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Who started it all for you?

#141
My very early influences were Jack Bruce, John Entwistle and Paul McCartney (Sir Paul). There have been loads more along the way but those were my initial influences.

Jack Bruce in particular, back in the 60s we (someone in our band) had a copy of Wheels of Fire by Cream. We tried to play quite a lot of the songs from it and failed miserably with most. We did manage half passable versions 'Sitting on top of the World' and 'Politician'. Not too bad for a bunch of school kids.

The spark that got me started initially was probably listening to The Beach Boys a couple of years earlier.
 
#144
pltnny said:
Geddy Lee, Moving Pictures.
Click to expand...

+1 geddy lee made me pick it up. I had no drive to play though but after a year of no playing I fell in love with the sound this instrument produced

and then about 1-2 months ago i picked it up again practicing non stop (about 4+ hours a day) covering some of the music I listen to.
watching people jump all over a stage makes me want to play :p
 
#145
John Paul Jones was probably Herrick's earliest influence. I've always liked the sound of that rounded bass tone in a lot of classic rock and JPJ always looked so cool in the Led Zeppelin footage my sister had on VHS. JPJ & other bass players I saw always seemed quiet to me, which matched my personality and since everyone else played guitar, I decided that I wanted to be a bass player.

Entwhistle was also an influence on me before I even got into The Who. It had to do more with an image thing because I wasn't able to recognize how good he was back then. I thought he was so cool the way he just stood there calmly while Townsend, Moon, & Daltry would be going crazy on stage. The only part of him that seemed alive were his spidery-like fingers flying all over his bass, ha ha :)

Steve Harris & Cliff Burton were also early influences because they were doing things on the Bass that most Metal Bassists weren't doing.
 
#147
Tom Petersson of Cheap Trick did it for me. I was a junior in high school and was totally into all of the same music as every other kid in Chicago back in '77-'78: Nugent, Rush, Aerosmith, except that I played trumpet in the marching band. Some buddies and I went to see Trick at the Rialto Theater in Joliet. We had 8th row seats and mine was right in front of Petersson and I was eye level with his amp. This was on the Heaven Tonight tour, so of course, they started with Hello There. It was all cool with Neilson playing the intro with Bun E., then Zander starts singing, but when Petersson hit that first power A note on his 12-string Hamer it felt like he was pushing me back in my chair and beating me on the chest with a sledge hammer.

And that's when I decided the bass was significantly cooler than the trumpet. Been playing one ever since.
 
#148
For me, it was Matt Freeman when I was around 12-13 years old. I can even remember the song, it was off the first S/T "Rejected". I remember thinking "Hey, there's more than just a guitar going on there! I want to do what THAT one was doing!".

"THAT" one ended up being the bass line. 10 years later, bass has become a large part of my life. I'm glad I made that choice.
 
#149
It was some nameless bass player in a country western band (maybe Smokey Rogers's band) that played at the square dances my parents went to when I was only 5 or 6. I thought those low notes were really cool. I don't remember ever thinking I'd be a bass player growing up, but the idea laid dormant until I was 29 years old, when I had the opportunity to buy a bass from a college buddy. That was it.
 
#150
LSquared said:
Peter Tork....

s$2C+Peter+Tork$2C+Mike+Nesmith$2C+Micky+Dolenz$2C+Utah+Concert$2C+c$2C+1967+copy$2C+WEB$2C+ROCK.jpg


OK, whoever played bass on Monkees' Headquarters album (Chip Douglas??). Of course, I was 7 at the time.....
Click to expand...

It was probably Chip Douglas.
 
#151
Paul Gray(RIP), fieldy, john entwistle and more. I was watching some interviews for bassplayers on youtube, and in that time I play some guitar, but i didnt move on, so i try to see if I can find interest to play bass.
and i saw that Paul tell that he didnt even play bass before he came to kind of audition to slipknot, also Fieldy could move on guitar, then he try bass, and both are great musicians, and i want to be also
 
#153
I guess it would have to started with Jack Bruce.

Then, when I started actually playing, I cut my teeth on Mel Schacher and Geezer Butler (not to mention Gary Thain, John Paul Jones, Tim Bogert and Greg Ridley).

In the course of my learning years, I started listening closer to Motown, and "that guy" that was on all those records. It was a couple decades before I learned the name James Jamerson.

From there, it's anyone's guess.
 
#154
At the risk of sounding like a stereotypical metalhead, for me it was Cliff Burton, specifically th bassline to the beginning of "Master of Puppets". The way he didn't really follow the guitars so much as he would flit unpredictably around them, plus the way he stood out as much as the guitars even though he was barely audible in the mix, is just awesome.
 
#156
1. Sir Paul made me interested in the bass when I was a teenager in the early 80's. Before exploring the Beatles, I had not known anything about the bass.

2. Then, Geddy and Squire assured me that the bass was THE instrument for me.

3. Next, Steve Harris truly made me obsessed with the bass.

4. Finally, Stuart Zender and Bernard Edwards taught me that the funk bass is the best thing in the music world!
 
#158
Jerry Watts - he was playing at a smurf jazz festival in San Diego and got held up by traffic out of LA. Anyway, during the count-off for the first song he comes running up on stage, plugged in and just killed - groove, tone....

I had thought about playing bass before but he was the one who pushed me over the edge.

Dan K.
 
#160
I was a metal guitarist and bass turned me to funk, soul, r&b, thank you Bass :)

My 1st influences where

Flea
Dirk Lance (ex Incubus)
Tye Zamora (Alien Ant Farm)
Marcus Miller
and a local guy who shortly became my bass teacher.
 

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