Terry, if you're admiring my vents, brother you may want to consult a professional . . . .
Really, I'm telling you, for me all those 'Base Played' magazines made me feel like Waters' emotions that led him to write 'The Wall'. It's amazing to me that for all the implied sense of freedom and 'doing your own thing' that rock implied, you can quickly and easily be segregated and relegated if you DON'T show up at the gig with a PBass and an SVT. 'You don't have a Fender' began to be the same in my mind as 'Vair are your papers?'.
And then lacking this 'de rigeur' equipment and then not wanting to get high/drunk and chase skirts so I could be 'one of the boys' ? So lemme get this straight, I have to be just like everyone else so we can all be hip and cool and different, while I forget what I truly know, and kick my sobriety and relationships to the curb?
I was doomed from the start.
Obviously, I didn't want it bad enough, and from what I've seen, 'bad enough' in a lot of cases was worse than what I thought. Oh to be as successful as Elvis or Michael or Whitney. Or Jaco or Hendrix.
For a lot of my life, I did sleep with my bass, figuratively speaking. It consumed me, kept me up at nights, was all I thought about.
In a way, I was fortunate. I was an eye witness to a lot of bad object lessons, and came out the other end untouched, at least by those usual 'occupational hazards'. Disappointed, yes (as if you couldn't tell !), but lucky and smarter for it. I was never in the right place at the right time and met better people, but hey, it happens to a lot of guys.
So aside from a raging cynicism (whose swelling is gradually receding over time), at this point in my life, there are other things that interest me, and the 'music mags' were a real enabler in buying into that daydream that I now find doesn't have the hold over me that it once did.
EXCUSE me for this hijack !
J o e y
