Robbie Fulks On Bassists
A friend sent me this link to the blog of Robbie Fulks, renowned singer/songwriter/wit-about-the-nation. Specifically, he referenced to me this passage:
I should explain that bass players are an odd species. You might guess that with about twenty-eight notes to play in a three-minute song, and without the ego-nourishing plaudits lavished on soloists, the bass player personality might be typified by a Gary Cooperesque easygoing humility and can-do stoicism, but not so. Bassists are the screwiest of all musicians, excepting only female singers, if you can call them musicians. Drummers are the subjects of all the stock jokes, but if there’s one person in your band who has a hair-trigger chemical imbalance, holds strange and unalterable opinions, pores over obnoxious magazines whose titles incorporate the name of his instrument, and demands constant catering to, it’s almost always the bassist. He will wear you out by talking long into the night about speaker cabinet dimensions, string gauges and alloys, and coming advances in direct-box electronics, and if you excuse yourself to go to sleep, he will start in eight hours later at the point in the sentence where he left off.
I was dodging Fulks’ descriptive bullets like the Matrix until he got to the part about the magazines. It’s about then that I had to take my 16 years of “Bass Player” back issues and head out the door. I’d try and differ with him about the other points, but I’ve got no idea who he’s played with, and I believe there’s more than enough weird musicians in general to back up an opinion like this about any instrument. So take it for what you will.
Luckily, this weekend’s victories of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the DePauw Tigers have filled me with victorious spirits, and the whole shebang was pushed over the edge by a much-delayed viewing of “300.” I think I tried to lead my pug to eternal glory over the backyard at some point, but I might be mistaken. The replacement copies of my bass book also came in, so I’m going to dedicate a few blog posts in the coming days to instrument actually named in my blog.
June 17th, 2008 at 2:21 PM
[...] Robbie Fulks has already shared his view of bassists, so I thought I’d toss in an insight into the denizens of the low end – courtesy of William Muderface, bassist for Dethklok, just after his bass solo had been usurped by his bandmates’ auto accident: “Why do I get pre-empted? You know why? ‘Cause I’m just the stupid bass player. Why don’t I just play behind the bass amp? Maybe that would be good. Then album sales would go up. Who am I fooling? I don’t deserve the spotlight. I thought I could maybe just once, just once be in the spotlight. That’s all I want. Just once.” [...]