One of my all time favorite songs is 1999’s “She’s So High” by Tal Bachman (son of Randy Bachman of Bachman Turner Overdrive). I was watching the original video clip of it recently and thought “man, that bass playing is nice too”. So I looked him up. Chris Wyse. New to me but I’m sure some folks here will tell me all about him!
I know Chris, great person. Haven’t seen him on a regular basis in ages, as I’ve lived two hours away from L.A. for ages. His main gig these days, and has been for a while, is in Johnny Depp’s band, the Hollywood Vampires, which also features Alice Cooper and Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, but before that he had stints in Ace Frehley’s band and also The Cult.
He’s long been a proponent of electric upright bass…
…which he has used extensively in his long-running side project, Owl, but bass guitar is also employed…
As well as traditional acoustic upright…
Instrumentation/membership of Owl has always been fluid; when he started, it was a trio with keyboards, but he’s also used guitar, and then my wife, an electric harpist, sat in with them live way back when. We all met a long time ago(jeez, 30 years)when she played on an album project by former Tool bassist Paul D’Amour and future Guns’n’Roses keyboardist Chris Pitman called
Lusk.
While he is not on the album, a live touring unit was put together with a conventional ‘rock band’ line up(Paul played guitar), but that soon got changed around to include Chris on his electric upright, and then she was brought in(something you didn’t see everyday, at least until Florence and the Machine)just to be different. They flew out to play a festival in the midwest, then hit the road in a van and trailer to do a proper west coast tour leg.
Unfortunately, at the end of that jaunt, the label(Zoo)changed ownership. The new guy, a dance music type, dropped every rock-oriented act on the roster except the moneymakers(Tool and Matthew Sweet), and everybody went their separate ways, Chris to Tal in particular.
Here’s a pic I took at NAMM, 10 years ago, at the Ampeg display, with Chris, Tony Levin, and Juan Alderete…
