13. I really took to it and took
all the chords he showed me
and put them to the songs on
the radio. Three or four years
later, I began making money by
playing covers on a stool at a
happy hour with a coat and tie.
Low end has a huge impact on
music in general. I can’t understand
how I went so long without it.
Did you write all the music
on Bass, or was it a collaborative effort?
Except for the obvious covers, “Hollywood Freaks” and
“Buena,” all the songs are originals. One of the originals was
co-written by Robert Hunter.
I’m very proud of that. The rest
were written on guitar, and all
of them have been road-tested.
Some of them I’ve been playing
for years, and they never really
found a place on a record.
“I Am Elvis” is another one
like that: On the Bass version,
you add a reggae/soca feel to
it, but in some of the older
You Tube videos you play it in
more of a singer-songwriter
strumming style.
“I Am Elvis” is definitely done in a
few different ways, but if you really put them side by side you’ll see
that they’re very similar. My guitar
style focuses on the bass lines.
For instance, on the solo section,
this is the bass line [scats bass line]
and if you listen to the acoustic
version, that bass line is there.
Does the road-testing of a
song play a part in the final
outcome of the recording?
Yeah, road-testing is definitely
a big part of the final recording. It has a lot to do with the
audience reaction. There are
songs that have died a quick,
painful death, never to be resurrected again, simply because
they didn’t go over live. Which
is the total opposite of how it’s
normally done. Y’know, people
usually go in and record songs,
save them, and go out and play
them live. I’ve never seemed
to have that luxury. And there
have been songs that were
made up in the studio, and
then they go out and get drastically changed live. I figure out
exactly how I want it to be, and
then record it.
There’s a You Tube video of you
playing “2Bu” acoustically,
and it’s a totally different feel
than the version on Bass.
“2Bu” is a drastic difference from
what I do on guitar. All these
songs are written on guitar, and
when I took that into the studio
with this trio, it turned into
more of a reggae thing. It’s really
fun for me to do songs a different way, but it’s not so different
that people don’t know what it
is. The vocals are still constant
and usually done at the same
tempo and in the same key and
in the same timbre. It’s just that
the music might change from an
open, fast-picking tuning to kind
of a laid-back, reggae style.
Unlike your other albums, Bass
isn’t a solo looping record.
K Dubalicious is the name of
the trio. It’s me and two of my
favorite local musicians—Jay
Starling [keyboards] and Mark
D [drums] from a reggae band
called the Transmitters. The guys
are so good. I’m able to show
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