We're going right on to the next number.
So, it's 1974, autumn,
Chris and I moved down to New York City,
and David Byrne is already there.
We're going to become the Talking Heads, but we don't know that yet.
We all get jobs, we find a loft, we move in together
and they would go out every night to CBGB's to look for a bass player.
They looked and looked and looked,
maybe they were too clean-cut looking,
something just didn't jibe right.
Chris persuaded me that I was the only person
who understood them as musicians.
I, finally, on my 24th birthday,
brought home a Leo Fender 1963 Precision Bass.
David was so surprised.
I turned on my amplifier.
Chris said, "Come on, play,"
so I just did booom,
and he said, "Yeah! Now we're cooking with gas!"
Well, my young friends,
I like to think of the orchestra divided into families.
Violins, the violas, the cellos and the basses.
# Yeah, boy!
# Bass! How low can you go? #
MUSIC: Bassline from Good Times by Chic
This isn't a history of bass... HE CLICKS HIS TONGUE
..or a list of great players,
it's a joy ride through the deepest register in music.
The story of how an instrumental came out of the shadows
to fight for the spotlight.
Make its own culture and become a genre of music...
LOW ELECTRIC HUM
..in its own right.
That's it. Aha!
These little licks that you get...
..they can influence generation.
MUSIC: Bassline from Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie
You hear that and you know exactly where you are.
In certain cases, it can be the absolute hook of a song.
It's a melody within itself.
James Brown said, do what you want to do and come back to that one.
One!
You make me happy and I'm glad I thought of it.
In my world, bass isn't just a sound, it's not just a frequency -
it's culture.
In my generation, it's the dirty bass
that the kids really respond to.
You just need bass. It's like a conversation with no conclusion.
It's like, yeah, you've got a melody, you've got some drums,
but what's the point?
At the start of rock and roll, THE bass instrument was one of these.
But it was huge and it was expensive.
A double bass like this would have cost thousands.
From the beginning, double bass was a bit specialised.
The preserve of orchestras and jazz,
with its trademark walking baselines.
You know, walking...
The walking bassline came out of Blues and jazz.
And it really, it became super popular in America
when boogie-woogie sort of took over.
# He puts the boys asleep with boogie every night
# And wakes 'em the same way in the early bright... #
Boogie-woogie was a huge fad in the 1940s.
# He's the boogie woogie bugle boy of Company B
# Da-doo, da-doo... #
And if you listen to Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis, you hear
Bill Black playing in a plucked style, and it's slower but
he's still playing the same boogie lines, you know, when he goes...
# Since my baby left me I found a new place to dwell... #
# Well, it's down at the end of Lonely Street
# At Heartbreak Hotel
# Where I get so lonely baby
# Well, I'm so lonely
# I get so lonely, I could die. #
But plucked or bowed bass lines weren't the only way of
playing this beautiful instrument.
Blues legends like Willie Dixon began manhandling the double bass
and pushing it to its limits.
SLAP BASS
And hillbilly bands slapped the bass to compensate for having no drummer.
Johnny Cash and The Tennessee Two.
All of a sudden, you've got these bands like Johnny Cash
and the Tennessee Two, it's just three guys.
Everybody has to make the maximum amount of noise that they can
possibly make just to fill out the sound.
# Hey, get rhythm
# When you get the blues
# Come on, get rhythm
# When you get your blues
# Get a rock and roll feeling in your bones
# Put taps on your toes and get gone
# Get rhythm
# When you get your blues. #
But back then, if you didn't have a double bass,
there was another technique.
Street corner doo-wop gave rock and roll the human bassline.
# Bom-bom-bom-bom, bom-bom-bom-bom-bom
# Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom Dang-dang-dang-dang, ding a dong
# Blue moon... #
Such a great track!
It reminds me of my childhood.
# Without a dream in my heart... #
To this day, a deep profundo basso male voice
is exciting to me as a woman.
# Ding a dong Blue moon... #
I suppose because it vibrates me in all the right places.
SHE CHUCKLES
# Without a dream in my heart... #
So beautiful.
The Marcels were basically a street group.
They were in Pittsburgh and they kept mailing me,
they kept calling me and I said,
"Guys, if you get to New York on your own nickel,"
I said, "I'll record you," and I figured they'll never do it.
TV COMMENTARY: Wind, snow and icy cold
as the Atlantic coast experienced a true blizzard.
And of course, on some snowy January day,
five Marcels and the manager walked from Penn Station
all the way up to 7/11 Fifth Avenue in a blizzard.
As a matter of fact,
I think that was one of the coldest years maybe in history.
To come to my office and say, "Here we are, we're The Marcels!"
We recorded three songs,
but in those days when you went into a studio
you had to come out with four songs.
The band had a song in mind they wanted to cover...
# Bom-bom-bom-bom, bom-bom-bom-bom-bom... #
..but they only part of it that Stu liked was the opening bassline.
I said, "OK, supposing we start with that."
Kept thinking and thinking, and I said, "OK, anybody know Blue Moon?"
And the lead singer says, "Yes, I do."
# Blue moon, you saw me... #
Then at about midnight, we had seven or eight minutes to do Blue Moon.
I said, "OK, drummer, beat it off."
# Bom-bom-bom-bom, bom-bom-bom-bom-bom
# Dang-dang-dang-dang, ding a dong
# Blue moon. #
# Blue moon, blue moon
# Dip-dip-dip-dip-dip
# Moon, moon, moon, moon, blue moon... #
Dang-a-dang dang, ding-a-dong ding, all of that,
the bass riffs and all of that, I did that.
# Bom-bom-bom-bom, bom-bom-bom-bom-bom
# Dang-dang-dang-dang, ding a dong
# Blue moon... #
After I finished recording and listening to playbacks,
the promotions man showed up and got floored when he heard Blue Moon.
He convinced the engineer to make him an acetate.
# Everything is swinging... #
There was a station up there called WINS.
# W.I.N.S. #
Broadcasting for New York.
Murray "The K" Kaufman, he played it 26 times in one day.
RADIO: Hey, this is it!
# Bom-bom-bom-bom, bom-bom-bom-bom-bom
# Dang-dang-dang-dang, ding a dong... #
Every time he went to a news break, he would play the beginning of the record...
# Bom-bom-bom-bom...
RADIO: I want to tell you to stand by.
And then during the course of the hour, he'd play the whole record.
Within a week, it went to number one
and then it stayed on there for about a month.
The bassline and the flavour of doo wop, it became one of the
first times that it crossed over into white radio broadcasting.
Blue Moon sparked a bass vocal craze.
But there was a much bigger revolution happening
in the world of bass.
PLAYS LONGS LOW NOTE
Such a great little bass guitar.
I mean, these things, you can lift with one finger.
And that's a dream.
The early '60s saw the rise of the electric bass guitar.
A user friendly instrument that brought bass playing to the masses
and inspired a while new beat group generation.
This thing of beauty is a Hofner Club Bass.
It's one of the first electric basses of the 1960s.
It had a short scale neck, it was very lightweight and, of course,
it put a lot of string bass players out of work in the early '60s.
I used it in 1981 on the Genius Of Love track.
However, the first person I saw play a Hofner bass guitar
was Paul McCartney.
His was a violin shape and it had a big fat bottom sound.
MUSIC: Day Tripper by the Beatles
McCartney was the first frontman bassist.
As McCartney said, before that it was always the fat guy in the back.
# Got a good reason
# For taking the easy way out
# Got a good reason
# For taking the easy way out now
# She was a day tripper... #
Most players in general don't sing.
So for Paul to actually play an incredibly busy bassline like that
and then sing over the top of it as well, is amazing.
It was unheard of.
One, two, three, four.
MUSIC: Intro to I Saw Her Standing There
# Well, she was just 17
# You know what I mean
# And the way she looked was way beyond compare... #
It's not your standard rock and roll bassline that you would,
it's flicking back and forth on notes so, you know, he's playing the
root note but then rather than just playing a straight sort of...
He's back and forth.
# As I saw her standing there
# Ow! #
He was thinking of this bassline to really push the song along.
It's the drums and it's that bass,
the bass is getting you to the finish line.
But while McCartney created extraordinary basslines,
Paul's Hofner did have certain quirks of its own.
He could try to play a G up the top of the neck
and it would sound out of tune.
And also, you can't really be flamboyant on it
because you can't hold notes.
So Paul received a Rickenbacker around about '64, '65.
It stays in tune all the way up the fretboard
which enabled Paul to not play, er, have to play basslines
down the bottom.
He could come up the top and he could be a little bit more
elaborate up the top of the guitar.
And also, a note on a Rickenbacker will sustain.
That note does ring quite considerably longer
than what would occur on the Hofner.
The Hofner is very, sort of, abrupt.
But with the new bass came a challenge.
For years, Paul had wanted a bigger bass sound,
the kind he was hearing on American soul records.
So in '66, he worked with 19-year-old engineer
Geoff Emerick, to find a new way of recording his bass,
to do justice to that Rickenbacker tone.
Geoff had this idea, taking a secondary speaker,
reversing the wiring, making a giant microphone,
so that instead of pushing the air out, it was absorbing the air in,
as a microphone diaphragm should do.
And so he put that giant microphone
right over top of Paul's speaker.
So that big whoomy bass sound,
that's what you hear on Paperback Writer, Rain and Taxman.
It's in ingenious.
# Let me tell you how it will be... #
There was nothing that sounded remotely like McCartney's bass
in rock.
BASSLINE BOOMS
# Cos I'm the taxman... #
They no longer sound like this moddy kind of business in the background,
they become more melodic.
So he was kind of, almost, playing lead guitar lines on the bass.
If you listen to a song like Something,
that bassline is a whole other melody under that song.
You can sing that bassline.
# I don't want to leave her now
# You know I believe her how... #
It was like Mozart.
FANS SCREAM
Meanwhile...
# Going to a go go... #
..in one of the most industrialised cities in America...
# Na, na, na, na, yeah-yeah... #
..unknown to the world, one man was quietly crafting up a bass sound
that would outlive all of Detroit's production lines.
# Going to a go go... #
When I was just starting, I was playing maybe five, six months,
I didn't know who the great bass players were
because nobody put their names on the records.
But one kid came up to me at CBGB's and he knew.
He said, "Hey, you know the way you use your thumb and forefinger,
"that's just like James Jamerson."
I said, "who?"
Jamerson, who played on the majority of early Motown records,
was key to their unique sound.
But like all of their studio players,
he remained uncredited and invisible.
# I got sunshine On a cloudy day... #
James Jamerson created a groove
which the rest of the musicians rode on.
He was the foundation that other players vibrated with.
Everyone else made up their parts based on what James was doing.
# I guess you'd say
# What can make me feel this way?
# My girl My girl... #
They incorporate the rhythm with the melodic part as well.
He could have just gone... # Duh... #
He could have just played the riff.
# Duh duh-duh-duh-duh... #
# Oh... # CLICKING
But he chose to do something that you feel the rhythm in it as well.
PLAYS DRIVING RIFF
He brought the two elements together.
Jamerson's bass, with big flat wound strings and there is a foam mute
installed in Fenders at the time.
That would mute the strings.
They don't make them like that any more so now you can just stick
a piece of air conditioning foam in to get that muted, muffled sound.
And then the key to the sound is never touching it beyond that.
I bought this years ago and I haven't cleaned it or done
anything, cos you just let it ferment.
# For once in my life I have someone who needs me
# Someone I needed so long... #
He didn't change his bass strings and so they got that little muddy,
muffled sound, and so the notes didn't last long.
Because the notes didn't last long it forced him to play
more of a rhythmic feel to the bass.
His bass playing goes... # Doo, doo-doo-doo-doo. #
Right. He just found in between the grooves and just started a style
that nobody had ever done before.
# Oh, someone warm like you
# Would make my dream come true, yeah... #
What makes a hit record a hit? It feels good!
He just made those feel good. You know, the way he's playing.
Little short guy. The bass was bigger than him, you know.
Unbelievable, just a touch. That's what made it so special.
I Was Made To Love Her. You know, that initial sweep...
BROKEN CHORD
..that you have to play really fast.
PLAYS LICK
# I was born in Lil' Rock
# Had a childhood sweetheart
# We were always hand in hand... #
And Ain't No Mountain High Enough.
His lines are taking these peaks and valleys.
I did a bassline thing online so you can see it.
# Listen, baby
# Ain't no mountain high
# Ain't no valley low, ain't no river wide enough, baby... #
This was the advent of soul music, and Motown was soul music.
# Don't worry, baby... #
It had to be almost orchestral, but using rock instruments.
# Cos baby there ain't no mountain high enough... #
He climbs, when the other instruments are diving.
And then he completely descends and drops under the vocal.
# To keep me from getting to you, babe... #
The first song we sent into Motown was Ain't No Mountain High Enough.
We just knew it was a hit. You know, the song had so many levels.
# I made a vow I'll be there when you want me
# Some way, some how
# Cos baby, there ain't no mountain high enough... #
James Jamerson was a quiet genius.
You didn't have to tell him anything.
He instantly knew the feeling that you were going after.
# We've got to find a way
# To bring some understanding
# Every day
# Make it last... #
Jamerson didn't just come to define the Motown sound,
he kind of invented funk bass.
But because he was anonymous, he was replaceable...
MUSIC: I Want You Back by The Jackson 5
# Oh
# Let me tell you now... #
..as Motown producers looked elsewhere
and began hiring LA studio musicians...
One sad day, in 1972, there was a little handwritten note on the door
with a piece of tape and it said, "No work today."
And they never came back.
Berry Gordy did not even tell them he was leaving Detroit.
He just left.
But in the end, the loss of James wouldn't hurt Motown,
as they moved to a city with its own music scene...
..which, in the '60s, had many answers to the British invasion...
..and another extraordinary invisible player.
LA had their own studio musicians, including the woman
who wrote the book on how to play electric bass guitar.
MUSIC: Games People Play by Joe South
Carol Kaye is an inspiration to me.
# La-de da da da da de da... #
A woman in a man's world whose influence grew as pop grew.
And one of her most famous tracks could almost be an ironic comment
on what she brought to a recording session.
# Oh, the games people play now... #
I played the opening lick all by myself.
SIGNATURE DESCENDING GLISSANDO
And then it would go... WALKING BASS LINE
Carol Kaye came in on that part too.
So we had the click... CLICKS TONGUE
You know, the click. She'd play with a pick, you know.
So we played together.
# You keep sayin' you've got something for me... #
DRIVING BASS
# Something you call love but confess... #
One of these days these boots are going to walk all over you.
# You've been a-messin' where you shouldn't have been a-messin'... #
A woman's come back to somebody that's treating them poorly.
I had to be strong and tough, like the guys.
# These boots are made for walking... #
You know, I borrowed the way that they would walk and talk sometimes.
# One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you... #
If a couple of the guys swore, then I swore back at them,
and cussing or something.
I'm not proud of myself to do that, but sometimes you've got to do that
cos that's the only language they understand.
# You keep lyin' when you ought to be truthin'... #
She could play. She had some real, erm...whatever.
I don't want to use bad language, but she had...those, you know.
CHUCKLES
Say it, Chuck. She had balls, you know.
Carol was inspiring to everyone, not just to women.
She was just a really gutsy person.
MUSIC: California Girls by The Beach Boys
Her passion is there. You hear it.
You hear it on Pet Sounds, you hear it on Smile.
# La-la-la-la la la-la-la-la... #
MUSIC: Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell
River Deep Mountain High.
Over 10,000 sessions.
# I wish I was homeward bound... #
You can almost name it, and she played on it.
# Whoa... #
Made me feel very supported that somebody could be that competent and that respected,
therefore it wasn't a field that women really were not allowed to enter into.
I think that's her as well, on The Beat Goes On.
DRIVING BLUESY RIFF
Originally it was just a simple line,
going back and forth or something, and she was like,
"You know, that's..." You know, "It needs to do something."
And that became the song.
Sonny... # And the beat goes on...
I don't know if this is the right key.
# And the beat goes on... #
And that's all it is.
# Drums keep pounding a rhythm to the brain... #
And Carol developed a way of playing the electric bass
that became her unique trademark and the hook of multiple hits.
On the Fender bass I played it with the pick.
I could create lines with it, you know,
that made the music pop a little bit better.
# Boys keep chasing girls to get a kiss... #
It has not only a bright, tight sound but it also...
It cuts through the track and it's very, very accurate.
The spirit of it was how to create a hit record
with a simple little line.
See, that was the challenge.
# And the beat goes on... # DRIVING BLUESY RIFF
# The beat goes on
# Drums keep pounding a rhythm to the brain
# La-de da-de dee
# La-de da-de da
# And the beat goes on... #
While Carol was underpinning classic pop...
MUSIC: Sunshine Of Your Love by Cream
..a whole new tradition of British rock brought bass to the fore...
..using the skills of British jazz players like Jack Bruce.
# I've been waiting so long
# To be where I'm going
# In the sunshine of your love... #
GUITAR LICK
While Jack took the spotlight with Cream,
another British jazzer would take a side path to bass immortality.
CRESCENDO FLOURISH
Yeah, I played on some of Henry Mancini's recordings that he did in London.
MUSIC: The Pink Panther Theme by Henry Mancini And His Orchestra
RHYTHMIC TICKING
DESCENDING BLUESY SCALE
ASCENDING BLUESY SCALE
Us double bass players were still doing pit work,
like "Hello, Dolly!", Sweet Charity, West Side Story, Kismet, "Oliver!",
and then at ten o'clock at night you might go to Danny La Rue's club,
The Gargoyle Club or the Dorchester
and play jazzy stuff til four in the morning.
That's how crazy it was.
Us old jazzers had the good fortune of taking our experience
of improvising into the pop world.
I worked for David on things like Space Oddity.
# Ground control to Major Tom... #
Lou Reed came over from America and David suggested to him
that he do some recording in London.
We spent three days laying 12 tracks.
And you got paid £12 for the recording session.
No more, because you were paid to go there.
They were paying for your bass playing.
Nothing to do with the composition of songs like Walk On The Wild Side.
You get paid a wage. A workman.
We all sat round in a circle.
There's me here, there's Mick Ronson there on acoustic guitar
and there's Lou there with acoustic guitar and microphone.
Mick Ronson sets a bar of C... HITS NOTE
..and a bar of F. HITS NOTE
"Yeah. Then what?" Oh, that, round and round.
"How long for?" He says, "I don't know yet."
HITS NOTE
So I went... HITS NOTE
DESCENDING GLISSANDO
ASCENDING GLISSANDO
DESCENDING GLISSANDO
ASCENDING GLISSANDO
After we'd listened back to it, it was so raw and empty,
it went through my mind,
"Wouldn't it be nice to try another line on the bass but a tenth apart."
Like, that's up here. So that the two...they call it portmanteau.
One going down and the other going up.
DESCENDING GLISSANDO ON BASS
ASCENDING GLISSANDO ON GUITAR
ASCENDING GLISSANDO ON BASS
DESCENDING GLISSANDO ON GUITAR
SHUFFLING DRUMS
# Holly came from Miami FLA
# Hitch-hiked her way across the USA
# Plucked her eyebrows on the way
# Shaved her legs and then he was a she
# She said, hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side... #
It didn't fill the track up too much.
It filled it up enough to be different.
You know, just like that. Bouncing ball, you know.
Lou said, "That's gorgeous."
# Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo... #
It's melancholy as well as being happy.
It's got all the emotions in it. It's like a symphony.
# Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo... #
It just fitted the moment, and that's why I'm quite proud of it.
Mm.
Herbie's bassline was the feature of that record,
and while he got no composing royalties,
unlike James and Carol, he did get a credit.
And in the '70s, technology also gave bass a big boost.
Musicians were using bass like never before.
The equipment was a factor.
These big speakers could handle low frequencies.
Now, bass could push the air ahead
to propel sound forward to reach large audiences.
And one guy who pioneered big bass sounds
and found fame with James Brown is my good friend, Bootsy Collins.
Hello!
Oh, there you are! Ah!
Ooh!
How you doing, Tina?
Oh, I am so happy to be with you this afternoon, Bootsy.
It's been too long, actually.
It seems just like yesterday that my mother was coming over to me
and saying, "Tina, Tina, there's somebody out in the audience.
"His name is Tootsie.
"He's very tall, and he's dressed entirely in green leather.
"Do you know somebody named Tootsie?"
I said, "No, but it may be Bootsy!"
Good! You know it, you know it!
I'm ready to get up and do my thing! Yeah!
How did James Brown find you?
He was always recording here in Cincinnati, in my home town.
Bobby Byrd called me and said,
"James Brown needs y'all to come and perform."
Oh, OK. Tonight. Tonight?!
He came along with James Brown's Learjet to pick us up.
# I don't care
Huh!
# About your past... #
First of all, he told me,
"You can't be on my stage with that green $29 bass you got."
And then he said, "What kind you want, son?
"What kind of bass you want?"
I said, "Well, the Fender Jazz bass is what's happening now," you know,
"I would love to have a Fender Jazz."
And so, the next day, I had a Fender Jazz bass. Beautiful!
And same, like, every little thing I would kind of ask for.
He asked me about the Ampeg amps, and I was like, I want the SVT!
Exactly. You know? I said, not one, but two of them. Two! Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
My vision was, I want one on one side of the stage so,
you know, I can hear, and then the other one on the other side
of the stage so they can hear on that side.
# Know we need it Soul power!
# We've got to have it Soul power... #
Tell us, how did you get into doing Sex Machine?
What happened was, after the show we did,
I think we were in Nashville,
I remember Bobby Byrd is sitting in front of Catfish and myself.
And he pulls out a paper bag, and then he tells Bobby Byrd,
"Yeah, I got a hit. I got a kid. It's called Sex Machine."
Yeah, yeah, and then he started writing the lyrics. "Get up!"
And he said, "You say, 'Get on up'". So he was teaching...
You know, teaching Bobby the lyrics, and he was telling us,
we got to get the groove to go with it,
so by the time we got to the studio,
we kind of basically had a vibe, and we went in the studio.
James said, "Can I count it off?" We said, "Yeah!"
Yeah! Can I count it off? Count it off!
Count it off! Count it off! Count it off! Count it off!
One, two, three four...!
SEX MACHINE RIFF
# Get up Get on up
# Get on the scene Get on up
# Like a sex machine Get on up... #
My understanding is that you guys jammed your own parts,
you improvised. You came up with the part,
and then James would say, "Yeah, yeah".
He would say, "I'm glad I thought of it."
Exactly, "Uh-huh, uh-huh, I like that, that's a good groove.
"Yeah, that's a James Brown groove." Yeah.
# Like a sex machine Get on up... #
Well, in his mind, that beat is his. Uh-huh, yeah.
That's James Brown music. You know? That ain't Bootsy. Yeah.
That's the way he looked at everything.
# Get on up
# Get up Get on up... #
I've been in that situation. Yeah.
We sit around, everybody comes up with a part,
and we're just cooking along. Yeah.
And then the lead cat says, "Yeah, and pretty soon, I wrote a song!"
Well, that's exactly what happened.
Yeah, take it to the bridge! Take it to the bridge!
Take it to the bridge! Yeah! CHEERING
Take 'em on! Yeah! CHEERING
# Machine... #
"I love what you've done. I'm glad I thought of it!
"Just lay it back, lay it back. Uh! Good God. One..."
BOOTSY ON VIDEO: One, two, three... And you hit on the one.
Explain for folks who don't come from the Mothership
what "down on the one" is. Oh, man.
He would always tell me he loved all the stuff that I played,
but I just need to add the...
FOOTAGE: One. And then you would try to fetch a different note
what you felt in between that, like...
ADDS OTHER NOTES
You know? And that's the funk. One...two...three...four...
PLAYS A NOTE One...two... You know? Four...
One! He says, "As long as you do what you want to do
"and come back to that one, you'll make me happy.
"And I'm glad I thought of it!"
THEY LAUGH You know?
MUSIC: Pull Up To The Bumper by Grace Jones
In the early '80s, while recording Tom Tom Club
at Compass Point in the Bahamas...
We had the intense pleasure of hanging out with
another great player, Robbie Shakespeare,
bass half of Sly and Robbie, who was there working with Grace Jones.
This is a track by the Compass Point All-Stars called Peanut Butter.
When Grace Jones sings over it, then it becomes Pull Up To The Bumper.
And it's great for demonstrating
what Robbie Shakespeare can do on bass.
DEEP BASS GROOVE
It's just such a brilliant piece of work,
because it's all on one string.
Keeps it nice and heavy and deep, but it's rolling all the time,
it's driving the track forward, it's moving,
and it's so cool to dance to.
Robbie, feet rooted to the ground like a samurai,
is one of the first generation of reggae bass men,
and was a key player in the '70s sound systems
that came to the UK from Jamaica.
# So we have to
# Move ya... #
A scene where bass took on a bigger role than it ever had before.
# Hear what dem say... #
Where it became part of a cultural identity.
For those that don't know, a sound system is like
a giant mobile disco that's all about the bass.
With bass cabinets that are like six feet high.
I mean, my father had a sound system.
It was called Duke Letts Superstonic Sound.
At any given time in Brixton or Notting Hill,
you'd find what you called a shebeen, these basement clubs.
REGGAE PLAYS
Tiny rooms, filled with speakers, more speakers than people.
Earth-shattering frequencies.
You know, you'd be making a spliff in front of these things,
and the bass would blow the spliff out of your hand.
In fact, a lot of times, you'd find them,
you'd drive around at night-time, one o'clock in the morning,
and you'd listen out for bass.
You end up with sound systems competing for crowds,
and for that, sound systems would find
engineers that would be able to cut them one-off dubplates,
individual, exclusive records pushing the bass as far as possible.
There was one out in the suburbs, and it was a beautiful set-up.
This couple in their mid-to-late-'60s, and these guys
from a local London sound system rock up,
feeling slightly out of place.
# Send him to outer space
# To find another race... #
If there wasn't enough bass, you could boost that...
BASS BECOMES HEAVIER
..to transform your mix,
and give it power, and then the dubplate would be cut.
Undoubtedly, when these things are mastered,
you're maxing out the bass, and then you're playing it on a sound system
through valve amps that are going to max it out,
you know, so at night, it's like lightning and thunder.
HEAVY BASSLINE
# I love you so
# If ya... #
You know, in my world, bass is a culture.
You know, I travel around the planet,
and it connects me to X amount of people.
To put it into words as to what exactly that is,
very difficult, but it's definitely an attitude.
It's definitely a school of thought.
It's definitely a way that you carry yourself on a day-to-day basis.
It's not just about the frequency.
MUSIC: This Must Be The Place by Talking Heads
So here we are, just coming into Downtown Manhattan.
Are we on Delancey? Yes, we're on Delancey.
Well, in some ways, it's the same as it ever was.
But in some ways, it's changed radically.
It's very much gentrified.
I can't see which one is our door any more, it's so changed.
We'll figure it out by the actual address, right?
# Home
# Is where I want to be
# Pick me up and turn me round... #
That way was the way to CBGB's.
This was where I parked my car.
We were on the top floor.
Just below us was a blacksmith,
so it was sweltering in the summer,
but it was a godsend in winter, because that was all we had,
the heat that percolated up through the concrete floors.
We wrote our first two albums in here.
MUSIC: Burning Down The House by Talking Heads
# Watch out... #
When we lived here, the kids adored coming out here,
hanging out on the street, and they had their boom boxes,
they bring their pieces of cardboard,
they were spinning on their heads,
doing all kinds of B-boy dance, hip-hop tricks.
And that was when New York City was really starting to get cool.
# The party's over... #
In the late 1970s, I bought my first boom box. It was a Sony.
And the most important part, it had bass, it had big bottom,
and that was everything we were looking for.
We could listen to dance music.
It was like you had your own private personal club.
# Burning down the house... #
In 1979, the summer I got that boom box,
all music styles blossomed.
Bass-heavy disco was huge.
And there was one group who supercharged it
and laid a foundation for hip-hop with the perfect bassline breakdown.
# Burning down the house. #
PLAYS THREE NOTES
Three on E...
Everybody knows about three on E, right?
I mean, Another One Bites The Dust, Hollywood Swinging,
like, if you want to get people moving,
just take the lowest string and hit it three times.
PLAYS THREE NOTES
MUSIC: Good Times by Chic
Good Times was maybe our greatest bassline.
For many years, we had been trying to put walking bass lines in songs,
and I guess that's probably because of my jazz background.
# Good times
# These are the... #
This particular day, Bernard came to the studio late,
and he said to our engineer at the time, he said,
"Hey, man, what's going on? What's that?"
And he said, "I don't know,
"that's something Nile came up with last night or this morning,
"or something, I don't know, but all the guys were playing it."
So Bernard just plugged in, and he was copying me.
So I was playing...
So he was probably going...
MORE MUTED RIFF
That sounded OK.
But then I just screamed, "Walk, walk, walk!"
And for no reason, other than the fact that we have been trying it
A million times. Anyway...
Doo...doo..doo...
# Go 'head, go 'head
# Go 'head, go 'head... #
And it just felt amazing to us, and I screamed to the engineer,
I said, "Make it red!"
And we just recorded, first take, and it was right.
With Bernard Edwards, he claimed he could never hold on to a pick.
But he would play like he had a pick in his hands,
and you get this bizarre sound of when you're going down,
it hits the fingernail, and when you're going up,
it hits the pad of the finger.
His whole chucking thing...
..it's really hard to play.
You see...
PICKS AT BASS QUICKLY
FINGERS BASS SLOWLY
REPEATS THE TWO PHASES
Play it again.
Something like that. I'll try it again.
That was not bad.
So...it's a mixture of using the finger as a pick...
..and using regular...traditional bass fingering...at the same time.
And that used to always amaze me, and amazed other bass players.
Because they thought he had a pick but that was his technique.
Which I haven't seen anyone even do to this day.
And it was so complicated!
I just decided to go...
PLAYS CHORDS
# Everybody dance
# Clap your hands, clap your hands... #
But Chic's bass-heavy breakdowns weren't just innovative.
They were key to their success.
And their legacy.
It worked with every crowd.
With the newly growing hip-hop crowd,
because we had amazing breakdowns.
It worked with the super-funkers,
because our music was always different, jazzy basslines.
# Everybody dance... #
All of our hit records had that melodic bass breakdown.
That was the Chic magic, so we wrote up on the wall,
and we kept this model for all time.
"A song is an excuse to go to a chorus and a chorus
"is an excuse to go to the breakdown."
Period. That's our philosophy.
MUSIC: Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones
# Hey-ho, let's go!
# They're forming in straight line
# They're going through a tight wind... #
We're standing here in front of CBGB's.
# Blitzkrieg bop... #
Well, used to be. Now it's a men's clothing shop.
I saw some great bands here in my day.
There was Television, then there was Patti Smith, then there was Blondie
and The Ramones. Oh, my goodness, it was an amazing time!
One of the most liberating things was for people who played bass
was they could move around because the parts were very simple.
They could just go...
# Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta! #
Or feet firmly planted to play bass like this,
which was a very different style from the funk and jazz players,
who played up here like this.
# Hey-ho... #
The great thing about punk was it liberated us.
# ..let's go! #
And we all felt we could do anything.
# Hey-ho, let's go! #
And, at the end of the '70s, in a parallel punk city, one band
took that spirit and redefined the role of the bass as lead guitar.
When I started playing, at 21...
..it was actually more important for me not to play like anybody else
I do remember going into music shops,
which was our big Saturday regime,
and listening to all these tossers playing Stairway To Heaven
and Smoke On The Water, and all that lot.
Our attitude was that we had to stay away from that.
My style came quite naturally from being unable to hear myself
in the rehearsal room.
I started playing high.
# Confusion in her eyes that says it all
# She's lost control... #
And the singer loved it. Ian Curtis, God rest his soul, "Play like that!
"Play high! Play high!"
It's nice that I have a different style, and I must admit that it
sort of fits in with my ego
because I'm not good at standing at the back.
MUSIC: Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division
Love Will Tear Us Apart.
The song came from the bass.
It took us about three hours. We had the bassline...
..got the break...
..and then the end...
..in about an hour.
And Ian loved it. He said, "I'm going to rip your riff off.
"I'm going to get some vocals that go with that riff." And he did.
# Love, love will tear us apart again... #
It became part of our persona, as a group.
I would play around the vocal. A different melody.
# Why is it something so good... #
To me, that gave a depth to the songs.
As the band morphed into New Order in the '80s synth boom...
..Hooky and his bass found they had competition.
They always say that drum machines and bass synths
were invented so that the lead singer doesn't have to talk to
the bass player or the drummer.
HE LAUGHS
All of a sudden, you've sort of lost your role in the group
and you're fighting with a sequencer that is taking your role.
Kicking off with New Order, playing live,
singing live, with Blue Monday!
Drum machines and synth bass drove the band's seminal hit.
But Hooky still found a way to steal the day.
And that's the famous line of Blue Monday
that I stole from Ennio Morricone.
BASSLINE PLAYS
In the studio, we were watching For A Few Dollars More,
and I thought, "I wonder if that'd work?"
HE GASPS
Went in and got it. Easy as that.
That's Ennio. Don't tell him!
Very careless of you, old man.
BASSLINE PLAYS
What we have here is the Moog Rogue
that I took on tour with Talking Heads.
# Burning down the house... #
We could think about bass in a new way and play bass
in a different way, and play parts that we wouldn't have thought to
play before because when you're playing on a neck, you're
thinking of one kind of part because of the physical dexterity of it.
I found this a really useful tool.
Not only that, but it's funky.
SHE PLAYS SOUND
And you can change the sound.
If I pitch it down...
SOUND PITCHES DOWN ..it's fun.
SHE PITCHES UP AND DOWN
The equipment really changed how the artist thought about
what they could do.
MODULATING SOUND PLAYS
That's me going "A-a-a-h."
And one of the favourite tools '90s house producers used
to get really deep bass sounds was the low frequency oscillator,
otherwise known as the LFO.
# L
# F
# O... #
And these subsonic breakdowns became a genre in themselves,
as drum and bass clubbers craved these low frequencies.
BREAKDOWN WITH LOW FREQUENCY BASS
During the '90s, I started to develop bass sounds
that had a wobble effect...
HE MAKES WOBBLE SOUND
People always took it as my signature and the credited me
with the wobble bass sound.
And Aphrodite wasn't using synths or expensive gear.
As one of the first bedroom producers, he made deeper
bass sounds with just a home computer and budget software.
This was the kit. This is the Commodore Amiga.
In there, you have everything.
You have a sequencer that allows you to write notes
as if they were on a stave.
These rows are white notes from a keyboard,
these rows are black notes from a keyboard.
You literally figured it in your head
and then programmed it straight in.
HE PLAYS MELODIC BASSLINE
Then, in order to get it going down...
..you put a pitch control in OctaMED,
which was a piece of software I bought for £1 back in 1989.
BASSLINE PITCHES TO LOW FREQUENCY
If you take that digital output and put that to a big rig,
it is as low as possible that a bass can go.
On a track, like Drop Top Caddy, which was myself and Micky Finn,
we had this bassline that I created here...
PLAYS BASSLINE
..down.
BASSLINE PITCHES DOWN
With the hit - woof! -
you're taking the frequency down incredibly low and that's
what gets you in the stomach.
Yeah!
Yeah.
What are you doing?
Don't touch it! Who told you to touch it?
Don't ever touch that shit again!
# I'm a fiend for a big, dirty bassline
# When I hear one, I have a great time... #
By the millennium, bass had gone from a shy passenger at the back
to a new generation's addiction.
# If you take my bass away... #
A frequency they didn't just want to hear...
# You think I'm over the top
# But when I hear that bassline drop... #
..but wanted to feel.
# I still feel satisfaction
# So don't come around here whingeing
# I just want to hear the bassline rinsing... #
Bass means everything to me.
I've made songs about bass, bassline junkie.
# I don't need no speed I don't need no heroine... #
That's a song basically where I'm saying...
..I'd rather have bass than drugs.
# I'm a bassline junkie
# And I like it funky
# Big, dirty, stinking bass... #
I had an Audi RS5,
and I got a subwoofer put in it that was half the size of the boot.
I was always wondering why's everyone always looking at me?
You could hear me from down there.
# Bass, bass, bass, bass, bass... #
The ladies like bass as well.
Their hair standing up.
I've heard it gets the girls...
I mean that's why girls sometimes they stand
right next to the speaker.
They like to feel it through them, going through them, innit?
My name's Dizzee Rascal. It's about time we got a little bit bonkers!
CHEERING
And Dizzee would have his biggest hit when house-cum-pop producer
Armand van Helden sent him a track with a bass drop
that crossed all genres.
Let's do this!
Check it, check it. Come on!
I heard it on a laptop speaker.
And that's why that's dangerous because sometimes you don't take...
There's music I'll dismiss because of the way I listen to it.
I think I even sat on it for six months or something.
They had to tell me, like...
"You might want this for your album."
I said, "Yeah?" I'd forgotten about it.
# I wake up everyday it's a daydream
# Everythin' in my life ain't what it seems
# I wake up just to go back to sleep
# I act real shallow but I'm in too deep... #
I performed for the first time in Liverpool. The reaction was mental.
It was like it was a hit already. I couldn't believe it.
I think we did it twice. Like, the crowd, they went mad.
And I didn't even realise the hit I had.
And it is, it's that drop.
# Bonkers... #
BASSLINE DROPS
CHEERING
Come on, come on, ooh-ooh!
VOICE-OVER: When that bassline drops,
every country I go to anywhere,
they go mad, and it's been like that for ten years.
Mental.
The purpose of bass...
..it's like the glue. Yeah, that's what the bass is.
The bass is like the glue.
It's powerful. It's emotional.
It's gutsy.
It comes from deep down.
Bass has been central to my life.
I've seen bass grow...
..I've seen it flourish...
..and, maybe now more than ever, it's centre stage.
It ain't just the big, fat guy at the back.
# What you gonna do when you get out of jail?
# I'm gonna have some fun
# What do you consider fun?
# Fun, nasty fun... #
The girls can do it, too, y'all!
# I'm in heaven
# With my boyfriend, my laughing boyfriend
# There's no beginning and there is no end. #