Any of you who read comments (or more than surface level at what I write) will have likely figured out that I went and bought myself a low- to mid-range electric bass last night. It may seem rather sudden, but it has been part of my thinking for quite a while. Years, in truth. And several months in earnest. I don’t just drop money on anything over $25 without some serious thought.
So it wasn’t on a whim, as much as it might have seemed to have been.
The first “rock star” instrument I played was the bass. Before that, I had a hand-me-down drum set that I was terrible at and quickly gave up when it didn’t come easy to me. My parents and neighbors rejoiced.
I tried singing for a while, but I was a terrible singer at the time (I’m marginally better now) and one of the people I worked with handed me a POS bass guitar that I bought off them for $25. “Play this,” they said. “Your singing sucks”.
And I started playing it, mostly without amplification, nearly every waking moment that summer. I was and am the self-taught guy who has had to work really hard at his self-teaching. Because we were a poor inner-city family, we didn’t have much money for lessons. Or books. And my parents thought my playing music was “just a phase”, even after I was in several garage bands playing “punk” music (we did a mean cover of “C is for Cookie”, lemme tell you).
So I only got group lessons meant as a honeypot to get kids to beg their parents for private lessons so they could learn how to play “Stairway to Heaven” in a guitar store before they kicked you out for being the twentieth kid to do so that Saturday afternoon. And they didn’t offer group lessons on bass, because only p*ssies played bass (kid logic, what can I say?). You were considered queer if you offered to play synth and, back in the 80s, being branded as queer by your peers would often result in ass-kickings on a weekly basis. So I tried to play synth on the sly…
I learned some basics on a rental electric guitar during group lessons, transferred what I knew to the bass and started plucking.
I tried out for a few bands and ended up in a goth band, initially as the replacement bassist who left because he was fed up with the guitarist’s habit of trying to make everyone follow his tempo instead of the other way around. Let me tell you, he was ALL over the place. They were terrible. But it was a band, so hey…. Then the band fired the guitarist (who thought I sucked) because the rest of the band saw me as a solid rhythm guy.
I still only had a passing understanding of notes at the time, but my rhythms were rock-solid and I came up with dark sounds befitting a goth band (tritones are your friend). So I would lay out a song in bass riffs and everyone who had an ear or understood theory played to my oddball progressions, making the occasional suggestion here and there until I learned to follow their leads better.
Eventually, I ended up trading bass for a a guitar on another punk outfit. The guitarist hated the guitar and I was guitar-curious — so we swapped. And I ended up leaving the bass behind, picking up acoustic and electric six-string guitars (both POS and used hard; I was dirt poor).
As time went on, I often wondered what it would be like to play bass again, but was turned off by the beast of a bass that I started off with. It was always and is currently junk.
Last night, I went and picked up a bass guitar. My excuse? It’s nominally my birthday in the near future. Happy birthday to me.
It’s nothing special. It’s a cherry red 4-string Ibanez bass with visible wood grain on the lowish end of the spectrum. A beginner’s bass. But, let me tell you — it is the best bass I have ever owned. And it feels good to get back into the rhythm end of things.
My fingertips hate me though…
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