Some Interesting Bass Quotes from Mike Watt
Mike Watt, late of the Minutemen and Firehose and now with the Stooges, fairly defines what a punk bassist should be - makes the songs work, plays memorable lines, and always goes all-out. Thsi article found him ruminating on the “Watt Commandments” of bass:
The bass has got some righteous karma and politics—you look good making other cats look good, and the more notes you play, the littler you get. It’s an eternal struggle for the right notes. Which I think should never be solved.
My favorite is this quote:
In the bathroom, people look at the tile—I look at the grout! That’s the way I relate to the bass, too. I don’t try to be too definitive. It’s funky about the bass. I see a guy with a righteous bassline and I wanna meet him—‘I really like that bassline!’ And I find out the guy’s been playing two months because his buddy made him! That’s how righteous it is! You can write good basslines when you’re just starting. It’s not the most notes—it’s the right notes!
I get the point, and it’s a great one. I’m still never going to look at my bathroom the same way again.
And then there’s this one:
In the old days, there was a huge hierarchy and bass is where you put your retarded friend, the right-field little leaguer—in punk, everybody was lame, so the bass equaled out. So I try to tell them . . . ‘A lot of times you ain’t gonna be the one writing the songs, but there are a lot of ways to do it.’ The instrument is still in a stage of mystery and self-realization.
For most rock and pop music, he’s exactly right. And it’s the last part of the statement that’s kind of exciting to me. Historically speaking, the bass guitar is young. Infant young. Whereas most of the orchestral instruments have widely accepted pedagogy, musicians like Stanley Clarke are just now starting to put together more structured and refined ways to play the bass guitar. That means things are still wide open, whether it’s finding a bassist’s role in a rock song or trying something totally experimental, like Squarepusher. I’m sure a lot of the effort will end up in the compost heap, as scraps best used for creative fertilization of the next round of ideas, but that’s a great place to be.
February 5th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Interesting that you’d be posting about Mike Watt mere days after I told you of my new band idea which is 50% Mike Watt and 50% Woody Guthrie.
Interesting indeed.
February 5th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
Smaller parts of the larger Watt zeitgeist, I promise.
February 5th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Although I know nothing about the base, I do feel the desire to stare at the grout in order to find some sort of meaning my life is currently missing.
February 5th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
I’ll let the base/bass thing go. It’s not staring at the grout, really. It’s contemplating the overall nature of grout.
February 6th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
A few things:
a.) Mike Watt thinks more about music than anyone else on the planet.
b.) His notions of the politics of instruments go back to the Minutement days. If you’ve not seen “We Jam Econo,” it’s a must. Part history lesson, part philosophy lecture, part hetero life partner love story. There’s a lot of talk about the politics of the guitar and the thud in there.
c.) As always, there is no c.