Speaker 2: bass to.
Speaker 1: What degree you talk about getting the feel right. But
Speaker 1: when he got in the student, were the songs finished
Speaker 1: and just tweaking them or would he change them in
Speaker 1: the studio.
Speaker 2: Both Sometimes it was finished, done deal, and sometimes he
Speaker 2: had no lyrics. Sometimes I think one song called have
Speaker 2: a Good Time, Maybe it was he said his son
Speaker 2: had just said something that morning to me, and they
Speaker 2: all had a good time, and that was the song
Speaker 2: was going to be about that, and he he I
Speaker 2: don't remember how long we worked on it could be days,
Speaker 2: could be one day, I don't know. But once we
Speaker 2: had the track in a way that made him happy.
Speaker 2: The next morning he came in with the finish lyrics.
Speaker 2: He had written them that night. I happened to come
Speaker 2: in early and I heard him singing a song that
Speaker 2: sounded like it took a year to write. So that's
Speaker 2: what I meant about, when things were right for him,
Speaker 2: that he could he could complete the song.
Speaker 1: So let's say you're working with him for months once again,
Speaker 1: how do you decide to charge? You make it a union? Raid?
Speaker 1: Do they make you an offer beforehand? How does that
Speaker 1: even work?
Speaker 2: I think back in those first of all, I don't
Speaker 2: I'm squeamish about all that. I don't pay much attention
Speaker 2: to it. But back in those days, it was called
Speaker 2: the there was a union scale. Maybe some of the
Speaker 2: other guys made what's called double scale on that session.
Speaker 2: I don't really know, but I was getting paid by
Speaker 2: the hour, not tremendous pay, not terrible pay. I wasn't
Speaker 2: really thinking about it then, and I don't remember. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna guess I know. When I started in New York,
Speaker 2: a double sorry a session, a three hour record session
Speaker 2: paid sixty dollars or something like that. So maybe it
Speaker 2: went up to one hundred and eighty dollars or something
Speaker 2: like that, but for a three hour session, and those
Speaker 2: would have been six hour sessions.
Speaker 1: Now you're literally classically trained. A lot of rock bass
Speaker 1: go the and then you have Paul McCartney, who was
Speaker 1: famous for Melody on the base, certainly untrained. What is
Speaker 1: your view on McCartney's base play.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fantastic, fantastic stuff that influenced all of us, but
Speaker 2: me included for sure. Even though you know the training,
Speaker 2: it really has nothing to do with it. When I
Speaker 2: came to I'll tell you a little thing about that,
Speaker 2: the training. I was a classical musician. So when I
Speaker 2: came to New York and started doing sessions, when there
Speaker 2: was a chart and an arranger who would write out
Speaker 2: every note to play, I would play every note the
Speaker 2: way he wrote it, the way a classical player would.
Speaker 2: Even when I I'm not proud of this, but if
Speaker 2: I saw and just knew that it was not the
Speaker 2: note that was wanted. I would still play it because
Speaker 2: that's what classic I'm not. It's silly, but that's what
Speaker 2: classical players do. Literally, if a fly poops on the page,
Speaker 2: you're going to play that note. And you just pointed
Speaker 2: the page, all it's there. Okay. So I did that
Speaker 2: for a minute and New York minute. I did that
Speaker 2: for I don't know X number of months before I
Speaker 2: realized that what I want to do is figure out
Speaker 2: what the arranger wants and play that in spite of
Speaker 2: what he wrote. I actually don't remember what your question was,
Speaker 2: but it started me off on thing about reading Bob McCartney. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: So I didn't really in my early session years have
Speaker 2: a style of playing. I was doing what I thought
Speaker 2: was wanted on that on those on that particular record. However,
Speaker 2: I was influenced, given the chance to plitt, to make
Speaker 2: up my own part, which I often wasn't. I was
Speaker 2: influenced by Paul Mark McCartney to do a great deal
Speaker 2: not only the choice of notes, which are very fantastic,
Speaker 2: you know, beyond description fantastic, but the sound he was playing,
Speaker 2: famously ah Hoffner, which sounded very different than than the
Speaker 2: Fender base that we all were playing on. All the
Speaker 2: records made in New York in those days. Nobody had
Speaker 2: a Hoffner or Gibson, and if you did and walked
Speaker 2: into a session, a normal session, the engineer would never
Speaker 2: use you again. The producer, they wouldn't like the sound
Speaker 2: you had. So I wasn't allowed the latitude of sound
Speaker 2: that Paul really made use of in a great way.
Speaker 2: And I'm also going to add d Murray, the unheralded
Speaker 2: wonderful bass player with Elton John on his early records,
Speaker 2: also played in a wonderfully melodic way, and that influenced
Speaker 2: me a lot.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's say someone makes contact with you, you're
Speaker 1: out with the bead, you're out with whomever, and you
Speaker 1: can't do it. Who do you tell them to call?
Speaker 2: Very very funny question. That has happened in the last
Speaker 2: couple of days. A few times I've got emails about
Speaker 2: doing a track, because that's I do. Get those emails,
Speaker 2: and I had to say next year I could do it.
Speaker 2: It is not a thing at all in the industry
Speaker 2: where I live that a bass player would be asked
Speaker 2: to recommend another bass player just doesn't happen, so nobody
Speaker 2: they're not if I can't do it, they're not really
Speaker 2: interested in who I like. They're going to get another
Speaker 2: bass player they like, or that the drummer like. That's
Speaker 2: not an even better idea.
Speaker 1: Okay. So traditionally, a session player, a band member gets
Speaker 1: paid by the hour or the gig, other than the
Speaker 1: records you've put out yourself. Do you have royalty interests
Speaker 1: in any of these records?
Speaker 2: Some there's publishing. If you had publishing is big, if
Speaker 2: you had something to do with writing the piece, as
Speaker 2: I do in King Crimson, the bands that I'm a
Speaker 2: remember of, and if you were a band splitting the royalties,
Speaker 2: there's that. Of course that's great. If you're a quote
Speaker 2: session man playing being paid by the hour, then I
Speaker 2: wish I was. I don't wish, but I'm not an
Speaker 2: expert at this. But in general you're just paid by
Speaker 2: the hour. There is no royalty factor. However, in the
Speaker 2: last few years that's changed a bit. There's a big
Speaker 2: fund of money from record labels. I guess that's divided
Speaker 2: up somehow in a complicated way among all the people
Speaker 2: who did all the sessions, and so there is that payment.
Speaker 2: And then there's another thing that's different. In Europe, there's
Speaker 2: an organization that keeps careful track. I don't know that
Speaker 2: there's one in the US. If there is, I guess
Speaker 2: I ought to find it keeps careful track of who
Speaker 2: played on all records and gives them some royalties from it.
Speaker 2: So European recordings, yes, there's some extra payments. I don't
Speaker 2: know anything about how that works or what the percent is.
Speaker 1: Forgetting the money that you've put away. Are the royalty
Speaker 1: interests you have over your fifty odd your career significant
Speaker 1: such that you could live on them, or they can
Speaker 1: basically pay for dinner.
Speaker 2: Yeah, somewhere in between, but a little closer to the
Speaker 2: dinner thing. And caveat is that I haven't counted it
Speaker 2: up and done that math. I've been too busy playing.
Speaker 2: And I like the joke, but with a little bit
Speaker 2: of serious, a ring of truth to it that we
Speaker 2: musicians are very smart in that we've chosen a career
Speaker 2: where we have to keep working until they pull the
Speaker 2: instrument out of our our frozen hands and we can't
Speaker 2: play anymore. And it was a good decision for I think.
Speaker 1: For all of us, and how many times, you've been married.
Speaker 2: Twice?
Speaker 1: And how old were you when we got married the
Speaker 1: first time?
Speaker 2: First of all, I'm baffled why you or anybody would
Speaker 2: want to know this. I can tell you the important one,
Speaker 2: The now one has been eighteen years.
Speaker 1: Okay. Then let me ask you. Let me ask a
Speaker 1: couple of questions a different way. How long were you
Speaker 1: married the first time?
Speaker 2: First? More important, I'm gonna trump you with it. The
Speaker 2: current one is twenty eight years, nine eighteen years, and
Speaker 2: that's the more important one. So I was married for
Speaker 2: ten years, from nineteen sixty six to seventy six.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we were relatively young when you first got married.
Speaker 2: Why didn't those numbers weren't correct? By the way, it
Speaker 2: wasn't sixty six, it was seventy nineteen seventy in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1: Okay, Why did you choose to get married at that time?
Speaker 2: I'm baffled by that question. I have no worthwhile.
Speaker 1: Well something, you know the reason I'm asking this. And
Speaker 1: there's a human you're a road musician. I remember Metallica.
Speaker 1: We're all married. They went on the road that came on,
Speaker 1: they all got divorces. I mean, you know, it's not
Speaker 1: easy to sustain a relationship when you're a road musician.
Speaker 1: I've talked to certain people. They say, oh, thank god
Speaker 1: he goes on the road, he drives me nuts when
Speaker 1: he's home. It all works. So I guess I'm asking.
Speaker 1: Sometimes people want to get married because the musician wants
Speaker 1: an anchor, or the person at home says, hey, you know,
Speaker 1: I want a commitment. Other times, irrelevant of how the
Speaker 1: relationship started, the fact that one person's on the road
Speaker 1: one person is not ends the relationship.
Speaker 2: Good point, and yeah, now I understand the the issue
Speaker 2: behind the question. It's a very good question. I think
Speaker 2: how many years it last, it doesn't matter. It was
Speaker 2: always difficult, always has stress on a relationship to have
Speaker 2: one person gone all the time. And there's also in
Speaker 2: the old days, in my case, when tours were longer,
Speaker 2: when they were eight weeks, ten weeks, twelve weeks, and
Speaker 2: then two weeks at home, and then more they're not
Speaker 2: quite that long usually anymore. This upcoming one is, but
Speaker 2: that exacerbates that factor. Then you're really not a person
Speaker 2: at home, and then when you come home there's a
Speaker 2: period of adjustment. It's just a different world. No matter
Speaker 2: how ground did a person you are. Animals and kids
Speaker 2: help a lot because they don't care that you are
Speaker 2: on the road. But no matter how grounded you are,
Speaker 2: you've had a life where you or your band is
Speaker 2: the center of attention of everybody. You meet, every worker,
Speaker 2: every day, every not just fans, but people working us.
Speaker 2: It's all about you, and interviews and all that all
Speaker 2: about you. And then you go home and it's you know, literally,
Speaker 2: people walk up to you on the street and you
Speaker 2: start to reach for a pen to sign our autographs
Speaker 2: and you're just a home. You're nobody, thank goodness. So
Speaker 2: there's that, and that add that to a relationship. It is,
Speaker 2: of course to strain, and it was harder in the
Speaker 2: even harder in the old days when we didn't have
Speaker 2: cell phones, when you had to make phone calls from
Speaker 2: hotel rooms, which were very notoriously expensive, really expensive one
Speaker 2: hundred dollars phone calls, and if you started to have
Speaker 2: some issues and want to have a fight or a
Speaker 2: long talk, it was it was more than you could
Speaker 2: afford from being out. So that in that one case,
Speaker 2: there's a couple ways that being on the road got
Speaker 2: a lot easier. The other's GPS because we used to
Speaker 2: be lost a lot of time and no phone to
Speaker 2: be able to call and ask directions. Okay, so yeah,
Speaker 2: I got more mature. We all got more mature as
Speaker 2: we got older, and hopefully and in my case for sure,
Speaker 2: found a partner who understand what understands from the beginning,
Speaker 2: what's involved with somebody who's not around all the time,
Speaker 2: and hopefully found ways to connect emotionally and meaningfully while
Speaker 2: you're apart. That's a big part of it. But at
Speaker 2: the end, I'm going to just say that I'm no
Speaker 2: expert at this. I'm just saying what little comes to
Speaker 2: mind in my case about it.
Speaker 1: Okay, you've been on the road and been married, not
Speaker 1: been married. You know, traditionally people took advantage of the
Speaker 1: so called peroks of the road, certainly pre cell phone
Speaker 1: camera and you know, I've been out there myself. I've seen,
Speaker 1: you know, people who were married and they're taking advantage.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to say anything code of the road,
Speaker 1: so to speak. Was this a lifestyle the people you
Speaker 1: went out with partook of if that's the word or
Speaker 1: that you partake or just the acts you were out with,
Speaker 1: that just wasn't a thing.
Speaker 2: No, never toured with that kind of act. I know
Speaker 2: that they're out there, and that kind of rock and
Speaker 2: roll lifestyle is out there, and I've bumped into it
Speaker 2: sometimes and seen other bands that are like that. The
Speaker 2: never anything like that in the band's I tour with.
Speaker 1: And do you have any children?
Speaker 2: Yes, My wonderful daughter is thirty nine now living in
Speaker 2: Los Angeles and writes and directs horror movies.
Speaker 1: And if she off the payroll, I don't know what that.
Speaker 2: Means, off the payroll.
Speaker 1: Do you support her?
Speaker 2: No? No, I don't. Oh that's funny. She's thirty nine.
Speaker 1: I think, Hey, listen, I know people in their seventies.
Speaker 2: Okay, she'll support a valid question. Yep. I'm looking forward
Speaker 2: to only a few years from now when I'm known
Speaker 2: as the guy who's her father.
Speaker 1: Let's hope. So you start working with Peter Gabriel in
Speaker 1: seventy six. The album comes out in seventy seven. The
Speaker 1: first Album's Got a Push, does have Salisbury Hill. Second album,
Speaker 1: Irrelevant of Quality, does not have the same commercial impact.
Speaker 1: Atlantic won't put out the third album That's on Mercury,
Speaker 1: which is really the best of that realogy. Then he
Speaker 1: shifts to Geffen. Has a certain amount of Action has
Speaker 1: a double live album, then all of a sudden, SO
Speaker 1: comes out and it's gigantic, but sledshammer, et cetera. From
Speaker 1: the inside. What did this look like? It was like
Speaker 1: you were in the wilderness. Was it like you were
Speaker 1: in the wilderness and didn't care. Was it like you
Speaker 1: knew it was only a matter of time? What was
Speaker 1: it like?
Speaker 2: I was never good at knowing what's going to be
Speaker 2: a successful record or not, and I don't. Plus I
Speaker 2: don't pay attention to it. Plus it doesn't really matter
Speaker 2: to be the bass player on those records or be
Speaker 2: the bass player on the tour. So it's not that
Speaker 2: it didn't care about it, but I didn't care enough
Speaker 2: about it to be involved in it. I only vaguely
Speaker 2: knew that that stuff was going on. And I'm you know,
Speaker 2: I still get to play on the new material and
Speaker 2: I still get to tour, and that's a win win win.
Speaker 1: Well, let's say that album specifically, although usually the rhythm
Speaker 1: section is early he records, so which then us which
Speaker 1: you know, gigantic. When you're playing on those songs, you say,
Speaker 1: wait a second, this is something special.
Speaker 2: Not the case. No, Peter's Peter's songs almost always had
Speaker 2: or some of the songs had that element of, oh,
Speaker 2: this could be you notice that this could be a
Speaker 2: radio play record, not a hit. I'm not the guy
Speaker 2: to predict that, but oh this is this could be
Speaker 2: very popular, and one way or another, Peter would sabotage
Speaker 2: that part of that song. So he always did that.
Speaker 2: He just has it built into him that that the
Speaker 2: song would get longer and longer, and then eventually that
Speaker 2: first part would be gone, or the second, the core,
Speaker 2: whatever it was, the hook, what you might call the hook.
Speaker 2: Who knows why. I never asked them why, just I
Speaker 2: saw a lot of them come and go, or we
Speaker 2: recorded them, and then they weren't there on the final album.
Speaker 2: And it was an exception when Sledgehammer came out. I thought,
Speaker 2: and I'm not really the expert at the history this,
Speaker 2: but I believe that we had finished the recording of
Speaker 2: the album and Peter, in its quirky way, said let's
Speaker 2: do a song for the next album. And Manukach was
Speaker 2: literally packing up to go back to Paris, and he
Speaker 2: set up again and we played one or two takes
Speaker 2: on what would became Sledgehammer, and I think that wasn't
Speaker 2: meant for the record, and I think the label heard
Speaker 2: it and insisted that he put it on the record.
Speaker 2: So even that one, the Tony Levin opinion, as Peter
Speaker 2: would have sabotaged it in some way. It may had
Speaker 2: a five minute introduction to the hook or something like
Speaker 2: that had he had the chance. But he didn't have
Speaker 2: the chance.
Speaker 1: And in terms of recording Peter's music, to what degree
Speaker 1: is it finished when you show up, or to what
Speaker 1: degrees it worked out in the studio.
Speaker 2: It's a very long process with Peter. I'm used to it.
Speaker 2: It takes a long process and can go on for years.
Speaker 2: You can keep coming back and playing the same songs,
Speaker 2: or it could be done. I don't know there and
Speaker 2: I leave and I don't know is it done this
Speaker 2: record or will I be in the next decade playing it?
Speaker 2: And I just take a pretty deep breath. And that's
Speaker 2: the way it is. And it lies within Peter's sensibility,
Speaker 2: and I'm not the one who's there day to day
Speaker 2: to find out how it's going.
Speaker 1: So in the last thirty years or so, Peter has
Speaker 1: been less active than he was in the previous fifteen
Speaker 1: or twenty. So you have to book a schedule. What
Speaker 1: do you do if Peter calls.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's an element in my life because without question,
Speaker 2: I want to without question, he's the first priority. I
Speaker 2: want to be available for Peter's stuff. And if he
Speaker 2: just book was the kind of person or act or
Speaker 2: had the kind of management that he decides a way
Speaker 2: ahead of time, life would be easy. In fact, the
Speaker 2: two things are coupled that he's my top priority, even
Speaker 2: over King Crimson, and he's the last one to decide
Speaker 2: decides because these things need if it's an arena tour,
Speaker 2: it needs to be booked way ahead of time, but
Speaker 2: he still decides a little bit on the late side,
Speaker 2: which makes it very hard, especially did when I was
Speaker 2: actively touring with Peter and with King Crimson. In fact,
Speaker 2: when email was invented, the first thing I was early
Speaker 2: to hear about it, well, when it became I don't
Speaker 2: know about invented, but when it became popularly used, and
Speaker 2: I used it to connect the management of King Crimson
Speaker 2: with the management of Peter Gabriel so they could talk
Speaker 2: from different countries about the next where I was going
Speaker 2: to be in October, because otherwise, with phones and time differences,
Speaker 2: it was very hard to work out, so that, Yes,
Speaker 2: that's been an element in my life for a long time,
Speaker 2: and it is now. I haven't heard anything about Peter
Speaker 2: doing any touring next year, and it's too late to
Speaker 2: book the spring or the summer. But when hopes, I
Speaker 2: haven't heard any thing, you think being in the band,
Speaker 2: I would know, but I don't, And like any fan,
Speaker 2: I hope there's stuff and I will hold off as
Speaker 2: long as I can, and then maybe i'll I'll try
Speaker 2: to contact him and say, are you sure you're not
Speaker 2: going to do anything. It's a common Oh, here's Tony
Speaker 2: reaching out to say, next September, I have a thing,
Speaker 2: what do you think might you be doing something? And
Speaker 2: often I don't get a definitive answer, but we work
Speaker 2: it out, and it almost always has worked out that
Speaker 2: I'm on the tours.
Speaker 1: Generally speaking, you know, you work with a lot of people.
Speaker 1: Do they only make contact when they want work or
Speaker 1: do you maintain like regular contact like Peter could years
Speaker 1: go by, we don't hear from them or easy checking
Speaker 1: in or you checking in a regular basis.
Speaker 2: It's different with everybody. Peter's an old friend. We don't
Speaker 2: chat often when we're not working together, but the lines
Speaker 2: are open and we see each other when we can.
Speaker 2: And Robert Fripp's an old friend and I've worked with
Speaker 2: him a long time, and I have an open invitation
Speaker 2: to visit him at his house in England, and I
Speaker 2: think I took him up on that one time, but
Speaker 2: it's a little awkward to have the time to do that,
Speaker 2: so I haven't done it lately, but the good friends.
Speaker 2: So it varies a lot with different people. When I'm
Speaker 2: going to be in La soon rehearsing for a long time,
Speaker 2: and I will indeed have a few breakfasts and dinners
Speaker 2: if I can with some recording artists who I've become
Speaker 2: friends with and who I've worked with.
Speaker 1: And to what degree do you think about legacy.
Speaker 2: I don't think about that. I'm lucky, as if you
Speaker 2: heard me say a few times, I'm so lucky to
Speaker 2: be doing what I'm doing and to be able to
Speaker 2: have done a career of it, and I have visions
Speaker 2: of being able to do it into the future, indefinitely
Speaker 2: crazy visions, and so that's enough for me. I'm lucky
Speaker 2: about that.
Speaker 1: So the world has changed because no music disappears with
Speaker 1: the Internet and streaming services, whereas in the old days.
Speaker 1: You know, old records might disappear. If you're eighty eight
Speaker 1: and everybody else's passed and there's a club and there
Speaker 1: are going to be fifty people there, are you going
Speaker 1: to show up and play.
Speaker 2: When you say everybody has passed him and everyone in
Speaker 2: the band.
Speaker 1: I guess what I'm saying is you are a musician
Speaker 1: to a great degree. Other people are calling for you
Speaker 1: to play in their bands. Some of these you're always
Speaker 1: in the band, like Peter Gabriel, but it's not like
Speaker 1: he's working every year. What I'm trying to say is,
Speaker 1: certainly in the old days when the records were unavailable,
Speaker 1: there's some people say I'm not going to do it anymore.
Speaker 1: There are other people who stayed on as long as
Speaker 1: someone was willing to pay them. They were out there.
Speaker 2: Of the ladder. But it's not correct to say as
Speaker 2: long as someone's willing to pay, as long as there's
Speaker 2: good music to be made. Like all my friends who
Speaker 2: are musicians, with one exception, like all of them, we're
Speaker 2: going to do it. If we're able to bend the
Speaker 2: knees and have to walk to that walk onto stage,
Speaker 2: and the music is good, we're going to do it.
Speaker 2: The one exception is Bill Rufford, my band made in
Speaker 2: King Crimson in the eighties, who not bizarrely because it's
Speaker 2: a normal human thing, but he decided to retire from
Speaker 2: touring and from playing music. And it's totally unusual in
Speaker 2: my genre, in their genre I live in, and among musicians,
Speaker 2: he's the only guy I know who did that or
Speaker 2: would do that, and bless him is his decision to make,
Speaker 2: and it's kind of to people who are a professor,
Speaker 2: it's a normal decision, but us musicians, we musicians tend
Speaker 2: to want to do it until they pull the instrument
Speaker 2: out of our fingers or we can't bend our fingers anymore.
Speaker 1: And to what did we Let's assume you're on a
Speaker 1: you know, a family trip. Can you go without playing
Speaker 1: the instrument for a week, or you're the type of
Speaker 1: person who says me and I got to play it
Speaker 1: and when you're home, how much do you practice?
Speaker 2: I don't practice is very much. I ought to practice more.
Speaker 2: In some years I practiced more than others. A couple
Speaker 2: of years ago, I started taking base lessons online. I've
Speaker 2: got a great kick out of that, and I learned
Speaker 2: a lot. I'm fine not playing for really any amount
Speaker 2: of time. It's what I do, and work will come
Speaker 2: in or work on my own music, and then when
Speaker 2: I come back I have learned through the years. I've learned, Okay,
Speaker 2: if I've been two weeks without playing, then it's going
Speaker 2: to be three days or something like that of playing
Speaker 2: before I have it back. And since I'm on the subject,
Speaker 2: the biggest technical thing about coming back is playing jazz.
Speaker 2: When I haven't been playing jazz for some reason, the
Speaker 2: technical thing of my fingers is very different. So I
Speaker 2: could be playing my butt off for six months with
Speaker 2: King Crimson and I come back and go out on
Speaker 2: the road with my brother playing jazz, and I need
Speaker 2: a week a full week of playing every day before that,
Speaker 2: or I just don't sound good. So the switch from
Speaker 2: rock to jazz is a profound one. But the switch
Speaker 2: from not playing at all to rock is only a
Speaker 2: few days for me, and to play jazz again it
Speaker 2: would be a whole week.
Speaker 1: Speaking of fingers, what's this funk fingers thing?
Speaker 2: On the SO album in nineteen eighty five, on one
Speaker 2: track called Big Time, I ask Jerry Marauder, the drummer,
Speaker 2: if he would drum on the bass strings while I
Speaker 2: fingered the left hand. While I'm saying this, I'm showing
Speaker 2: you the funk fingers. So that piece, Big Time came
Speaker 2: out fine. And then the year after, we were touring
Speaker 2: with Peter Gabriel in nineteen eighty six, and I found
Speaker 2: that I couldn't play the darn part. I held one
Speaker 2: drumstick in my right hand. I'm trying to play that,
Speaker 2: and I was practicing all the time, maybe obnoxiously, and
Speaker 2: one day Peter Gabriel walked by me at soundcheck and
Speaker 2: looked at me and said, when you put two drumsticks
Speaker 2: on your fingers. So Peter, in that moment, invented what
Speaker 2: I later called funk fingers. I had my bass tech,
Speaker 2: Andy Moore, make them up and we did a lot
Speaker 2: of experimenting with stretch velcrow and dipping them in rubber
Speaker 2: so they didn't break the strings, so they had some
Speaker 2: rubber factor to them, and I played them ever since.
Speaker 2: Not a great deal, but I played them on one
Speaker 2: track on my new album, and I played them I
Speaker 2: don't know the odds, maybe one out of fifteen tracks
Speaker 2: that I do for other people.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they're like five or six for those you
Speaker 1: can't see the zudio, only they have a little finger attachment.
Speaker 1: Then it looks like, you know, a piece of plastic.
Speaker 1: What actually is it?
Speaker 2: It's a drumstick. These last sometimes they're red, these new ones,
Speaker 2: but usually they're drumstick colored. And the end is dipped
Speaker 2: in very weird stuff called tool handle dip, really weird
Speaker 2: stuff that you just dip something in it, for instance
Speaker 2: a hammer handle, and it comes out as rubber as
Speaker 2: soon as you take it away from the can as dry.
Speaker 2: And that's weird, but that's I found that to be
Speaker 2: the perfect product for the end, to make it so
Speaker 2: it doesn't actually break the bass strings. I did a
Speaker 2: lot of experimenting. If it was the string, the sticks
Speaker 2: are too heavy, they break the strings. If they were
Speaker 2: too light, they bounce in a way that you can't control.
Speaker 2: If the stretched velcrow was too tight, my fingers turned purple.
Speaker 2: If it was too loose, the sticks would go flying
Speaker 2: into the audience, which they have done a lot. And
Speaker 2: when I got it right, which is stretching adjustable vel crow,
Speaker 2: when I got it right, I got a guy to
Speaker 2: make a whole bunch of them. My hope was in
Speaker 2: the beginning, which would have been in the late eighties
Speaker 2: that a lot of bass players would just get them.
Speaker 2: I think I sawd them for ten dollars online somehow,
Speaker 2: I don't remember through what mechanism. So I hoped a
Speaker 2: lot of players would use them and play them, and
Speaker 2: that didn't turn out to be the case. I'm sure
Speaker 2: a few guys, a few guys, a few bass players
Speaker 2: have them, and I hope they're using them, and I
Speaker 2: use them quite a bit.
Speaker 1: And what's the difference between and your feelings about pick
Speaker 1: versus fingers.
Speaker 2: I've never been. I wasn't. I didn't come up playing pick,
Speaker 2: so I'm not very good at it. Sometimes if that's
Speaker 2: the sound that I hear for that piece, then I'm
Speaker 2: going to play with a pick and hope that I
Speaker 2: can work it out. That happens sometimes lately not so much.
Speaker 2: I think thinking back to Don't Give Up, Peter Gabriel's thing,
Speaker 2: I think on the record, I did play it with
Speaker 2: a pick. It just seemed like the right piece, the
Speaker 2: right sound for that. But as soon as I got
Speaker 2: playing live, I found a way with thinkers to make
Speaker 2: it feel good. By the way the song Don't Give Up,
Speaker 2: I had mentioned my daughter being thirty nine, so in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty five. There she was with me two months
Speaker 2: old in the studio in England and her mother and
Speaker 2: I had packed diapers into the base case because naively
Speaker 2: I thought, well diapers, England doesn't know how to do diapers,
Speaker 2: so we had pampers in the base case and on
Speaker 2: that piece. Don't give up. When I was looking around
Speaker 2: the last part of the piece. It has a different feel,
Speaker 2: different groove, which frankly we did later after we had
Speaker 2: the first part of it, and I was looking around
Speaker 2: for some dampening material and I saw those diapers and
Speaker 2: I put a diaper a pamper under the strings the
Speaker 2: sound which Peter Gabriel quickly named the super Nappy bass sound.
Speaker 2: And I have to smile when I think about my
Speaker 2: daughter Maggie now hearing that piece and knowing it goes
Speaker 2: back to the very beginning of her life that she
Speaker 2: was connected with dad on the road and dad recording
Speaker 2: with Peter Gabriel.
Speaker 1: And tell me about taking bas lessons online.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Scott's base less and I recommend them. They're great,
Speaker 2: and I take a peek at them once in a while.
Speaker 2: And I decided a few years ago, while I was
Speaker 2: touring with King Crimson and the other guys were practicing
Speaker 2: in the other rooms. I was taking actually beginner, not beginner,
Speaker 2: but basic the basics of bass playing, like how to
Speaker 2: hit the how to pluck the string and things like that.
Speaker 2: So I'm in my dressing room playing one note at
Speaker 2: a time on the same note for five minutes, just
Speaker 2: one note with one finger, and then I go on
Speaker 2: stage and play King Crimson concert, which is pretty complicated,
Speaker 2: and I appreciated the irony of that, but also I learned.
Speaker 2: And the fact is I confronted the fact that I
Speaker 2: was trained as an upright player, which is a different
Speaker 2: technique than the electric bass, and when I switched to
Speaker 2: having frets, there were no teachers to show me, Oh,
Speaker 2: here's the way you do that. So I just did
Speaker 2: it whatever way I did it, not necessarily the best way.
Speaker 2: And it's good to finally be aware of some of
Speaker 2: the options, of technic technical options of how you can
Speaker 2: do that. Okay, so this is youtubeh No, Yes, some
Speaker 2: of the clips are on YouTube.
Speaker 1: Yes, okay, Just so I know for people who are interested,
Speaker 1: this is lessons that you pay for and you watch videos.
Speaker 1: What exactly is it?
Speaker 2: Either one you can see Scott's based lessons. He's an
Speaker 2: excellent teacher, more than anybody I've met. He understands the
Speaker 2: technique behind playing this simple instrument in the electric bass
Speaker 2: and so yes, you can see clips on YouTube. But
Speaker 2: I contacted the website and what I don't know how
Speaker 2: you call I subscribed to a series of twelve lessons,
Speaker 2: I think twelve hour long lessons.
Speaker 1: Does Scott know you're taking his lessons?
Speaker 2: I think so.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I haven't spoken indirectly, but I've spoken to one of
Speaker 2: his co teachers who does know. But I did buy it.
Speaker 2: I don't want to be given it.
Speaker 1: Tony. I want to thank you so much for talking
Speaker 1: to me and my audience. Amazing thing is seen you
Speaker 1: on stage in a video a million time, and you
Speaker 1: have sort of a dark persona, which as a regular
Speaker 1: person that's not the case whatsoever. Kind of shocking. You've
Speaker 1: been very open and honest. I want to thank you
Speaker 1: again for talking with me.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Maybe you just caught me on
Speaker 2: a good day when the dark persona is not there.
Speaker 2: I don't know, but I appreciate your expertise and the
Speaker 2: wisdom behind your questions. I really do appreciate that.
Speaker 1: So thank you for having me okay, you know he's
Speaker 1: got a new album. You definitely want to see the
Speaker 1: beat on the road. In any event, that's been Tony
Speaker 1: Levin with Bob left sets. Till next time. Thanks,