The Demise Of The Bassist
By David Statter
Illustrations by Sonia Whitehead
The bass guitar has played a fairly pivotal role in popular music for decades, from the double bass in Elvis’ TCB band to the Gibson Thunderbird IV electric bass played by The Who’s John Entwhistle.
Lately, however, Toast can’t be alone in noticing an increasing number of bands who no longer feel the need to have a low-end theorist among their number, which has led us to the question: Is the bassist no longer an essential element of a band’s musical DNA? Is it now being used more as a supplement to a band rather than an inherent part of its setup? To be fair, the exclusion of a bassist isn’t entirely a new development. One of the most famous bands lacking a bass player is The Doors; active between 1965-73, they produced some of the biggest classic rock anthems of all time, all with the aid of a Fender Rhodes piano bass. The Rhodes covered the ‘low end’ notes that a bass would, and so by using this early incarnation of the keyboard bass The Doors achieved a significantly more distinctive sound than they would have done with a traditional bass instrument. Despite not employing a full-time bassist they did tend to employ studio musicians to give them a richer sound on their albums, pretty much refuting the myth that they were strictly non-conformist in their band setup.
Sorely-missed garage rock duo The White Stripes managed to make a hell of a noise, despite only having a guitarist and drummer. With regard to the number of members some bands have, Jack White has stated: “you can keep going and going and going. It’s scary. [It] would break up the thing of vocals, guitar and drums.” The stripped-back purity of the band’s sound is clearly aided by the economical nature of their lineup and Jack White has gone on record as stressing that as “there’s just the two of [them] in the band it means the music is less structured and can be more ‘on the moment’ so to speak.” They have employed the help of a few guest contributors to albums in the past but most were only favors to friends and artists or when they had an idea that couldn’t be fulfilled by the two of them alone. The White Stripes have also relied on some synthetic bass in the studio but it is arguably not enough to warrant a challenge to their status as a two-piece band, though it’s worth noting that as their studio experimentation expanded, their ability to replicate their more complex tracks in a live setting became more of a challenge, ‘Seven Nation Army’ being a notable example.
The Black Keys share an approach and sensibility with The White Stripes, but whereas the latter take in a range of garage and rock n roll influences, The Black Keys take traditional blues as a jumping-off point. By eschewing the standard setup of a double bass, drums, guitar and a selection of woodwind and brass instruments in favour of stripped-back vocals, guitar and drums, The Black Keys manage to create a tight, modern blues sound. Unlike a lot of other bands who seem to have actively left out the bass, there’s no deep meaning behind the lack of it in The Black Keys, just the simple fact that, as drummer Patrick Carney states “Bass players are hard to find, especially ones that can really play.” What is clear is that bassists are in short supply and there seems to be less desire to take up the bass than in the past. From the sixties onwards and right up until the nineties very few bands were seen without a bassist but it appears that the trend of replacing bassists with piano, or at least having multi-purpose instrumentalists is catching on, with a countless number of modern bassists being able to play several instruments.
While their sound does include bass guitar, eight-strong Montreal chamber-pop merchants Arcade Fire can often be seen to swap and change roles and instruments across the spectrum of their musical output, and this eclecticism is perhaps the key to this discussion. An eclectic approach to multi-instrumentalism inevitably means not sticking to a single instrument. Bassists such as John Paul Jones or Paul McCartney can play over 25 different instruments between them, so could it be that the concentrating solely on the bass guitar represented limitations that made them look to other instruments as an outlet for creativity? As there’s no pressure to pick a single instrument, the bass guitar seems to have been relegated to the bottom of the pile. Perhaps it’s an image thing. As Matthew Johnson (Fat Possum Records) puts it “Jean designers and lead guitarists rule the world, we all know that”. This is a point you’d struggle to dispute. Maybe it just isn’t cool to be a bassist. When Toast dreamt of being in a rock band as a kid, we pretty much thought of being the front man or the lead guitarist, or possibly the drummer as a last resort. It’s a safe bet that very few of us at that stage even knew what a bass guitar was. Perhaps it is due to the disproportional amount of guitarists in the world that bassists are being left out of bands, as they just aren’t readily available.
Whether bass players are surplus to requirements or aspiring bands and musicians have simply had to manage without them, the fact remains that the noble bass player is clearly not the staple of a band’s setup that it once was. Gone are the days from school where a group of guitarists had to draw the short straw for who would move onto bass to join up with the only kid in school who could play drums. We’ve now very much entered an era of the ‘Multi-instrumentalist’. We no longer have popular ‘big bands’, everything is condensed and stripped down, with a few artists playing the part of many, and the modern drummer alone can replace the majority of a percussion section. This idea is further supplemented by synthetic production where you can effectively create whatever instrument sounds you want on an album. All in all, perhaps it’s not so much a demise of the bassist but more an evolution.
