I'm a bit different at this.
I went through my younger years idealizing certain players, and as I'm 50, most of them fall into the Jamerson/McCartney/Kaye, etc., end of things.
However as I dodder off into middle age, I find that it's really impossible to 'solo' the players out from the bands they were in and the songs that made such an impression on me.
So my influences now actually run out this way:
I grew up in the heyday of AM radio, so there's a big part of me that loved all the 'West Coast' singles: Beach Boys, Carpenters, Monkees, Grass Roots, especially Glen Campbell's Jimmy Webb records. This was the classic LA 'A Team' folks like Carol Kaye, Hal Blaine, Howard Roberts, Tedesco, Glen Campbell, Larry Knechtel, all of those guys who were mostly serious jazzers knocking off these 'little pop records' 4 a day to make house payments so they could play REAL music at night. Brian Wilson's harmonies and charts, the string charts behind 'Wichita Lineman', just breathtaking. They cut so many TV scores, listen to Hal Blaine drive the theme to 'Hawaii 5-0', one of my favorite TV themes. To this day, I'm crazy for Floyd Sneed's drumming with Three Dog Night. This taught me to respect playing precise charts that were well written, the antithesis of 'never playing it the same way twice'.
Motown and Jamerson and Jerry Scheff were huge to me, but divorce their lines from all of those fabulous tunes and what have you got? The Funk Brothers are surely the most overlooked bunch of session cats that ever drew breath that truly changed the world. Motown really was The Sound of Young America, and did more to end segregation than anything else at that time: How could you love Marvin or the Temps or Stevie and hate the black kids at school? It was the precursor of funk and one step back from soul music only because it was from Michigan, not Mississippi.
Since I lived in the South, the 'other' Motown (Memphis) really was the home of soul, blues, and Gospel. All of the Chicago guys stopped in Memphis on the way from the Delta, and lots of 'em stayed. I really cut my teeth on Al Green, Ike Hayes, the BarKays, Booker T + the MGs, Rufus and Carla Thomas, etc. This also spread out to the Delta Blues (R Johnson, Muddy, the Wolf) across (early) Elvis and on to Black and White Quartet gospel. Pre-Movie Elvis is just too cool for school. This was really my roots. A little branch of this grew to Southern Rock, the Allmans, Wet Wille, Skynyrd, and so forth.
Then the damn British came along. There's nobody my age that, like me, saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and didn't say, Geez I wann be like that!! Which brought the Stones, the Animals, the Who, Traffic, the Hollies, which over time led through Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Cream.
I loved the Dave Clark Five, and 'Ferry 'Cross the Mersey' and Dusty Springfield still really get to me. The British landmarks for me were Sgt Pepper's, Exile on Main Street, Who's Next, Dark Side of the Moon, The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. I wore out Mad Dogs and Englishmen. Delaney and Bonnie. Gasoline Alley-era Rod Stewart and the Faces. Dave Mason's Alone Together still haunts me, and when I hear Mr Fantasy I'm right back there.
After I got married, my wife and in-laws thouroughly educated me to country, bluegrass, and Southern Gospel, music from poor white people, in a way the same feelings translated to music in a different culture as the black music from Memphis, maybe it was segregation . . .
And of course I had to learn Texas Swing playing beer joints in Texas, as well as a little cajun and a little TexMex. Sometimes there just isn't anything that's more fun than Asllep at the Wheel.
These are the things that shaped me. I can say in very few cases did I ever learn a certain bass part from any of this note for note. But I absorbed a lot of the styles deeply, and I hope it shows in the right places.
The hardest thing was to learn what to leave out . . . not how much to put in.
J o e y
