The first bassline I ever learned was by B.B. Dickerson. It was "Heartbeat," from the Why Can't We Be Friends album. War was a really interesting band. The original War was an all black band except for a Jew from Denmark who played harmonica, who sang mainly about Mexican American culture. When they did sing about black life, the songs were pretty gritty like Sneaking into Darkness or Me and Baby Brother. Me and Baby Brother could have been a song about the LA Riots although it was written about 16 years earlier. The song Outlaw is about biker culture, which is another very California thing. War was possibly the inner city equivalent of a Southern Rock band because they always represented the place from where they came in their music.
