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Bass solos you CAN like…

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Prompted by Moose’s Jaco Post-orious (o, my sides!) , it set me a wondering. I confess bass solos are seldom my bag, especially if everyone else stops playing or goes for a pee. But there are instances of where bass plays to the front and is delightful. Here are a couple of my favourites.
First the bass in the studio of Song For Europe is exquisite, at 3.23, John Gustafson, I believe. (A live version is pretty tidy too, by Sal Maida, on a boot I have.)

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  3. I really love the way Andy Fraser sets up Koss for the guitar solo in Allright Now. It’s hardly enough to be called a bass solo, but it’s absolutely sweetly perfect in the song.

  9. There’s some disagreement over whether this was Michael Dempsey or in fact Alan Rankine who played on this. Does it count as a solo or just a riff? Either way it’s magnificent….

  11. As founder member of the Root Note Plodders Organisation, I always come to these threads in awe. Mostly. The ones done with economy and grace and that actually fit the song are great. The muso “look at me” ones less so.

    Where’s Derek Smalls when you need him?

  13. A couple of great Rickenbacker moments:

    Roger Glover on Pictures of Home
    Lemmy on Stay Clean

    Almost more breaks than solos, but all the better for their melodic brevity.

  14. I stand by the belief that this qualifies as a solo – only bass. My favourite ever. I was a couple of years too young for the Blakey Ridge years but I saw him/ them play this live in a pub in Hartlepool in the late 70’s – it was perfect

  18. Here’s what Heaven 17 said about the bass solo on ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’, performed by a 17-year-old John Wilson.

    Glenn Gregory: Pretty early on we’d recorded ‘Facist Groove Thang’ and the backing track was down and we’d got this gap in the middle – a standard middle eight gap – and Martyn said, ‘Why don’t we do something really stupid like have a disco bass solo.’ We didn’t know any bass players who could do any more than play rubbish one note bass lines. At the time to get some money together I was working as a stage hand at the Crucible Theatre just doing the panto and shifting scenery. I asked in the green room if anyone played bass and this really quiet, nice guy called John Wilson put his hand up and said he played a bit. I said, ‘Brilliant. At lunch time can we go to yours, get your bass and you can come to the studio and play it.’ We got the bus to his, picked up his bass came to the studio and we recorded it in one take. He’s left handed but hadn’t restrung the bass, just learned how to play it upside down. He said, ‘Is that OK? Because I don’t usually play bass… I’m more of a rhythm guitar player.’ And we said, ‘Really? Can we go back to your house and get your rhythm guitar?’

    Martin Ware: I mean we’ve got a brilliant bass player for this tour coming up but he doesn’t play it exactly the same. I think it’s got something to do with John’s bass being upside down… so there are things about that bass part that you just can’t play in a conventional way. It was fate us meeting John like that.

    And from a different article:

    A surprise star of the song was teenage bassist and guitarist John Wilson, whose buzzes and thrums and eight bar bass solo earned many accolades. Ware told us the story behind the young axeman’s contribution: “We wanted a bass solo in the middle eight. We thought it would be really cool to go with the electronics, but we didn’t know any real musicians at all because we were basically just kids messing around with the tape recorder and synths. At the time Glenn was working at the local theater in town in his spare time to make ends meet – because we weren’t paying ourselves very much – at a place called The Crucible where the world snooker tournament was going on as well. He went into the greenroom. He said, ‘Oh, I’ll ask around because it’s theatrical people, there’s bound to be a musician in there somewhere.’ He walked into the greenroom of the theater and said, ‘Does anybody play bass?’ Literally. This is not some apocryphal story. This is literally what happened. And one of the stage hands [John Wilson] was this young guy who had just started, 17 years old. Black guy. Very shy, quiet was reading the newspaper. He put his hand up without looking up: ‘I play a little bit of bass.’ We asked him to come down because we just wanted to see if the idea would work. He said, ‘Oh, I’ll go and get my bass. I just bought one last week. I bought it for 20 quid, so it’s not a very good bass.’ It really doesn’t matter. It’s just the idea. We want to see if it will work. So he came down and the first thing he played was the solo in the middle of ‘Fascist Groove Thang’ and we all went, excuse my language, ‘Fu–ing hell!’ Literally, in my entire life my jaw’s never hit the floor. All of us, we were going, ‘This is phenomenal!’ And so I said, ‘Would you like to see if you can play some bass on the rest of the tune?’ And he went, ‘Sure.'”
    Ware continued: “After he finished the bass on the track, he said, ‘Is that alright?’ I said, ‘I think it was alright.’ ‘Because,’ he said, ‘It’s not really my main instrument.’ I said, ‘What’s your main instrument?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m a rhythm guitarist.’ And I said, ‘Do you think you might want to go home and bring your guitar in, like, right now?’ So he came back in and he sat down and plugged it in. And I said, ‘I think we’d like something that sounds a little bit like Chic.’ I knew it would be good because this kid’s got the funk, but it was on another level. I’ve since talked to Nile Rodgers about this and he says, ‘Wow, that kid is just awesome.'”

  22. I immediately thought of this, at 3.52, on one of my favourite guitar albums, the immaculate”Elegant Gypsy” by Al Di Meola and played by fusion ace Anthony Jackson.

  24. Not a bass solo, but Colin Moulding’s bass burbling through XTC’s ‘Mayor Of Simpleton’ (Oranges & Lemons) is superb. Partridge’s song, but I think they both wrote the bass line. Fast, but not over-showy, it rises up over the other instruments as they fall. A quite wonderful bassist, Mr. Moulding.

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