Ah yes, but Mothman isn't the best bass for metal. It is the only bass for metal and all others must bow before it to ask permission to play.
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Interviewing Bassists Stories Pt. 3
- Thread starter Arthritic_Tom
- Start date
Ah yes, but Mothman isn't the best bass for metal. It is the only bass for metal and all others must bow before it to ask permission to play.
Hey Tom, going back to your Ode to Bill and Pino track...
What strings did you use back then for such techniques?
The reason I ask (and also why I'm interested in Scott Thunes choice too; although I'm pretty sure he uses Gollums hamstrings from what I read ;-) ) is because for years I've been a P-bass/flats guy so never really slapped to much or used a pick even. As I don't play in a band (where the flats thing works best)anymore and only really play around the house, I've kinda been turned on from what I've seen in these three threads, to the idea of messing around with those styles which would probably be more fun to do unamplified.
Sorry for the geeky questions but hey, I'm at the right website right?
Cheers.
What strings did you use back then for such techniques?
The reason I ask (and also why I'm interested in Scott Thunes choice too; although I'm pretty sure he uses Gollums hamstrings from what I read ;-) ) is because for years I've been a P-bass/flats guy so never really slapped to much or used a pick even. As I don't play in a band (where the flats thing works best)anymore and only really play around the house, I've kinda been turned on from what I've seen in these three threads, to the idea of messing around with those styles which would probably be more fun to do unamplified.
Sorry for the geeky questions but hey, I'm at the right website right?
Cheers.
I always used Dean Markley Medium Gauge Super Rounds on my Sting Ray.
The most famous slapper who used flats was Bernard Edwards of Chic.
Try experimenting with your flats and some effects. My '79 P-bass had to be refretted, so I used flats for a long time after that. I had a lot of Boss pedals; with the flats I used the equalizer and limiter-enhancer to get a brighter sound and added a touch of flanger, chorus, delay, and octaver.
Oh, and Scott Thunes is in Vegas right now, but when he gets back next week, he says he'll write a post in this thread describing all his equipment.
That's very cool Tom, Thanks! It would be awesome if Mr. Thunes checked back in here again.
Glad you caught my post as I went back to edit it on my phone without wearing my glasses and deleted the whole damn thing!
Cheers!
Time for a re-post of the picture he took to capture the look on your face when he showed you his...other...equipment.
'Tis in the book.
He asked me if I wanted to put the picture he showed me in the book.
There are only about 96,789 reasons why I didn't.
Tom, I just read "In Cold Sweat" in one sitting. Great writing. Can't wait for the new book. Scott Thunes is a very compelling individual. Bravo, my friend.
Thanks so much! That's great to hear. I think I'm going to put some audio from each interview on my Web site. Just snippets to tantalize.
Scott is indeed compelling. There's no one like him. And he sounds exactly like Jeremy Piven.
Beware of F-bombs.
After my neighbor Nellie--a woman I'd known since I was four and who'd been a widow since the early fifties--died at the age of 98, my parents bought her one-bedroom house, where I live today. Mom and Dad bought it so we could move my great-aunt Marian into it out of her retirement community, where she hated everyone. All the staff were obese, so Marian called them "the rumps." She had an amazing life, being married to an officer of the U.S. Army General Staff. Look up any treaty we signed in World War II, and he was present.
We had to refurbish Marian's house, but my father--who rashly retired at 57 and has been at loose ends ever since--decided we'd do most of the work. He volunteered Tim and me. Dad was raised by his grandfather, a man born in 1877. In all his mannerisms, Dad is from the late 19th century. He's a genuine time traveler who started working in his family's Midwestern hardware store when he was twelve. I don't know a come-along from a chain fall from a cheeseburger, but Dad informed Tim--an artist--and me that we were going to rebuild a house.
Dad hired some contractors. They were all musicians. The carpenter was a heavy-metal bassist with carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands. He couldn't hold any of his tools, so whenever he cut anything with his power saws, the end result was like a map of the Yangtze River.
The guitar-playing plumber was claustrophobic, refusing to go under the house to dig the trenches for the new pipes. That job fell to Tim and me. We went into the 18-inch-high crawlspace and hacked our way through adobe-hard earth with picks, axes, and shovels. But first we removed the mummified cats and possums we found, some of which dated back to the 1920s. The plumber brought his two small boys to the work site. They were horrifying little towheaded apes who ran everywhere, knocking things over. The plumber would cut holes in the floor of the house and pass down the pipes for Tim and me to install in our trenches, after we hauled out the adobe and piled it in a cone ten feet high and thirty feet wide in front of the house. It was like a slag heap.
One day, as Tim and I lay on our backs in the trench under the house, waiting for pipes, the plumber's two little boys appeared, standing over us. They looked at each other and whispered, "Let's drop hammers on their faces." Tim's got quite a set of pipes on him. He said very emphatically, "No, that's not a good idea. Time for you go somewhere else. Now."
I crawled out and discovered that the kids had made a Flintstone version of a teeter totter out of a slab of concrete Tim and I had broken from the driveway. Yes, we had to smash an entire driveway with sledgehammers, as though we'd been sentenced to twenty years at hard labor in Singsing. Sometimes we'd be so exhausted, furious, depressed, and punchy we'd be laughing hysterically, completely unable to stop, while the whole construction crew stared at us as though we were loons.
I found the carpenter and told him that his kids were playing with a cement teeter totter and might hurt themselves.
"Well, if they do git hurt," he said, "they won't do that no more!"
And if they git daid, they won't move no more, neither! Guh-hyuck! I left them to their fate. They didn't die during the renovation of Nellie's house, but it was only blind luck that saved them.
We had to strip the house down to its wooden framework and rebuild it, so I learned how to put in battens of insulation, hang drywall, and mud it. I also built a garage. The contractor who laid the cement floor had two sons, one of whom was a drummer and looked exactly like David Crosby. He had Crohn's disease, so he would go into the bathroom in our house and scream: "EEEEEEEEYAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
Then he'd come out and look for me. "Where's Tom? Where's Tom? Where's Tom?" I'd hear him ask everyone. When he found me, he'd say, "Hi Tom. Hi Tom. Hi Tom. Hi Tom." One day, as I was helping his brother nail together the framework for the garage, the drummer-screamer dropped his nail gun and it went off. A nail whistled past my fast so close it sounded like a bee. I felt the wind. His brother very mildly said, "Hey, man. Easy with that."
"Sorry Tom," the drummer said. He smiled at me behind his massive walrus mustache, his eyes twinkling.
Part 2 next.
We had to refurbish Marian's house, but my father--who rashly retired at 57 and has been at loose ends ever since--decided we'd do most of the work. He volunteered Tim and me. Dad was raised by his grandfather, a man born in 1877. In all his mannerisms, Dad is from the late 19th century. He's a genuine time traveler who started working in his family's Midwestern hardware store when he was twelve. I don't know a come-along from a chain fall from a cheeseburger, but Dad informed Tim--an artist--and me that we were going to rebuild a house.
Dad hired some contractors. They were all musicians. The carpenter was a heavy-metal bassist with carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands. He couldn't hold any of his tools, so whenever he cut anything with his power saws, the end result was like a map of the Yangtze River.
The guitar-playing plumber was claustrophobic, refusing to go under the house to dig the trenches for the new pipes. That job fell to Tim and me. We went into the 18-inch-high crawlspace and hacked our way through adobe-hard earth with picks, axes, and shovels. But first we removed the mummified cats and possums we found, some of which dated back to the 1920s. The plumber brought his two small boys to the work site. They were horrifying little towheaded apes who ran everywhere, knocking things over. The plumber would cut holes in the floor of the house and pass down the pipes for Tim and me to install in our trenches, after we hauled out the adobe and piled it in a cone ten feet high and thirty feet wide in front of the house. It was like a slag heap.
One day, as Tim and I lay on our backs in the trench under the house, waiting for pipes, the plumber's two little boys appeared, standing over us. They looked at each other and whispered, "Let's drop hammers on their faces." Tim's got quite a set of pipes on him. He said very emphatically, "No, that's not a good idea. Time for you go somewhere else. Now."
I crawled out and discovered that the kids had made a Flintstone version of a teeter totter out of a slab of concrete Tim and I had broken from the driveway. Yes, we had to smash an entire driveway with sledgehammers, as though we'd been sentenced to twenty years at hard labor in Singsing. Sometimes we'd be so exhausted, furious, depressed, and punchy we'd be laughing hysterically, completely unable to stop, while the whole construction crew stared at us as though we were loons.
I found the carpenter and told him that his kids were playing with a cement teeter totter and might hurt themselves.
"Well, if they do git hurt," he said, "they won't do that no more!"
And if they git daid, they won't move no more, neither! Guh-hyuck! I left them to their fate. They didn't die during the renovation of Nellie's house, but it was only blind luck that saved them.
We had to strip the house down to its wooden framework and rebuild it, so I learned how to put in battens of insulation, hang drywall, and mud it. I also built a garage. The contractor who laid the cement floor had two sons, one of whom was a drummer and looked exactly like David Crosby. He had Crohn's disease, so he would go into the bathroom in our house and scream: "EEEEEEEEYAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
Then he'd come out and look for me. "Where's Tom? Where's Tom? Where's Tom?" I'd hear him ask everyone. When he found me, he'd say, "Hi Tom. Hi Tom. Hi Tom. Hi Tom." One day, as I was helping his brother nail together the framework for the garage, the drummer-screamer dropped his nail gun and it went off. A nail whistled past my fast so close it sounded like a bee. I felt the wind. His brother very mildly said, "Hey, man. Easy with that."
"Sorry Tom," the drummer said. He smiled at me behind his massive walrus mustache, his eyes twinkling.
Part 2 next.
After the cement floor of the garage was poured, the two brothers and their dad put in the bolts that would hold the base plates of the walls, but we didn't supervise them while they did it. The next morning, after the cement had mostly cured, we discovered that every bolt leaned at a different crazy angle, like tombstones in an ancient Celtic cemetery. The holes for the bolts we drilled into the base plates looked like they'd been shot with a machine gun, like you see in old war movies, where the line of bullets zigzags along the side of a Spitfire, rat-a-tat-tat.
The way you put in walls is you have to build the whole framework and then set it on the bolts. When every bolt is at a different angle, you have to ease, shove, and wrestle this thing into place, like you're waltzing with a giant statue made of granite. It's so heavy that it can easily kill you, and you're totally at risk because you're distracted by the guy beside you smiling at you behind his colossal mustache, his eyes twinkling as he says, "Hi Tom. Careful Tom. Watch out Tom."
I started thinking he had to be my guardian angel. He was perfect for me: A grown man with the mind of a child, who screamed when he crapped and then came looking for me so he could greet me eighty times a day.
When we got everything put together well enough that we could send all the "professionals" away, Tim and Dad and I finished the rest. Dad is an engineer, and he's obsessed with measuring. His version of the old adage is "Measure 3000 times and never cut." We had to anchor the house to the cement foundation to bring it up to code, and Dad said he needed to determine exactly where we'd drill into the cement. He and I went into the 18-inch crawl space again, where Tim and I had spent months digging like the British, American, and Canadian prisoners of war at Stalag Luft III. I was to hold one end of Dad's tape measure while he scribbled figures on his beloved clipboard.
The thing is, wherever I was under the house, Dad had to be on the other side of me, so he'd crawl over me, like a giant centipede. At least that's what it felt like. It went on forever, as though my father were 200 feet long. When we finally had the exact placements of the anchors sussed out, Dad lacked the strength to do the drilling, since he was already in his seventies. So Tim and I did it.
Cement keeps curing forever. This cement had been laid in 1913, so it was harder than the steel bits we used to drill the holes for the bolts. In that crawl space, the only position that allowed you to have enough leverage was to lie on your back, brace the soles of your shoes flat against the foundation wall, put the drill between your legs, and assume the position of a woman giving birth, her feet in stirrups. Each hole took about half an hour to drill, and there were about fifty of them. By the end of it Tim and I were hysterical. He kept yelling at me to shut up because he was going to drill his foot.
After the house was anchored, the rainy season began. A tiny hole opened up in the ground next to the new driveway. It got bigger and bigger, and we realized it was an empty septic tank that had not been capped. The brick roof had fallen in. We hired a little Bobcat, enlarged the hole into the septic tank, and spent the day filling it with chunks of broken cement from the driveway. Once we'd filled it, we realized that there were far too many voids between the cement pieces. It would suck down water forever and present a constant danger of erosion. It could undermine the driveway and make it collapse. We'd have to fill the tank with paver sand. So we went out and bought fifty-pound bags thirty at a time and dumped the contents into the hole. It took 200 bags, or five tons of sand, all carried from the store, loaded into the truck, unloaded from the truck, and poured into the tank. Each ton was move four times, so we actually moved twenty tons of sand. In the rain.
I can't remember how long we worked on the house. Five months, maybe? When we were finished, we had to remove the slag heap of adobe from the front of the house and the remaining chunks of broken concrete. Tim used the dirt and cement to make planters. Before we reduced the slag heap, I'd take my nephew to the top and run him down, holding him by the wrists and letting his feet "tread the air above the din." He was about four. I have a picture of me doing it, which I can't find, which is a shame. It's here somewhere, probably in my overstuffed filing cabinet.
Marian enjoyed her new house. She died here in 2010, so I moved in. The fridge clucks like a chicken, and for the past couple of days when I flush the toilet, it screams like the drummer with Crohn's disease. Maybe he died and is haunting my toilet. Why not? It isn't where I'd want to hang out for eternity, but then I also wouldn't have grown the mustache he did. Every time he ate his peanut-butter sandwiches, he ate about a quarter of his mustache, too. That couldn't have helped with his Crohn's disease.
Here's a photo taken in the middle of the project. I'm on the right and my brother Eric is on the left. He's a left-handed bassist like me. Today he's an engineer in the Netherlands. He job is to figure out stress levels of oil tankers and other great vessels. We met when he was thirteen and I was thirty. Still, we get along fine. Behind us in the photo are the broken chunks of concrete driveway Tim used as planters, and my legs are covered not in fur but in dirt from under the house. We awakened microbes that had been dormant for almost a century, so we Tim and I got huge boils everywhere. The very dirt was malignant.
And we had at least ten more of my father's projects to go at that point. You haven't heard about the brick runways, replanting the parkway, the house extension, the many repaintings of our three houses as a consequence of the thirty-degree temperature swings between night and day that make it impossible to keep your wooden siding any hue except driftwood gray, so unless you want to paint all year round, you end looking like you live in Christina's World:
Invalid Link Removed
As house builders, all of us who worked on Marian's house were great bassists, drummers, guitarists, pianists, and clarinetists.
Maybe someday I'll tell you about building the extension. I've hung my last drywall, that's for sure. Nothing's worse than that. I'd rather take my chances with mummified cats and angry centenarian bacteria under a house than hang drywall or ceilings ever again. It's like the salve galley scene in Ben Hur. You just want the damn house to sink so you can be put out of your misery. No more projects, though! Dad's 84 years old and I'm liable to projectile vomit without warning. We ought to find my old pal with Crohns disease and come up with some kind of calliope action going from the different ends of our respective tracts the next time we do a home-improvement project. I'll bet we could get our own reality series.
"Hi Tom. EEEEEEEEEEEEYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
"Hi CliffUUUURRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP!"
Gene Simmons thinks I have a new career in music with my shtick:
He was completely different when I spoke to him. I'm positive I could make him be that way again. What do you say, Gene?
The way you put in walls is you have to build the whole framework and then set it on the bolts. When every bolt is at a different angle, you have to ease, shove, and wrestle this thing into place, like you're waltzing with a giant statue made of granite. It's so heavy that it can easily kill you, and you're totally at risk because you're distracted by the guy beside you smiling at you behind his colossal mustache, his eyes twinkling as he says, "Hi Tom. Careful Tom. Watch out Tom."
I started thinking he had to be my guardian angel. He was perfect for me: A grown man with the mind of a child, who screamed when he crapped and then came looking for me so he could greet me eighty times a day.
When we got everything put together well enough that we could send all the "professionals" away, Tim and Dad and I finished the rest. Dad is an engineer, and he's obsessed with measuring. His version of the old adage is "Measure 3000 times and never cut." We had to anchor the house to the cement foundation to bring it up to code, and Dad said he needed to determine exactly where we'd drill into the cement. He and I went into the 18-inch crawl space again, where Tim and I had spent months digging like the British, American, and Canadian prisoners of war at Stalag Luft III. I was to hold one end of Dad's tape measure while he scribbled figures on his beloved clipboard.
The thing is, wherever I was under the house, Dad had to be on the other side of me, so he'd crawl over me, like a giant centipede. At least that's what it felt like. It went on forever, as though my father were 200 feet long. When we finally had the exact placements of the anchors sussed out, Dad lacked the strength to do the drilling, since he was already in his seventies. So Tim and I did it.
Cement keeps curing forever. This cement had been laid in 1913, so it was harder than the steel bits we used to drill the holes for the bolts. In that crawl space, the only position that allowed you to have enough leverage was to lie on your back, brace the soles of your shoes flat against the foundation wall, put the drill between your legs, and assume the position of a woman giving birth, her feet in stirrups. Each hole took about half an hour to drill, and there were about fifty of them. By the end of it Tim and I were hysterical. He kept yelling at me to shut up because he was going to drill his foot.
After the house was anchored, the rainy season began. A tiny hole opened up in the ground next to the new driveway. It got bigger and bigger, and we realized it was an empty septic tank that had not been capped. The brick roof had fallen in. We hired a little Bobcat, enlarged the hole into the septic tank, and spent the day filling it with chunks of broken cement from the driveway. Once we'd filled it, we realized that there were far too many voids between the cement pieces. It would suck down water forever and present a constant danger of erosion. It could undermine the driveway and make it collapse. We'd have to fill the tank with paver sand. So we went out and bought fifty-pound bags thirty at a time and dumped the contents into the hole. It took 200 bags, or five tons of sand, all carried from the store, loaded into the truck, unloaded from the truck, and poured into the tank. Each ton was move four times, so we actually moved twenty tons of sand. In the rain.
I can't remember how long we worked on the house. Five months, maybe? When we were finished, we had to remove the slag heap of adobe from the front of the house and the remaining chunks of broken concrete. Tim used the dirt and cement to make planters. Before we reduced the slag heap, I'd take my nephew to the top and run him down, holding him by the wrists and letting his feet "tread the air above the din." He was about four. I have a picture of me doing it, which I can't find, which is a shame. It's here somewhere, probably in my overstuffed filing cabinet.
Marian enjoyed her new house. She died here in 2010, so I moved in. The fridge clucks like a chicken, and for the past couple of days when I flush the toilet, it screams like the drummer with Crohn's disease. Maybe he died and is haunting my toilet. Why not? It isn't where I'd want to hang out for eternity, but then I also wouldn't have grown the mustache he did. Every time he ate his peanut-butter sandwiches, he ate about a quarter of his mustache, too. That couldn't have helped with his Crohn's disease.
Here's a photo taken in the middle of the project. I'm on the right and my brother Eric is on the left. He's a left-handed bassist like me. Today he's an engineer in the Netherlands. He job is to figure out stress levels of oil tankers and other great vessels. We met when he was thirteen and I was thirty. Still, we get along fine. Behind us in the photo are the broken chunks of concrete driveway Tim used as planters, and my legs are covered not in fur but in dirt from under the house. We awakened microbes that had been dormant for almost a century, so we Tim and I got huge boils everywhere. The very dirt was malignant.
And we had at least ten more of my father's projects to go at that point. You haven't heard about the brick runways, replanting the parkway, the house extension, the many repaintings of our three houses as a consequence of the thirty-degree temperature swings between night and day that make it impossible to keep your wooden siding any hue except driftwood gray, so unless you want to paint all year round, you end looking like you live in Christina's World:
Invalid Link Removed
As house builders, all of us who worked on Marian's house were great bassists, drummers, guitarists, pianists, and clarinetists.
Maybe someday I'll tell you about building the extension. I've hung my last drywall, that's for sure. Nothing's worse than that. I'd rather take my chances with mummified cats and angry centenarian bacteria under a house than hang drywall or ceilings ever again. It's like the salve galley scene in Ben Hur. You just want the damn house to sink so you can be put out of your misery. No more projects, though! Dad's 84 years old and I'm liable to projectile vomit without warning. We ought to find my old pal with Crohns disease and come up with some kind of calliope action going from the different ends of our respective tracts the next time we do a home-improvement project. I'll bet we could get our own reality series.
"Hi Tom. EEEEEEEEEEEEYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
"Hi CliffUUUURRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP!"
Gene Simmons thinks I have a new career in music with my shtick:
He was completely different when I spoke to him. I'm positive I could make him be that way again. What do you say, Gene?
Attachments
Wow. Great interview.
I was telling my wife about the book this morning and made the observation of how interesting it is to note that the more talented the individual the more it seems they then "lack" something else, whether it is social skills, life balance, whatever. As a teacher, she commented that is pretty typical of all people, and noted that the same Type A/Right Brain/ADD personality I have makes me thrive in business but then leaves me less creative than I want to be in the music world. I suppose it is the same with sports figures. In Scott's case the shear genius he has for music then doesn't translate well to interpersonal skills, but to then hear him talk I think I could listen to him for hours. He has a gift for performing.
I suppose the bottom line is people are complex. Your gift is being able to open that window and show this complexity in a way that makes us pause and think. Not idol worship of an awesome player, but respect for the gift and the life struggle of a fellow human being.
On a separate note, I need to thank you for turning me on to John Taylor. Growing up as a rocker in the 70s/80s I had a loathing for Duran Duran. Your posts made me go back and really listen and now (probably being more mature) I found I just loved his playing and now have a lot of his music on my iPod. Reading his book next.
Thanks again for opening up a new world for us.
Oh yes, this is so true.....the older I get, the more examples I have of this.
The most talented among us (artistically speaking) are generally those that have much "less" in the organizational / business / personal demon control, etc. departments.
I don't know why that is - but it's very true.
I am very organized. I'm a businessman and my life is so uberly organized and charted for success that I tend to miss out on some of the fun stuff because I'm so busy organizing.
My music is hard work for me because it is most certainly not natural. I require charts for most stuff I play - but by God, those charts are very organized!!
It seems my brain is so full of details that there is not much room for memorization of things - either that, or I'm an idiot lurking in a successful package.
But either way, it's OK - we all have our gifts and graces and as long as you recognize what yours are and use them to the best of your ability - happiness is right around the corner.
I have the utmost respect for Scott Thunes and others of his ilk. I've spent time speaking in depth with Steve Earle - who for me is the perfect example of talent wrapped up in a crazy, I can't understand it one bit (7 wives, prison, rehab, you name it) package. And even upon further personal examination, none of it makes any sense to me. But that boy is as happy as any I've ever run across......so hey, whatever works for you is OK by me.
Just reading through Tom's demons and process has made me cringe a bit because I can't even imagine what he has gone through because my walk is not like his at all. But at the same time, I think it's so cool that he has come out on the other side and is willing to share with the rest of us.
Yep, it takes all different kinds to make this world go round and I for one, am just happy to be here involved!!
I too have gone back since Tom's story on John Taylor and listened and wondered why I didn't pick up on his amazing playing.
I am 52 and a child of the 70's so when the "new" music of the 80's showed up - it made me sick. I couldn't/wouldn't/didn't listen to any of it because it wasn't my thing.
Going back now, as you say a more "mature" person and listening, there was some good stuff and the Duran Duran thing wasn't just packaging as I thought it was at the time.
It's not Led Zeppelin mind you, but not bad!!
So that's another thing I have to thank Tom for getting me to see in a different light!
I am 50, so we are the same generation. Sounds like our approach to music is also the same! OCD is a killer...
