• TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
    Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
    Join free Log in
    Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.

NBD Epi Jack Casady Blue Royale

#61
Axstar said:
I think it is fair to have never heard of Jack Casady. I heard of him firstly through the Epiphone bass, then from his cameo on the Electric Ladyland album. Having now delved a bit deeper into Jefferson Airplane's output I would say it maybe isn't the most obvious place to go looking for genre-defining high-stakes bass performances; commercial hippy pop with a jam band edge, zany abstract and satirical lyrics stuffed dated political messages, interspersed with meandering out-of-tune guitar solos replete with that garishly wide, weird renaissance vibrato that all those West Coast guitarists adopted. Two singers fighting over the top of each other with a similar wailing vibrato.

If anything Jack can sometimes be a bit tricky to make out on the earlier material. On Somebody To Love he is playing quite a busy line, but it becomes swamped in the murk of reverb they buried the track in.

I'm a big fan of Jack actually. We have a broadly similar right-hand techniques, and I admire the fidelity and dynamics he squeezed from shortscale semi-hollow basses which, around these parts at least, tend to get typecast as toneless, ill-defined thump machines. The dichotomy within Hot Tuna is quite stark. Jack was beta testing pioneering active electronics, in a roots Americana band! Brilliant.

Having said that I can't really think of anything Casady achieved beyond about the mid 1970s. Where as Jack in the '80s and '90s? If you grew up with Bootsy, Jaco et al then Jack is just an ancient hippy bassist that lacked the rhythmic formalities of the former while matching the business, if not the harmonic complexity, of the latter. One of those '60s 'join in' bassists that clings onto the side of the hurtling mine cart of music their various band produced (Phil Lesh and John Entwistle spring to mind), rather than play in the pocket etc. While I admire Jack's playing, there isn't an awful lot of take-home content to his playing.
Click to expand...
Well, anyway, when/if I next listen to the Grateful Dead, I'll now know the name of the bass player; likewise when I see one of those basses on ebay.

I did once nearly buy a CD, but I think I didn't.
 
#62
Axstar said:
I think it is fair to have never heard of Jack Casady. I heard of him firstly through the Epiphone bass, then from his cameo on the Electric Ladyland album. Having now delved a bit deeper into Jefferson Airplane's output I would say it maybe isn't the most obvious place to go looking for genre-defining high-stakes bass performances; commercial hippy pop with a jam band edge, zany abstract and satirical lyrics stuffed dated political messages, interspersed with meandering out-of-tune guitar solos replete with that garishly wide, weird renaissance vibrato that all those West Coast guitarists adopted. Two singers fighting over the top of each other with a similar wailing vibrato.
[Snip]
Click to expand...

You're entitled to your opinion, but I'd suggest checking out After Bathing at Baxter's (best Airplane album). Casady happens to have a long solo piece on that record, but even excluding that his playing is brilliant, both his tone and what he plays, on nearly every song. Jack was a major player in the bass revolution of the time, and the fact that he played in a "folkie" band (first few JA albums) makes that clearer. No one played bass like that in that kind of group. Listen to his first four notes on the first song on the first Airplane LP ("Blues from an Airplane"). That was a revolutionary sound, and it definitely helped bring the bass out of the shadows. He was absolutely up there with Entwistle and Jack Bruce IMO, though different.
 
  • Like
Reactions: tzohn, mdogs and bholder
#63
Davem74 said:
You're entitled to your opinion, but I'd suggest checking out After Bathing at Baxter's (best Airplane album). Casady happens to have a long solo piece on that record, but even excluding that his playing is brilliant, both his tone and what he plays, on nearly every song. Jack was a major player in the bass revolution of the time, and the fact that he played in a "folkie" band (first few JA albums) makes that clearer. No one played bass like that in that kind of group. Listen to his first four notes on the first song on the first Airplane LP ("Blues from an Airplane"). That was a revolutionary sound, and it definitely helped bring the bass out of the shadows. He was absolutely up there with Entwistle and Jack Bruce IMO, though different.
Click to expand...

I own Baxters, and I've not attempted to diminish Jack's talent in any way. I really like Jack's playing, and he is on my personal top 10 for sure. However Jack's style of playing and the general consensus towards bass playing started to diverge in the '70s. As I said before, I think he ceases to be influential after the approximate mid '70s, barring a few bassists such as Allen Woody who studiously noted what the first wave of pioneering experimental bassists were getting up to. Even a modern(ish) jam band bassist like Mike Gordon places more of an emphasis on the rhythmic element of being a bassist than Jack and his peers did. Again, I'm not diminishing Jack's output in any way, I just think it is slightly more forgivable to have never heard of him over, say, never having heard of James Jamerson.
 
  • Like
Reactions: iamprowla
#66
You don't know Jack !?! Here's some Jack...

upload_2017-3-28_17-16-30.jpeg






 
  • Like
Reactions: irjason, bholder, tzohn and 1 other person
#66
mdogs said:
So, my post was a "personal attack," but you calling my "decision," "asinine" is ok? Definition of HYPOCRISY, this time I suggest you read it...
Click to expand...

If you've somehow reached the conclusion that I've used the word decision in a pejorative sense then there's absolutely no helping you. Sort yourself out.

Anyway, nice bass OP! For the sake of my personal finances I hope Epiphone never make a mass production version of red Casady bass Jack was recently photographed playing, as seen here on Talkbass.

StatesideRambler said:
Alright, guys, take it to the gym. Your pissing contest smears you both and disrespects us all.
Click to expand...

I'm bemused. I made the observation that it is possible for a bassist not to have heard of Jack Casady, especially if you favour bassists that produced their body of work after Jack Casady's heyday. Mdogs simply wants to pick a fight with his own reflection by willfully misinterpreting my posts, while refusing to critically assess any of the observations I've written.
 
  • Like
Reactions: bholder
#67
Axstar said:
If you've somehow reached the conclusion that I've used the word decision in a pejorative sense then there's absolutely no helping you. Sort yourself out.

Anyway, nice bass OP! For the sake of my personal finances I hope Epiphone never make a mass production version of red Casady bass Jack was recently photographed playing, as seen here on Talkbass.



I'm bemused. I made the observation that it is possible for a bassist not to have heard of Jack Casady, especially if you favour bassists that produced their body of work after Jack Casady's heyday. Mdogs simply wants to pick a fight with his own reflection by willfully misinterpreting my posts, while refusing to critically assess any of the observations I've written.
Click to expand...
I'm with you - I found your post to be perfectly reasonable and took the "criticism" of Jack Casady as a bit of a parody rather than actually bad-mouthing the man; in fact, you then followed it with the reasons why you DO like him!
 
#71
Axstar said:
If you've somehow reached the conclusion that I've used the word decision in a pejorative sense then there's absolutely no helping you. Sort yourself out.

Anyway, nice bass OP! For the sake of my personal finances I hope Epiphone never make a mass production version of red Casady bass Jack was recently photographed playing, as seen here on Talkbass.



I'm bemused. I made the observation that it is possible for a bassist not to have heard of Jack Casady, especially if you favour bassists that produced their body of work after Jack Casady's heyday. Mdogs simply wants to pick a fight with his own reflection by willfully misinterpreting my posts, while refusing to critically assess any of the observations I've written.
Click to expand...
I wonder if it's the same red one I saw him playing 15 years ago or so - looked to me like candy apple red transparent over the usual gold flake. Man, it looked cool under stage lights. And I thought it was fretless, but I couldn't get close enough to see for sure?
 
#73
The odd thing is that JC sig bass has NO neck pickup. I am not sure but I guess that most Jefferson Airplane classic JC tone is based on this neck placement. Epiphone JC is a great bass, but I think a Gibson Midtown Standard bass is closer to Jack Casady characteristic tone.
 
Last edited:
#75
tzohn said:
The odd thing is that JC sig bass has NO neck pickup. I am not sure but I guess that most Jefferson Airplane classic JC tone is based on this neck placement. Epiphone JC is a great bass, but I think a Gibson Midtown Standard bass is closer to Jack Casady characteristic tone.
Click to expand...
I've never seen Jack play a Midtown but he plays his Epi signature (one or another color) a lot so he must be satisfied with its sound. The great players, Jack among them, aren't on stage reproducing what they played in the past. They play in the now and really can't help but sound just like themselves whatever instrument they play. When the Cream reunion concert video came out a few years back people were riled that Clapton played a Strat instead of an SG but relatively little was said against Bruce for his fretless. I guess we want our gods to continue living in the past while still giving us new music. I'm as guilty as anyone of that, though I tend not to say it outright.
 
#77
StatesideRambler said:
I've never seen Jack play a Midtown but he plays his Epi signature (one or another color) a lot so he must be satisfied with its sound. The great players, Jack among them, aren't on stage reproducing what they played in the past. They play in the now and really can't help but sound just like themselves whatever instrument they play. When the Cream reunion concert video came out a few years back people were riled that Clapton played a Strat instead of an SG but relatively little was said against Bruce for his fretless. I guess we want our gods to continue living in the past while still giving us new music. I'm as guilty as anyone of that, though I tend not to say it outright.
Click to expand...

JC is mostly known from J.A. and not Hot Tuna. And I really I don't care about his or any other artist's career choices, this was not what I was trying to say. My comment was about his basses during the period of his career apogee.
 
#78
tzohn said:
The odd thing is that JC sig bass has NO neck pickup. I am not sure but I guess that most Jefferson Airplane classic JC tone is based on this neck placement. Epiphone JC is a great bass, but I think a Gibson Midtown Standard bass is closer to Jack Casady characteristic tone.
Click to expand...
The JC pickup is in the middle, in the sweet spot - you could just as easily say it has no bridge pickup. In any case, it's Jack's current signature sound, he seems to like it quite a bit. Personally, I think he' still sound like himself playing just about anything.
 
#79
tzohn said:
JC is mostly known from J.A. and not Hot Tuna. And I really I don't care about his or any other artist's career choices, this was not what I was trying to say. My comment was about his basses during the period of his career apogee.
Click to expand...

You mean during that time when Jack was continually chasing tone that he never really found during that time? That apogee?

His current sig model is based on his early 70s Les Paul bass , which had, wait for it...one pickup in the sweet spot.
 
  • Like
Reactions: bholder

Latest posts

Top Bottom
Back