Influence.
I wonder if Robert Pete Williams, singing his blues in a Louisiana prison all those decades ago, could have ever even imagined he’d be a much loved soundtrack to a day of electric bass guitar building for some little hairy white dude from the east coast in a workshop deep in the woods of Texas… in 2020. We don’t know where our ripples go. They don’t go anywhere if we don’t do something, however it can be done, and just talk the game. Those who have walked it I’ll listen to talk it – but just talkers? They suck all the air out and don’t contribute all that much. If you’re gonna give me a sermon, you damn better move my soul.
Deep within what makes us us, or what makes our music as it is, or our lives as they are – all songs in their way – are the notes of influences present, past, and passed. Let’s talk basses… Deep in the carve of the neck of a Birdsong bass is an influence from this old Gibson EB-3. As a design itself, the way it does what it does – at its best – provides plenty of “Don’t do it like this” influence… quite often the most valuable kind of lessons anything or anyone can show or share. But this particular bass has more stories than I can tell; I will tell one though. The one I know.
So I don’t know DM or any of the other names scratched into it, but I did know Kade and I did know John C. “Uncle Johnny” Kirtland. Kade was a mysterious figure, large as a lumberjack, who swept through these hills 20 years ago from the Pacific northwest. He drank all the whisky, sampled all the twirling hippie girls, and just chucked his bass in the bed of his truck when he was done jamming… no case, no worries. It had been with him a while since being a “street kid,” banging out Pink Floyd tunes & slap grooves on it for change, and that’s the treatment they both were used to. One day the headstock broke, and soon after it was traded to Johnny for another bass and a little amp. And another day it showed up in clamps at Johnny’s little backwoods workshop (I was borrowing a corner to build guitars out of). “I’m gonna fix it up and do a nice hand rubbed finish on it.” “Nope. You’re gonna finish up fixing the headstock and trade it to me, it’s perfect as it is.” He laughed. That was 20 years ago. It’s still here. Kade had hit the highway on by that time, Johnny left this world a few years later, and the old workshop is a few miles down the road from where it was too – another story for another time. But that ol’ Gibson, for all its been through, despite its shortcomings, has played gigs and been recorded and somehow through its quirks and issues and scars, carries something with it from them, through me, to what it does. And some of it ripples into what I do, and on outward; the thin threads of influence weaving the tapestry of life in and around us, within and without us.
I know you’re out there reading this – YOU – and it blows my mind. I’m just typing in words, trying to give some feeling some form. That’s what I do; sometimes it’s words, sometimes it’s wood. I hope I thread something good into your world, wherever it is, whatever it looks like. I do wonder if Mr. Williams the bluesman thought about it, and I don’t know if the person putting together this bass guitar at Gibson thought about it. I know I do.
Listening to: Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz All Stars Bags’ Groove (this is amazingly great jazz); Robert Pete Williams I’m As Blue As a Man Can Be; Grateful Dead Workingman’s Dead; Scientist The Greatest Dub Album In The World; Pearl Jam Vitalogy; The Simon Pure (I wish I could find anything out about who they are, this is a self-made CD from 2006); The Allman Brothers Band The Road Goes On Forever; Ten Years After Ssssh.