Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast. My guest today is Bassis Extraordinary Tony Levin. Tony, you have a new album. Tell us about it?
Well, I will, and first of all, thanks for having me on. Great to speak to you and great to have a chance to talk about my album. I'm a bass player. It's called Bringing It Down to the Bass, kind of fitting title, and I've been working on it for years. And the reason I've been working on it for years is I have this big problem, which is a wonderful problem. I love playing on the road and I get a lot of chance to tour with King Crimson and Peter Gabriel and stick Man and Leven Brothers.
So because of that, I keep getting going on the album and that's stopping. But this year I resolved to take a few months and finish it up, get some great drummers on. It's some of my great musician friends, and I got to finish. It'll be out September thirteenth.
Tell me more about the album itself.
Largely instrumental. Sometimes I'm moved to do a vocal, but usually it's in a comedic way. I either either speak a poem or there's one track I decided to, Hey, what if I did a vocal song with a chorus of me singing only using the names of drummers I played in played with Excuse me. I spent the whole of the Lockdown year doing that because I didn't have a whole lot else to do. So there's that piece called on the Drums, which just has drummers names for
the lyrics. And on most of the pieces I try, I started them out with trying to find a bass groove or a bass sound, or a technique like a fingernail playing or funk fingers. This way, I played the bass and I began the composition with that. Then I spent some time finishing it the composition, and then then things got good because I turned it over to some of the great players I know to join me on the album.
Okay, when you say you turned it over to players, you sent him the tracks and said do what you want to. Yeah.
My way of doing this is to pick the right player and not have to tell him what to play, because he's the guy I wanted on and especially with drummers. The drummers I know, the excellent drummers, they don't love being told what to play, and there's no need if you want that drummer. So each each piece, as I got really the sense of it, and I finished my bass part, I thought, well, of the many great drummers I know, who would be the guy I would want
on this? Maybe it was Steve Gadd, my old friend, or Mono Kach whom I tour with with Peter Gabriel and any others. Vinnie Keludo and I chose that player, and luckily they all said yes, and I sent them the files.
Okay, you talk about doing this during lockdown? Were the songs written during lockdown? Or it was type of thing where you were accumulating stuff for years and you finally laid it down.
A good question, and the answer is all of the above. What the one I took the whole of the lockdown here was that were really quirky? One where I used the names of I just had pieces of paper all over the place with names of drummers that might not rhyme with each other, but that might go together in a certain section. Some of these pieces I wrote quite
a while ago. There's one poem about just chatman stick as an instrument I play and there's one with me reciting this poem about John Lennon and playing the Chapman Stick. And there are others that I composed as recently as two months ago.
Okay, so you're in the studio. What do you actually lay down on it's not tape anymore, on the hard drive or the solid state drive before you send it to someone? How much is there?
These are really great questions. I appreciate it, and they're making me think about how we do it. It turns out it varies a whole lot. There's one one or two pieces that I just did the bass to a click track, so there's a tempo, and then I sent it to the drummer, and then I sent that after he did it,
I sent that to the other players. However, there's somewhere I did every part except for the drums, because the Chapman Stick can also play guitar parts, and then I began thinking about what guitar player to have really play what I envisioned and likewise, so a wide variety of ways to do it, and I probably over the few years I've been working on this, I probably did all of those varieties.
Okay, do you ever call somebody you don't know, or everybody who's on the record you have a pre existing relationship with.
In this case, I know all of the folks. Yeah, and I know they're playing very well. I know I know them. Maybe we've been on the road together, but I know they're playing, and that's why I chose them for the particular song.
Now, you mentioned three different drummers, my new Gad Calayuta. What's the difference as a bass player between those drummers?
All right, how many hours do we have have because we'll see, Yeah, we bass players and drummers really spend our time together, are learning or then enjoying each other's feel and the slight differences that nobody else knows between us. So, by the way, there are much many more drummers than that Mike Portnoy played on the album. Pat Mascellato, Jeremy Stacey, and Jerrey Maratta. Uh yeah, some guys, some of the I'll only speak about the really excellent players. Each of
them has their own feel really different than other players. Ideally, each of them is going to play within the time parameters we have, in other words, that are going to speed up or slow down. Most of the guys that
I work with do not do that. So within those parameters or rules, there's a lot of space for playing on top of the beat or behind the beat, and how you phrase things and how how Some drummers will will make the whole kit sound like one instrument, but others h Manu, Vinni Caliro will, Steve gadd also will articulate some of the the element of the drum kit more than others, so it feels not like a drum kit. It feels like better really kind of like a drum kit that it is alive. And let me just tell
a short story. I toured with Peter Gabriel when he did a joint tour with Sting in twenty sixteen, and the two bands alternated songs, but I stayed on stage because I love being on stage during Stings stuff. And I was standing or sitting right in front of Vinnie Caludo playing drums, So there I was sitting on his
riser through all of the Stink pieces. It was a great thrill for me and actually a learning learning experience because that's when I realized how much subtle phrasing he's doing within the part that he's playing.
I'm gonna ask a really dumb question about to ask it anyway. What's the difference between Jerry Murrada and Rick Murata.
Well, Rick's a little older. I began playing with Rick way back when I was a studio musician, and he he is a great drummer. But he kind of moved on even beyond studio playing and moved to Los Angeles and became a writer for TV stuff and very successful at that and a very good producer. His younger brother Jerry, maybe not so young anymore, but still to me, the baby in the family, the younger Jerry. I toured with a great deal I think the first Peter Gabriel tour. No,
the second one needed a drummer. The first drummer drummer the first tour didn't want to do it anymore, and Peter asked me who we should use, and I said, well, my good friend Rick Murrauda would be great for that. And Rick was busy and suggested his younger brother, Jerry Murta. Hence, I asked Peter to use Jerry in the band and it worked out really well for a number of tours in a number of years. And by the way, they
play with a field that's similar but quite different. I don't think I'll waste everybody's time by analyzing everything about it. But I can tell hearing a record of them, which one it is.
Okay. You know, in this world, people are always saying, you know, this person's the best, that person's the best, certainly in terms of you know, guitarists, but also bassis and drummers. Is that something you can even apply to these people? Or at this level, everybody's great and their sound is a little bit different.
I don't think it's about the sound or about the level. It's about who's making that decision. So I know about my One thing I know about is bass playing. Another thing I know about is myself. And I don't tend towards having favorites of anything or thinking that anything is the best, except a football team or something that's provably the best. So with the arts, with painters, with writers, with musicians, with drummers, I'm capable of really thoroughly enjoying
bass players. I hear, for instance, many of the bass players, and I'm not moved to pick a favorite or even begin to think who's the best. I don't think there's any such thing among us musicians.
Now you know, everything's totally findable online. So you're in your late seventies, most people they want to get off the road. What do you like so much about being on the road.
That's very simple. It's the two hours or three hours a night that I get to play the music that I love to play. That's why as a child I decided to be a bass player, hoping i'd get to play good music with good players. How lucky I am that I do that. Yes, the other twenty two hours a day have got more difficult, and as you get older, they're still a little more difficult, and especially not because of age, but the last few years travel We all
know travel has become hard or more fraught. But those do those two hours make up for it more than that. Those two hours are priceless, and we are I know at this age, how lucky I am. How lucky anyone is who can not only play the music they really like and get an audience that enjoys that music to come and it and share the music with them, but actually do it professionally and actually make a living from it. Very special, very lucky.
Some superstar bands what they do when they go on tour, they'll base in Atlanta Chicago, and they'll take it jet to every date, so they stay in the same bed. Now, when you tour with Peter Gabriel, how do you do it?
The last few tours there was Yes, there was a private jet, which involves a whole lot of interesting factors, like doing what we call a runner off stage. I would prefer to meet my many friends who came to the show in a hospitality room, hang out and use that wonderful energy you have when you come off stage because something very special has happened. I would prefer to stay in town. That's not what the band does. We
don't run off stage, but we walk off stage. But then we put a robe over ourselves and jump into a van and go to the nearest airport fly either to a hub, as you said some bands do that, or to the next city, so we wake up in the next city that we're going to play in, which has big advantages to it. Of course, if it was up to me, I would stay in the town, but I believe me, I do plenty of other kinds of tours with Stickmen Jief. Sometimes we go looking for the
hotel after the show. We haven't even had time to check in, and sometimes we leave very early in the morning for a long drive to the next town. So we have private jet is way better than that. I would add that being a professional musician, some of the job and some of the life is being adaptable to those two situations where you're at the top of the world and everybody's excited about you, and you're at the
bottom of the world. I have lots of experience in my career, including recently, when suddenly the bottom falls out and you're sitting in the corner of an airport waiting for someone to pick you up. We didn't show up, and suddenly you realize you don't know where your hotel room is, or what you're going to do for dinner, or you don't have any money of that currency. Those things happen all the time to us.
Okay, you play on stage for a couple of hours, that's a very intense experience. You really want to talk to people after the show?
Actually, good question in some situations, Yes, in the hospitality room without too many people. Yes. What are we do in smaller bands now, which is most of the bands I play in what we call merch the selling of CDs and tour. T shirts is a necessary part of the tour because all the expenses went up. The gas went up, hotels went way up, but the price were paid by the club didn't go up. Okay, that's no problem.
Well that's a bit of a problem. But if we sell enough CDs and merch, if we come out the same at the end of the day, and so to enhance that, we'll have a table out in the entrance way and we'll go out there at some point. Myself, I like to grab a sip of wine first to kind of finish off the music part of the But then yeah, we go out to sign and sometimes if we have to take pictures with people wearing a mask
is an issue for me. I try to be safe and not pass on germs one night to another, and certainly don't shake hands and pass on germs in that way. So there's a lot to it. It's a little bit fraud, but there's something we do, okay, So that do I love that. No, I do it, and I'm okay with it. But what I would rather do is have finished the couple classes of wine and then go into a backstage room that has maybe ten friends or family or even fifteen or twenty, but not fifty.
Okay, let's say you're running an arena tour, not that it really matters in this case. You play for two hours, you're done at eleven o'clock. How long until you can fall asleep?
These are good questions me a long time, but I've I've used I've learned to use that time in ways that work for me. I keep a road diary online with lots of photos I take during the day, so when I finally get whenever it is I get to that hotel room, I will work for an hour or two on Photoshop a lot, downloading the pictures, seeing what I've got, maybe writing a little redal diary about it, and hopefully when I wake up in the morning, I'm I have it in shape to upload the right pictures.
So I, frankly I enjoyed that. I really love that the web. One thing about the web is that I found out in the nineties I was early to have a web page, and it seemed that it took down some of the barrier between our artists and the audience, and it allowed fans who happen to see it to see an experience, not only what's backstage, but actually how they look to us on stage and allowed them to get it, how important they are to us who perform. So it's worth the because I enjoy it. It's worth
an hour or two after the show. When I get back to the hotel room and let me just say this, we're going to talk I hope a little about the Beat tour that's coming up starting. Oh believe we were getting there a bus tour. The band is traveling by bus, and that's that's a whole different thing. So when you say hit the bed, you're hitting the bus. And some guys just can't sleep on the bus. I sort of can.
But those two hours, at least two hours, I'll be doing photoshop, either in the lounge room depends on how loud the music is there, how much it distracts me, or I'll crawl into my bunk and with my laptop.
So, you know, I know people who've been you know, household names have been on tour for a year straight and it took them a year to recover. Now you know, everything's changing. People say, you know, all the scientific studies say you really do need eight hours of sleep. There's a badge of honor sleeping little. But the nature of the game. Are you always trying to catch up on sleep or if you've done this long enough to figure out how to get enough shut eye?
Good question for me. It's not about sleep. Maybe for some people it is, I think for singers. I've heard Paul Simon Wentz told me not too long ago, too many years ago, that he needs twelve hours of sleep for his voice to be okay on tour. Me I don't have that problem, and I'm one of those people who can't sleep more than six hours. Maybe I read the article you were talking about, but what I never read is, Okay, I don't sleep eight hours. How do I get to sleep eight hours? Drinking a sip of
milk before bed won't do it. So I just never sleep more than six And if some night on the road I only get four hours, that's not really a problem. I don't do all nighters the way I used to be able to do. That's for sure.
Well they do say in the articles is some people just don't need that much sleep. It's not the majority, but that's one of you.
What if you need it but you can't do it, the body wakes up.
That's a whole another thing. Okay, you talk about alcohol. You've been doing this for decades. What has your history been with drugs and alcohol?
Wow, getting right to the deep stuff. I never was a drug guy. I can I drink moderately. I think I think there was a tour or two where I was not happy for various reasons, and I drank more than moderately. Didn't get drunk every night or anything like that. I mean, there's no fun in my answers about drugs and alcohol. And in fact, I haven't been in many bands where the other guys were doing drugs and alcohol. I don't want to go through every individual on every tour.
I've got really a lot of tours, but generally the ones, you know what, fans of King Crimson probably realized that the band is playing such difficult music that we're we just wouldn't be capable of playing that show if we
were less than one hundred percent. In fact, that's a band that needs days off between shows and needs to have there to be rested, because any mental laps will mess up the whole rest of the band's The pieces are not in four to four, so if somebody gets off an eighth note, there's no way for any anyone else does say one through three, four years where you are? And the secret to me seems to be for us all to stay rested.
Now today many people are follically challenged shave their heads. Well, for whatever reason, you had a shaved head and a mustache, you know, decades and decades ago. My question is to what degree when you're out and about are you recognized?
Good question? Again, it varies if I'm playing in the town, if I'm playing with Peter Gabriel or King Crimson in the town, I'm likely to get recognized a bit walking around in the streets. If I'm not playing there, I never get once in a while, but very rare for me to be recognized. There was once I was a customs going into Italy and not yeah customs, and the guy wanted to go through all my stuff, even I had, Hey,
what do you call it? A bar of shaving? Not cream, but it's all soap bar and he wanted to cut it in half. I thought, I don't mind that that that's pretty extreme. And then I heard him, he speaking Italian, and I heard him say there's something to his associate, and he mentioned pink Floyd, and I realized that he was just enjoying being spending some time with one of the guys who would have recorded with Pink Floyd. He didn't hear me, He didn't know that. I heard him say that I.
Know someone who was a photographer for Led Zeppelin, and don't forget this before digital And he said, I've been around the world and seen nothing. So you've been around the world. You know, you're writing, taking pictures. You the type of person. Oh, I'm in Prague. There's somewhere I want to go in Prague. Many people you know, this is a classic line in rock and roll. You know, Hello Cleveland, and there in Chicago, they got no idea where they are. What kind of guy are you?
It's all true. I try, when I used to try harder than I try now. It depends on the schedule, but generally there is no time. Sometimes there's no time to see even a street downtown. You just go right to the venue. You do your sound check, you do your setup for the show, you have dinner backstage, you play your show, and then you either go somewhere else. So you go to hotel at midnight and you wake up at eight o'clock and leave eight am and leave
for somewhere else. Yeah, that happens a lot. Of course. I have, as you said, been I had it a long time, and I've made the rounds a lot, and sooner or later I'll have a day off in most places and try to enjoy it. Do I have the initiative and energy to go to museums and things like that? No, I'm not that guy. I wish I was, but I'm not.
So if you have a day off, what do you do?
A lot of times I have friends. I'll meet him for a meal or hang out. Sometimes I'll go to a club and hear another band that's a treat and inn a rarity. And sometimes it really depends where it is. If it's Italy, I'm going to go out for as many meals as i can, and I'm going to meet friends because I've been there a lot and have a
lot of friends. And if it's someplace I haven't been, I'll hopefully the hotel is downtown and I'll just take a walk and really spend hours walking around and taking photos.
I have found in my travels, which are not as extensive as yours, that the places where people don't speak English. I find those exotic places are the most interesting, you know, whether it be Bogata, Brazil, India. What are the couple of fascinating places you've been to?
Oh hard to think back on, you know. I've been a lot of places I have been, not to Bogata and not to India, actually almost to India. My friend Shankar asked me to do a tour with him once quite a while ago. Uh, and I just didn't feel comfortable about the fact that I didn't have a visa. He said, oh, we'll get you that when you get here.
And I didn't have an itinerary. He said, oh, we'll do that when you get here, and I said, you know what, that's just too deep, a diving into a deep pool that I don't want to take a chance on. So it didn't. I can't remember one place that stands out, but I've had a lot of great times and a lot of great places, especially maybe especially as a photographer.
So for instance, in La Paz, when I'm on the tram that people get around on because it's so hilly and it's the altitude is extremely high, then I could get amazing photos to me of the tram coming the other way with a lady in it with that kind of very distinctive hat that they wear in Bolivia that looks like old fashioned, but that's the way they go around on the streets. So stuff like that I get
a big kick out of. And by the way, when I have a chance to share those photos on the road diary or once every decade putting out a photo book, I really enjoy the chance to share with others, with fans, especially what it's like behind the scenes on tour.
So how'd you get into photography?
I don't remember. It was so long the earth was cooling. There was this stuff called film, and there was no digital. Oh gosh, I don't know, But I do know from the time. I know from thinking back on my photos that from the time I joined King Crimson, which is nineteen eighty one, I was pretty intent on documenting, really
for myself, documenting what was going on. I know that because the first show we played was in Bath in a club called Moles in nineteen eighty one, and I set up a tripod with a foot pedal, an analog foot pedal to choose air into a trigger that would trigger the pick, and I wanted very much to get a picture of the first note that I played with King Crimson in that context, and I did so. By that time, the early eighties, I was pretty intently into it.
Let me just say another story about the same almost the same year. One regret I have about the John Lennon Yoko Ono albums that I did very quickly was I had my camera with me. Of course, that was in late nineteen eighty and on a break in the control room, John and Yoko were listening to playback and I came in with my camera and I said to John, do you mind if I take a photo? And he said, well, yes, I'd rather you didn't. I do mind, And that was fine.
But I'm kicking myself. That was nineteen eighty I'm still kicking myself because the professional photographer would have taken the picture and then asked, and I'm sure he wouldn't have booted me off the session for doing that. He would have just said, please don't do that, and I would have that one picture that I don't have from that very special experience.
Yes, but anyone who has met famous names and is meeting them as opposed to on the meet and greet level. No, there are certain rules and you don't violate those rules. So I'm sure that's why you asked first.
Yeah, but boy, I wish I had that picture.
And many people, if writing is only secondary to public speaking, is their greatest fear. You know, you're right your blog, which is very readable and articulate. Was this easy for you or how did you decide to do that?
First of all, I did start what's called a web blog before there was that word blog early nineties. I fell into having a website and I thought I'll just write about what it's like backstage. I have any very easy time writing a lot. I have carry journals like a lot of people do. Sometimes it lends itself to poetry. Sometimes it's just a log of what happened that day. So very happy to share it with people actually talking
this kind of of this kind of adventure. I'm not so good at it, as you can tell, because I stumbled on the words and I don't dislike it. But I'm very comfortable as a writer.
You know, what people don't realize is a lot of times household name musicians and you're one of them. They know certain fans because they come to certain gigs I don't want to, you know, encourage people, but do you know your super fans?
I know a lot of them. I'm not great with names of friends and everybody, so I'm not always aware of their names, but I know a lot of them, and by look, I know just about all of them to look at them. And one thing that's changed all that for me is Adrian Blu and Pat Maslato and I have a yearly music camp where we share almost a week in the Catskill Mountains actually near where I live, with fans or anybody who wants to sign up for it, all of whom are musicians at some level, but very
few are professional musicians. There are people who do other things and are fans of King Crimson. And the first year I went to that with the reluctance because I'll tell you why. I don't mind being around fans, but I don't like being in the position where I'm the guy who knows the stuff, where I'm going to be giving a bass class about how to play the bass. I just don't lend myself to that, and so I thought I'll do it, but I'm not sure this is
going to work out well. What happened is and I got to have meals with them and talk to these maybe fifty people who and learned their journey, something about their journey, what brought them there, and what they love about music and what they play. I was captivated by that, and we just finished doing our twelfth year of that. So a lot of the campers, by the way we call them the campers, a lot of these people are
the same people. I know them very well. Twelve years of spending four or five days together every summer and by the way, jamming and making music together. So that kind of put me more connected not only with them, but with understanding the mindset of the people who just are mad fans of King Crimson or Peter Gabriel, but really have their own story which is just as valid as my own.
I remember when the first King Crimson album came out nineteen seventy I could have been sixty nine, had a gatefold cover, had a sort of a green to the cover, and you know the first song some by Greg Lake courd to the Crimson King. What was your experience discovering King Crimson.
Very different than yours? In nineteen eighty I had played on Robert I met Robert Fripp on Peter Gabriel's first solo album in seventy six, when Peter left Genesis. By the way, I did not know of Genesis when I met Peter Gabriel and played on his album, and I met Robert Fripp. We toured together with Peter, and then Robert at some point after that asked me to play on his album called Exposure. So I was very familiar with his music, but I did not listen to King Crimson.
Didn't even know the band when Robert said, I'm thinking of forming this other band, not King Crimson, but what do you say you come to Let's just play together and see how it works out. With Bill Rufford and Adrian belou Later, maybe decades later, I found out that really I was being auditioned and they had other bass players come in also. But so I came into that not knowing anything about King Crimson, not knowing none of us knew that we would later name that combo King
Crimson because it seemed appropriate to Robert. So I had no history at all. In fact, if I remember correctly, at that audition slash let's get together and play. They said, well, let's play Red, and I said, well, I'm a few bars something like I'm a few bars to me because I don't know it. And I was at that stage of my youth pretty quick at learning stuff, so probably
they were impressed with how quickly I learned red. But that first year or two of touring we did, we steadfastly refused to do any Crimson classic material from before that incarnation. Later, when we did some, that is when I listened to King Crimson and that's when I learned that, and that's when I was introduced to the iconic parts of Greg Lake and John Wetton and became a fan of them much later.
So tell me about the Bead Tour.
Okay, Adrian Blue had this idea I can't quite speak for him, but quite a few years ago of doing the music of the eighties of King Crimson and finding not doing it with the King Crimson members but other guys. However, he brought me on board. And it took years. You know, the COVID came along, and when you have players who are in different bands, their bands take precedence the schedule
of their bands and the tours. So it took quite a while until we could finally zero in on September thirteenth, September twelfth, I think twenty twenty four as the time to start it. Steve I is going to play guitar, and he's going to play something like the parts of Robert Fripp, probably differently, I hope differently. But he's challenged by that and quite quite well known that he's publicized
that he's practicing a lot to do that. And Danny Carey, a wonderful drummer, the drummer and tool, has signed on to do it, and myself, So I'm excited to be revisiting that music, but also I think a little more excited about hearing I haven't heard yet, but we haven't hearsed yet where Steve I and Danny Carey will take it, where in what ways it'll be different, And I will be sure to join them in the adventure of taking this great material in other places if that's what happens.
Okay, you know, when Robert was still on tour, Adrian was not in the act, and now you're going out playing Robert's music, not that it wasn't collaborative with Adrian sons Robert. Has anybody been in contact with Robert got his take.
On this, Yes, not me. I wouldn't even have thought of that. I am I'm the bass player. I just yeah, I'll show up, I'll play bass. But yes, Adrian contact in him. Robert is one hundred percent in favor of the tour and he gave it. Robert gave it the name. Why don't you call it the Beat tour? Beat is the name of one of the albums we did, one of the three albums we did in the eighties.
And what material will it actually will be all that material, any new material, any material outside that decade when you work together.
At this point, because we haven't been together in the studio and we're close to going together, it'll just be any day now. I don't know exactly, but Adrian sent me a list of pretty much all of the music of all those albums. We can't do all of that in one show. We'll choose among those, and my hope is that we will also vary it on different nights, because I have the feeling a lot of fans will be coming to more than one show. Would be nice if they're not all exactly the same show.
Okay, who knew Steve I.
Adrian? So as many questions will that's taken me outside my experience. I had not played with Steve. I still have not played with Steve Vibe, but I'm going to play with him sixty five shows in the next few months, and that's going to be great. I'm looking forward to it. I've heard him. He's great with Danny Carrey the drummer. I have played with him a little bit because he sat in with King Crimson for a few shows in
a multi drummer situation. But it's it's all going to be very exciting, and it's all going to be for as you can tell from my talking about it. It's going to be classic material but a bit new, fresh and wild, and we don't know what's going to happen, and that's pretty exciting.
Okay, So you've been talking to Adrian about this or agents working on it for years now it's finally happening. Sixty five shows A lot of shows.
I did notice that.
And then you're talking about the economics or such. It's not like playing arenas. You're playing smaller venues and you're going on a bus. Are you saying I love this music so much, I want to play it, or I love hanging with these guys, or I'm not doing anything else these three months. You now, how much of a hurdle is it? Or do you kind of commit yourself and then say, holy fuck? What did I get myself into?
All of that can happen? A tour like this has to be booked way in advance, you know, at least a year in advance, so you have to get the venues in the right size. And in the case of this tour, sales were so good that they revised their thoughts about what size venues and sometimes we were playing the same area twice. That's all in the hands of management, not me. But yes, I had to commit to it one hundred percent about a year ago, and I wage, as I always do when I'm a call to do
something musically, it sounded great. Maybe I'm trying to how can I summarize digging deep into my personality in my sense of what made my mouth water about it was these other guys that are really great players that haven't played with and so the two together the eighties music. By the way, I didn't bother to stay playing with Adrian Blue is great. I love it. Been doing it a little every year for ever since the eighties. Can't
get enough of that. That's great, but the whole package as a whole made my mouth water, made me want to do it musically. Then the typical musician thing, Okay, we'll work that out, someone else will work it out. I don't know, so yes, it could be. As you mentioned, I'm on the bus thinking what did I get myself into, because that's a lot of days on the bus. But probably it'll be fine. I know they're really good guys, and almost undoubtedly the music will will overcompensate for anything
that's less than perfect. When I played with Chuck Mangoni and jazz in the sixties, when I was living in Rochester, he had an expression of the kind of the eleventh Commandment is thou shalt never really groove. It's kind of jazz player's way of thinking about digging and touring because there's so many things that can get in a way of an ideal jazz performance where you really need to
be free to improvise the way you want. And that's some groove not true in rock and these stories I can groove, but yes, there are many things that can make it less than ideal, and almost always the music compensates for that.
Okay, there have been records that have actually literally been made on the road, made in hotel rooms. Certain people go back to the hotel room practice. Certainly Frip himself does that. Oh yeah, to what degree do you find being on the road and I realize every situation is different. Is their camaraderie and contact with the other people on the road and at times musical collaboration, experimentation all stage.
Oh yeah, a lot of good times. I think in my experience, the bands that don't get along great just don't stay together long. So all the bands I've been a long time, there's great camaraderie. There's a lot of hanging out and a lot of joking. Even even King Crimson is a very serious band, has been on stage and the music is very intense. But even while we're on stage, if you really could see that the little communications among the guys that we're having fun and joking
with each other, even about our mistakes. Robert Robert, especially Robert Fripp, who's used to seem very serious to audiences. In the last few years they've on Facebook, they've seen behind the other side of him, which is what I've seen for years the kids around a lot. We'll get off stage and he'll look at me and he'll say, yes, when in doubt, play CE sharp because he'll have heard that I came in when I was supposed to play an E. I came in with a C sharp and
he doesn't rate me for it. He said, oh yeah, I went in doubt play C sharp. And once I got a note when I in the nineties, I got a note under my door at a hotel from Robert saying, you have the rare opportunity to lend me money. And who signed Robert Fripp? I think I said saved that it's one of the only things I have that he signed. Sorry, I went off on that. To play together off stage is something we just don't have the opportunity to do very much well at all in the bands that I
tour with. I know some bands that set up a stage. If they're playing an arena, they set up a stage. Bon Jovi did this, This set up a stage backstage to jam before the show, after the show, to have fun and play other stuff. That's just not a possibility in the tours I do. If it's a big one like Peter Gabriel's, the crew immediately is on stage tearing
down the stage right the second after you stop. And yes, you could go to if you had the energy, you could go to a club somewhere in jam with other players. And maybe I used to do that a little bit a long long time ago, but not anymore.
So you have this summer camp. Did you go to camp as a kid? I?
Oh, I forgot until you asked that I did. I went to classical I was a classical player and I went to one or two years at the University of mass in Amherst, Mass. Yeah, and it was influential on me, but only in a classical way, and later I stopped playing classical. But it was kind of cool, very different than this kind of camp with adults. I say adults, but this year there was a eight year old drummer who was amazing. Came with his parents.
Okay, you grew up in Brookline and outside of Boston. What'd your parents do for a living?
Wow, you've researched me a lot. I appreciate that.
Well, I spent a lot of time in Brookline. Anyway, we really have a friend who grew up absolutely.
My mother was the head of the children's department at a Boston public library, first at a branch, then then at the main branch, and then the overall library. So we read a lot. My brother and I had a lot of children's books. My father was an engineer, a radio engineer at first at WHDH, which later became also a TV station, and I grew up visiting the station a lot and seeing what radio is like behind the scenes.
That was fun. And they both my older brother, Pete was a French horn player at first and then became a pianist, and he went to Juilliard for classical and I went to the Eastman School for classical. So my parents did what they felt was the traditional thing of educating us musically, first playing piano and then picking our own instruments. And then they were kind of daunted when
first Pete and then I became professional musicians. That wasn't what they had in mind at all, but that's the way it went, and they were quite supportive of it.
Okay, so when did you start piano lessons?
I don't remember that, good question. Let me think I probably I was playing bass at twelve years old, so probably from nine years old I played piano and then I know this as an adult when my parents were quite old, I asked them if they remembered if I said anything about why I chose to play the bass, because I don't know what I did. And they said, no, you just said you liked it. They actually had asked
me that I liked the bass. And that sounds like a pointless story, but think about how many years later I'm seventy eight now and I still just like playing the bass, and I just want to play good music. So I'm glad I didn't think with that part of my brain that had a plan, And I'm glad I didn't say, well, I want to be this or I want to do this. I wanted to play the bass, and I'm very lucky that I am still doing that.
Well, you know, and a lot of Jewish families in the era, they made you take piano lessons, and most people, you know, had mixed feelings about that. When you started with music, we're saying, oh, this is my thing. Oh my parents are making me do this.
They had urged me to practice. What kid wants to practice, well, one in a hundred kids wants to practice. I didn't want to practice, but I did, and I liked it. I liked being able to play better the piano, and then once I was playing the bass, they didn't have to ask me to practice. I just did practice. And you're right, it was a tradition to educate it. And before had I been born ten years earlier, the tradition
was to take up violin. I was kind of I don't know why, but in the Eastern Europe that's what you did. And I'm glad I didn't have to become a violinist because it would have been ten years to master it instead of or sorry, twenty years instead of ten years the master of that instrument, and I wouldn't be able to play rock and roll the way I do.
Okay, So you know, I'm a little younger than you, and I remember hearing the show tunes and our parents takings to young people's concerts. Prior to playing the piano. Was there music in the house and what kind of music was that.
I'm very much a product of my older brother three years old, or the records that he got or the records that I grew up with because he could afford them. Yeah, my dad brought home music too. There was there was a lot of music being played and we had. We were pretty early to have a Hi Fi and and even a TV that I think I remember my dad building it out of components to have a TV in the early fifties. So it's a musical household somewhat. And yeah,
plenty of culture in Boston and in Brookline. Take I was taken to see concerts almost all well, there was no rock and roll, but I was taken to classical concerts and grew to love that music.
Okay, I don't have any brothers. I have two sisters. What's it like having an older brother? Did you always worship him and get along? Did you fight what was going on there?
In our case, we never fought. And I don't think I worshiped Pete, but I just quietly followed him.
You know.
He learned at an early age to take all the gigs because they might lead to something else. There might be a really good player. He was a jazz player before. I think of Pete as a jazz player, classically trained, a jazz player who plays rock, and I think of myself as a rock player who plays jazz. In that I mean, I don't really live the life, live the base parts of jazz, and I hear that when I play, I play it, I think pretty well, but not as well as I would if that was my whole musical life.
But anyway, Yeah, I learned from him many things, but including take the gig. You might meet a really good drummer and then you'll get to play with him. Other things like that and those. A few years ago we decided to form a band for the first time, quite only a few years ago, to form a band and to play the style of music that he first listened to. So we grew up with in the fifties, which was cool. I guess you'd call it the cool jazz. And the
bass player Julius Watkins was the French horn player. That's why Pete was getting those records because he was a French horn player, and Oscar Peterford was the bass player, great bass player. So really, in my later years I realized that I grew up listening to Oscar Petterford, whose choice of notes and whose taste and whose six think solos were pretty exceptional, and I didn't think about it at the time. It's only now that when I look back and I think that in a deep way, I
tried to become that bass player. But playing rock, in other words, trying to. I wasn't thinking I'll be like Oscar, but I do try to find the right notes and the right feel and the right sound, and not not do any more than not be flashy necessarily unless it's called for. And yeah, so I was greatly influenced by my brother's records.
Okay, talking about you and your brother at a young age, you go to school. What kind of student were you? Did you have friends? Did you play sports? We always one step remove what we you like.
Well, I'm never asked that I have to think a minutecause it was a long time ago. I enjoyed school. The Brookline Public schools were pretty good, so I got a decent education, not as good as I wish I had, but pretty good. And I was in a band, in an orchestra and a chorus the whole time, as soon as there was a chance to be in those, and
some of those did out of town concerts. So in a way, I was on the road as a thirteen year old a little bit, and that prepared me for being on the road when I was in the music school and college or university, and not prepared me for
being on the road even more it. There's a piece on my new album called road Dogs, and it was intended as an instrumental, and it wasn't instrumental, and I just was singing along with it, and I went road Dogs with that kind of voice of road Dogs, and I decided, well, I'll leave that in there and I'll write some other lyrics to fit that, because even though that it wasn't intended to be about that, I and the guys I work with are indeed road dogs.
So if I was growing up in Brooklyn in the fifties, brookline excuse me in the fifties, say oh yeah, Tony, he's the music guy.
I was, indeed one of the music guys I was. When the Beatles came around, kids came up to me, are they any good? Tony? I didn't know what to say, because I, you know, i'd heard them, but I didn't judge that about you know, like you know, I had nothing to do with classical so I didn't judge. Later I would have, you know, years later, I say they're very good. Indeed, there there's more to them than just
a pop band. But I do remember being asked that, and I was not the only person in that in that UH world, you know who was spending his time practicing in the in the band room, and I picked up tuba in those years. I didn't have a tuba at home, but it was sort of normal for for a bass player to be a tuba player, and the
and the school, the high school had one. I had a few of them for us to play, and I actually formed a love for playing in concert bands, which I carried with me later into UH into I think I end. I'm trying to think. When I stopped playing the tuba, they wouldn't let me play it at Eastman at is where they wanted you to have only one instrument that you that you focused on. But then when I played Peter Gabriel's first album, I I talked to him and let me play tuba on one piece and
subsequently on the road. So we had a tuba on the road.
Okay. I heard from somebody who's a road guys were from you work with you that you played the White House in JFK's era.
Yes, what's to say about that? Oh? Yeah, that's right. Yes, the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra took us on the road. I was was it early in the early sixties. I'm guessing sixty two, but I could look it up for sure. And we played in two places, at Carnegie Hall in New York and on the White House lawn President Kennedy. Kennedy came out and gave a speech before the show, saying that he was too busy to stay for it, but that he promising he would keep his window open
from his study. I'm not sure he actually did that, but somewhere I have a tape of the speech, and it's it's times have change, because he really gave speeches very well and eloquently, saying how precious it was to have our youth educated in music. And that's not the kind of thing you would lately you would hear from the White House. I think, so we're pretty special.
Where were you and Kennedy was shot.
I was in high school and I was heading for work at the library, Boston Public Library, where I worked in the music department, doing whatever I could. Yeah, and when John John Kennedy, when John Lennon was shot, I was in my New York City apartment developing photos. That's what I did all night because I didn't have a darkroom that was dark during the day, so I'd stay up late and the phone rang and it was I can tell this story now without choking up, but for
many years I couldn't. It was a newspaper saying, not that he had been killed, but it hadn't been shot and was injured, and did I have a quote for them? I don't remember. I think it was a Rochester newspaper, and I was shocked and puzzled by how they had my phone number, and doubly shocked, and then I said I don't know and hung up. And then another newspaper called shortly afterward, was asking for a quote saying that
he had died. I, like everybody, I was traumatized by that, and I think for about ten years after that, if anyone asked me anything about the John Lennon sessions, I just would say, that's not something I can talk about. And then I think I released a book called Beyond the Bass Cleft, with short stories of different situations I've been in as a musician through my life, and it had the John Lennon Yokohona sessions, and the editor said, correctly to me, you really have to address this. You're
just kind of dodging the reality that everybody knows. And that's when I finally, ten years later, came to emotionally came to grips with it well.
Jack Douglas, producer of Double Fantasy, he said, you know, the deal was, if anybody finds out the record's over, totally a secret. How did you end up on Double Fantasy?
It was Jack who I assume it was Jack who told John that I was a good bass player and worth head having the John's first words to me where they say they tell me you're good, just don't play too many notes. And I smiled and laughed. I smiled because that's such a New York in your face attitude, which I was fine. I was a New Yorker at the time that I'm very comfortable with that, and I knew, but he didn't know that I wouldn't play too many notes. It's just not the kind of bass player I am.
And I kind of understood that he was directly addressing the fact that somebody told him I'm good. That could mean I'm a real flashy player who's going to do just horrible things on his song. So I had a smile and I said, don't worry, I won't play too many notes, and we got along musically really great. We got along fine in every way. But I could tell he was very happy with the bass parts I played. And that's a nice feeling. When John Lennon's happy, he
doesn't have to gush about it. But I could just sense that he liked it a lot. There was something else, Oh yeah, secret sessions.
Yeah.
They told me not to tell anyone. I believe someone told me not to even tell my wife where I was working. I only lived across town and listen to this. The second day after I was told that, I took a taxi over from the East Side to the west Side. I believe it was a hit factory forty eighth Street between eighth and ninth, and I asked to get off on.
I just said to the taxi, just take me to ninth and forty eighth and he said, oh, that's near where John Lennon's recording And I thought, yeah, secrets as the cab drive and I'm not even going to the studio. And the taxi driver knows he had heard it on the radio.
By the way, that morning, were you starstruck when you met John Lennon.
I can't say that. I was no I was pleased to be part of it. Maybe it's just not the way I'm made up that I get starstruck from people. And also I had worked with other famous musicians, so I think I just I haven't analyzed why it is. I didn't get starstruck, as you can tell. I just think I entered situations on a musical level, and that's about the music. And I hoped that I would like him, that he would be nice and likewise with Yoko, and
that worked out fine. But in a way, it was the music that that it was all centered on to me, and that's just kind of the way I work.
Well, you a lot of times they lay down the drums in the bass and you disappear. How long did you work on the Double Fantasy sessions and to what degree were the songs pre written or work down in the studio?
They were the whole whole length of it was only two weeks, and then they made a second album out of outtakes that were Yeah, they weren't finished that In the case of that album, we did the full rhythm track rhythm section together. There were no overdubs. You could fix a part if you made a mistake, but there wasn't much of that. John would simp lay his song and sing it to you, and I would think, goodness, there's there are thousands of bass players who could do
a great job on this. How lucky am I that I'm the one who's here? And that was kind of the extent of all. Okay, Having put that thought aside, I just had the happy ride of hearing a new song and playing a wonderful song, and we alternated songs with Yoko's songs, would do John's, and Yoko would be in the control room with Sean, young Sean and kind of helping, just coordinate the control room with John. Then we would do a Yoko song and John would be
the tea boy. He'd be in the control room take looking at Sean and bringing out tea for Yoko, which was sweet. Her songs were a lot more problematic to
do because she doesn't play the instrument. She had had an arranger come in and do charts, but the charts weren't really didn't tell you much about how you should do it, so hers work became a a search to find the groove that she wanted, to find the tempo that would work, and to find where we're going with this piece, and then we would get that, and then we're back to John and all there. He placed this big guitar, he sings and it's all there for you.
It couldn't be easier. So it was an interesting experience. None of it was difficult, but it was unusual, and that we alternated between two writers.
And hey, are you ever starstruck with anybody, whether a musician, politician, scientist, whatever.
Good question. I can't remember being start what I would call starstruck. No, it doesn't mean that I feel I'm equal to these these really special people. It's just kind of not not in my makeup so much.
We've been doing this a long time. But if you go back seventies eighties when you were called for a session, did you ever feel somewhat uptight? You know, I don't want to make the exact equivalent stage fright, but it's sort of the same thing. You know, the band wrote a song. You know they've been on there at stage a million times with Ronnie Hawkins and Dylan, yet they're still uptight when they hit the stage. When you'd be called to work with an act, would you say another day,
I've got this or it would be party. You had spilkiss say, well, you know, I got to get it right. I don't know.
I think I'm thinking of a couple times in my concert life that I was nervous. Once, when I was a kid, I played a tuba concerto with the high school band and I didn't a factor in that your mouth gets dry when you're nervous. And we did one away out of town concert and a piece I had played before. But we got to the cadenza and my mouth was just dry as a bone. I couldn't even play the tuba, let alone go to the high note.
Excuse me, a high note on the tuba. And so I was very nervous, and it grew on itself as nervous as well will the more I realized, oh, I'm nervous, and that's making my mouth dry. So there was that, and then way many years later, I played with Paul
Simon Jimmy Carter's inauguration week. It was in a theater and full theater, and Jimmy Carter was at the front of the balcony with his wife and looking down and smiling, big famous smile and a lot of teeth, and I looked up and I'm behind Paul and I'm not the lead guy at all, and I thought, I'm nervous. This is this is really special, and I'm a little nervous. And I thought, that's great, that's pretty cool that I'm nervous.
I thought this, and a few times I've been nervous since then, since the Oh, I just thought of another one. I'll borri you with. But a few times I've got nervous, I.
Think bors What was the other time, Yeah, with.
That same orchestra that played the White House when I was older, I was playing a concerto with them, the Kusavisky Bass Concerto at the Boston University Theater, and I wore cuff links a thing back then. I was dressed up and I wore cuff links, which I had never worn at a rehearsal. And the piece, I think is in B minor. But when there's an e, which happens a lot when you're in the KYB minor, my wrist was at the shoulder of the bass, shall I put
it that way? And the cufflink when I did vibrato, the cufflink was banging against the shoulder of the bass, making a let's call. It a machine gun sound, much louder than what I was playing, much louder than the orchestra, and the audience couldn't help but be aware of that. And as I got nervous about it and about the upcoming ease the note e that I knew there were plenty of them coming, it got faster, as vibrato will do when you're nervous.
So that.
Was a great example to me of when I didn't embrace it, and it kind of got out of hand, and it was a dreadful performance for me, and I'm sure the audience was scratching their head about why I played the machine gun notes along with the concerto.
Okay, so your brother is buying these jazz records. Rock starts sometime in the early fifties. You know, I turn a rocket eighty eight rock around the clock. Then comes Elvis. At what point did you become infected with rock?
Interesting question? Not then? Not even in high school when the Beatle I mentioned the Beatles coming around around, I wasn't too interested. I listened a little bit, went to music school, started playing a little jazz, Still not interested in rock. I think I might have taken an ad out in Rochester when I was twenty looking for a rock band. I had never been in a rock band, and the Beatles had got more sophisticated, and I was kind of interested in it, So it really was. I think.
I was out of school and went to New York City and was a session player when I started playing. Well, I did a lot of kinds of music as a studio player in New York, and I became kind of attached to the rock stuff and trying to get the right sound for rock and trying to change my sound something you never did in classical never did in jazz, but you could do with an electric bass. I never thought until now about the what's the first rock I
listened to or enjoyed? But it was pretty late in my formative years.
Okay, how about you. You're coming of age and Top forty and there was great Top forty radio in Boston. Were you even listening to it?
No? No, I was immersed in classical music at that time.
Okay, at the time, were you playing a double bass? And at what point did you play the electric bass?
Yes, I played double bass only, and we called it double bass, and since then you call it spring bass or acoustic bass. And graduated high school, got into the Easton School of Music, played in the Rochester Philharmonic, and I was very lucky that Steve Gadd, a great drummer, was in school with me, was my classmate, and he didn't have any bass players who wanted to do gigs. We were all classical geeks, but I was a classical geek with a little bit of a streak of playing jazz.
I had played a little jazz, and Steve somewhat. We began to work a lot with gap Maan Joni and then with Chuck Mangoni, and then with both of them a lot, like I mean, two gigs a day, six and a half hours a day, playing a lot, and he sort of mentored me in a quiet way, letting me learn how to play the feel of jazz, which I really wasn't good at at all. I was a
classical guy, very interesting, and we put the time. We put the beat in a different place in jazz, or many different places, but a different place than classical, which just puts it right smack in the middle of where it could be. And yeah, so that was an education for me. And then soon after a few years after that, when I started playing rock, and when I came to New York, I had to adjust that to playing on the beat or behind the beat to play rock.
Okay, going to the Eastman's School of Music in Rochester. Your older brother had gone to Juilliard. Was there any doubt that you would go to music college? Why not that it's not a great place, but why Rochester.
I don't really remember why that school. But I had never had doubts. Once I was in high school, I had no doubt that I was going to play bass in whatever way I could making a living for it would from it would be a bonus. But that wasn't in my thoughts the way it isn't in any sixteen year old thoughts. I knew I was going to play bass, and that's what I did. And probably I seem to remember applying to a few schools. I didn't really I
didn't apply to Juilliard. I could have, but I didn't because my brother had gone there, and I thought I'll go off in my own direction. And maybe the Eastman School was a very good school for sure, and maybe the yes says I think back. They accepted me kind of early, and they said, if you let us know right away, you can come here and you'll get a scholarship.
Whereas if I started looking into other schools. I think I applied to one in London, the Royal Royal Academy or something like that, but I never heard back from them, and I accepted the Eastman offer.
Okay, another dumb question. Double bass, acoustic bass, whatever referring to it, has no frets. How do you decide and learn where to put your fingers and out of play?
Wow? Well, I think my first teacher said this is ten years. It's going to take you ten years, but be glad you don't play the violin that will take twenty years. You learn it by practicing your hand position and putting it in the right hand, sorry, and putting it in the right place, and you practice a lot, a great deal. It's way harder than having threats. And the day that I switched to an instrument with frets was an interesting day for me because I missed having
no frets. And later I found what's called a fretless bass, an electric bass that's fretless, and was very comfortable with that. I think it's more interesting to find bass players or guitar players who learned with frets and then make the switch to that fretless base. That must be very hard.
Okay, you go to Rochester for six hours away from Boston. It's a cosmopolitan city, but kind of in the middle of nowhere. Good experience, bad experience.
Well, I love the musical scene in Rochester. I was too young to know what the scene is in Boston. Frankly, there was the Berkeley School, but it was not even a legitimate school yet when I was there, And there were jazz clubs, but I couldn't get in them as a kid. So when I went to Rochester, it's really a mecca of really very good players, the cats of jazz players I'm talking about. There is a cultural affinity for orchestra also, of course, because of George Eastman and
the Eastman School of Music. But I liked hanging out with those jazz players and I learned a lot from them. And it was intimidating, yes, being a a kid and a new player to jazz and going to clubs and trying to sit in when you're not really sure what the songs are and things like that. So I went through that. An interesting thing that happened. I couldn't hear myself particularly with the acoustic bass with the double bass, and so I got an electric one. Ampeg made one
called the Baby Bass. Maybe they still make it, I don't know, but it didn't sound like much, but it was you've got an app and you could hear it. And I wasn't loving that. When I went to hear a band in Rochester that came into town. Jackie and Roy was the jazz band and Andy Musson was the bass player, and he was playing a Fender bass, which I had not heard of. Can you believe that I had never heard of a Fender base? And the kid I was, I want to to go up to Andy
after the show. I know him now. He lives in the New York area like I do. I guess he's always lived in the New York area. Yeah, And I said, what's that you're playing? Where do I get one of those? And this is interesting? He told me, Okay, go to New York, go to Dan R. Strong's music guitar store in the village. But he said, this is important. Don't
get a new one, get a used one. Those are the words he used because the expression vintage guitar or vintage bass didn't exist at the time, a used one was cheaper than a new one, and I did go to New York exactly. I took the train downs exactly he said to do, and the prices were exactly what he said. A new one at that time, we're talking mid sixties, a new Fender base was about two hundred twenty dollars, and a used one, by which I mean a nineteen fifties had their precision, it was one hundred
eighty dollars. It was cheaper, so I got one. I brought it back on the train to Rochester and I played that only that bass for many, many years. Interesting, how the times have changed.
You still have that bass?
I do not. I lost it in the fire. Sadly, I lost a lot of my basses in a fire in my barn in the mid nineties. By that time, to be fair, I had stopped playing it, or I would have had with me on the road where I was.
But still I wish I had it. Of course, I've had a lot of basses in my life, and I really came to appreciate and value them much more after I had lost some in that fire, and I switched in the late seventies early eighties, I switched to music Man bases designed by the way by Leo Fender, which were similar and similar in feel, but had more versatility and had more of the sound that we wanted at that time. We wanted more lows, more low end, and
maybe sometimes more highs on rock records. Then the Fender precision could give me. The engineer could compensate, but it seemed like a better deal to walk in with the sound that's going to be appropriate for the piece. Then. Ever since, I've primarily played a music Man bassis.
So what caused the fire and what did you lose in the fire? Oh?
What caused the fire was it became winter and I had foolishly left papers on top of the heater in my garage. It was a barn kind of garage, and so the whole place started on fire, and I lost all my bases and amps. I have forgotten what but a lot of not a lot, six let's say, six really good basses and four or five amps. It's a shame to lose them. I have one bass which I could show you, but it won't come across an audio
which survived it. It got half burnt. It was a base that was cream colored, light cream colored, and it turned amber in color, and part of it turned to charcoal, and I sent it very carefully back to Ernie Ball music Man with a note with a note that was it out of warranty, could fix it was a joking note, and they injected epoxy into the burnt part. And interestingly, I still play that bass a lot. I don't take it on the road because it would break if it
fell down. But it lost all its moisture, so it changed and it's a little more thumpy and a little less sustained in a way that's really cool and really has its own I love basses that have their own sound, really most of them do. And part of part of my joy in this album bringing it down to the bass was was expressing how much I like the particular bass on each track. I wrote a little essay or poem about each bass, and I took a portrait of it, not in a studio, but out in the in the world,
in a place that seemed appropriate. And it was important to me with this album to have a booklet that had room for all of those photos of the basses.
Okay, you know the guitars, you know, let's assume it's a new guitar. Guitars have them set up. They might change the pickups, the actions, et cetera. If you were to get a new bass from the fact factory, maybe in this case they make it to your specs, but I don't know. But generally speaking, you get a new bass, what would you change to make it the way you like it?
Good question is this has to do with the way the person is, the musician is here's the way I am. If it sounds great, then I get it. I want that bass and I like it, and I don't change it at all. If it doesn't sound great, I don't really want that bass. I don't want to. Well, that's kind of the end of the story. I don't want it. I never was one who's who has the expertise to
make a bass that doesn't sound good sound good. I mean, I can play the bass and change it a little bit with how I play it, But I'm not a bass redesigner, and I don't want to be. Why should I, Because there's basses that sound great when I pick them up. In fact, I gotta love what the basses give to me. I was very aware of this. Is I did this album so some basses just have a rock sound. You
just play half of the rock sound. Songs are in the kivs right, So sometimes I'm just playing eighth notes on an E and it sounds really cool and really great, and I really appreciate you appreciate the bass gave that to me. I didn't. It was not my fingers doing that. It's just a gift from my friend, that bass. And you can bet that I play that bass a lot if it has that to give me. In a similar way,
I play the NS electric upright. Need Steinberger designed that quite a while ago, and it sounds like very much like a double what we call it a double bass, but not exactly like it, but it has such a big, full round sound that if it's a ballot. This happened years ago. Peter Gabriel had a ballad and I took out that bass and I played a low G, just a G a long note, and Peter was like, oh, yes, that's what I want, and the engineer was, oh, that's great.
If there was a producer, he was and there they're saying, well, man, Tony, you're great. And I am very happily taking credit for this instrument that gave me that. And by the way, ever since, whenever Peter does a ballad, he wants that bass on it, and I'm more than happy to do that, to be the guy that plays that bass. So I really appreciate how instruments are each different. And luckily, through the year, you know, one way or another, through the years,
I've got a bunch of them. I could possibly get more in the future, but I have enough basses. Each sounds its own way in a very subtle way. The bass players would understand and would hear the difference, and they give me what I need, and I try to return the favor by making good music on them.
How many basses do you presently own?
I don't know exactly, but I recently did something I had never done. I assembled them all in one room and took a picture and made a jigsaw puzzle lot of it. In the title of the jigsaw puzzle is too many basses question mark. I don't know why I did that. I was just moved to do that. It was, frankly a lot of work, and I think I had about about sixteen or eighteen you know why, I don't know exactly, because it wasn't enough to fill up the room.
And my good friend Scott Potito is a bass player and a bass collector, and I borrowed twenty of his basses. So in the end I had a room full of bases. I forgot to exactly account how many were mine.
So let's say, for whatever reason you want a new bass, music Man will just send you something and you'll say yes or no. Well, you go to the factory and play five. How does it work?
Well, in the old days I would go to the factory, but not anymore. Music man comes out. They're very Ernie Ball music may. When Ernie Ball bought the music Man Company from Leo Fender and Company, they didn't It's unusual. They didn't change it and lose what was special about it. They made tiny changes that made it more versatile. And so through the years, I'm the guy who was playing them and endorsing them before that, and I can appreciate
that they never lost that. I don't know what, and I could never figure out what, but that magic that was special about that base. So once in a while, when they make an improvement, would they consider improvement? They'll ask me if I want one, and sometimes I don't, And sometimes if they'll say, well, this is really you're going to like this, Frank. You know what this happened
about four years ago. They redesigned all of the elements to make it lighter weight, the five string, and they told me about it and I said, that's great, but I don't need it lighter weight, and they said, it's really a lot lighter weight. And at some point I don't remember where, I got to pick one up and it was like, wow, it's a lot lighter but it sounds the same and it hasn't lost anything. And I decided to try one out. And I then realized that the two hours I talked about the show, that's not
a problem. But the six hours of rehearsing I do every day in some periods, boy, it's great having a light instrument. So once again I'm grateful to them for convincing me and talking me into trying at this lighter weight base, which became my default base to use because if only because it's so friendly to rehearse with.
So you're not changing the pickups, what about strings?
No, I use the strings to come on it. I'm lazy about changing them. I'm not a technical guy. A when I'm lucky and it's a big enough tour that I have a bass tech. His name is Mikaelai Russolto. He's an Italian guy that comes out with me for many years, since about nineteen ninety when it's that kind of band, and glad to have him. And I believe
he changes the strings and doesn't tell me. Probably he's swearing back there saying, oh, he hasn't changed this since the last tour, but I don't feel the need to do it when I'm recording. Yeah, I leave the bass set up the way it is. Let me say, it's obvious to plat bass players and guitar players. You can change the sound a lot with your fingers, with how you play, where you pluck the string, and other things in the tone controls. So it's not like I never
changed the sound of the bass. What I do a lot is put dampers under the strings. Music Man's original basses had dampers built in with a screw that were under the strings, and that was I think a Leo Fender idea, and then they took him off for a bunch of years and then they brought it back. But I always carry dampening material like foam rubber and things like that on the road with me.
Did you finish school at Eastman? I did.
I have a bachelor's degree that I haven't found a way to apply yet. But it's only been forty or fifty.
Years, so you graduate from college. What's the vision, right, I'm not a vision guy.
I wish I was. I had the same ethic that I had when I left high school, which is, oh, I'm going to play the bass and I'm going to meet some good players and play some good music. But now I'm playing jazz. I had a curious path after I left Rochester. The Buddy Rich band needed a bass player, and the manager of that band knew me and asked if I wanted to do it, which in those days meant leaving you don't have an apartment and go on
the road with this is permanently on the road. So I took a deep breath and I thought, that's for me.
I'm going to do it. And I got rid of my apartment and my furniture and all that stuff, and I said goodbye to everybody in Rochester, drove in my station wagon where I had my little bit of clothing and things, to Boston, where I found out that I showed up at the gig and they said that Buddy had changed his mind and talked the bass player into staying and I had no gig, and that was not my happiest night, but it was sort of yeah, you
want to be in the music business, okay. So then I gave some quick thought to a going back to Rochester, where I had said goodbye and got rid of everything I had b staying with my folks in Boston being a I don't know what a twenty four to twenty five year old guy going back home or c turning around and going to New York City. And I chose, see, I might never have had the gumption to go to the Big Pond, but I did and stayed with a friend, a school friend, because I couldn't afford a place in
New York. And fast forward a year year and a half and I was doing okay as a studio musician and the Buddy Rich came to town. The Buddy Rich band came to town and needed a bass player for two or three nights in a club and then recording
the album The Roar of seventy four. So I know this now we're talking nineteen seventy four, and they called me to do that, and I did that, and each night after the show, Buddy would tell the manager, Oh, this guy's okay, ask him if I'll go on the road with us, and each night I said no thanks. I tried that. Buddy had no memory of that incident, and I wasn't about to tell him. So I got to play with I got to play in that band. But my leaving Rochester was under strange circumstances. I might
never have let left. I don't know. So I'm not the guy that you questioned about who has the vision. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go to New York be a studio musician, and then I'm going to meet Peter Gabriel and go on the road. And I'm going to be a road musician for the rest of my life.
So that two years what first, you stayed with your friend, what happens in those two years?
Stayed with a lot of friends. And then later my brother lived in Danbury, Connecticut, and I stayed with him because you can't just show up in New York and gig and make enough money. And gradually I met the let's see, I joined I joined a few bands. One interesting one was called AH the Attack of the Green Slime Beast. Perhaps you never heard of that band because we only ever did one gig that was with three members of the Mothers of Invention. So it was a
very creative and interesting band. But as bands will do, we rehearsed a lot and at somebody's cabin in Greenwood Lake, and then we did the one gig, interesting gig by the way, where Meredith Monks Dance Troupe was doing improvised dance while we improvised on stage, and they had their bodies painted red and they were wearing kind of diaper kind of things. And one of the those dancers, who
was a young aspiring actor named Danny DeVito. So yeah, later when I saw him, when he became well known and I saw him on TV, I said, I know that guy from that one gig we did in Philadelphia without AH the Attack of the Green Slime Beast. Wonderful times.
So I was in a few bands like that, and I fell into what we called rehearsal bands that would go into a studio at eleven at night when the studio had no more sessions going on, and play into the night, mostly to give horn players a chance to play, to really play. The successful horn players in New York would do sessions all day, jingles and pop songs. Kind of want to play that. They want to play jazz,
so that's why they went into music. And from being in a rehearsal band called White Elephant, I met a lot of great players, did a couple of albums of that, and sooner or later those later. It took a while, but some of those players that I knew from the band got me on sessions and I met other people and came what you call the studio player in those days. There was such a thing later that that profession kind of went away because there weren't enough sessions being done
in New York to provide a living to somebody. And I liked studio playing and I liked being that, but I felt unfulfilled. And when I had the chance to go on the road, which meant not being a session player, I jumped at that.
Okay, In LA in that era, there were the a players, usually one person who might be getting double or triple scale, doing two or three sessions a day, and then there were a couple of other people, but really there were you know, one or two people who played when you were playing sessions as a bass player, at what level were you and who were the other bass players, if any?
New York were were very different seeing in LA and most of the records that I knew about were not those the ones we've seen in the movie the famous this is going to be a hit record. Some of them were that way, but most of them were not. They were just more just a huge volume of records being made and coming out, and they were the players were equal. Nobody was getting No one that I know was getting double scale for anything. And in fact, we
all had the same answering service. Would you call It was called radio registry who just had a list of bass players in The contractor would give him maybe eight names of bass players, he didn't care who showed up, and they would they the answering company would call, go down the list, and if you didn't answer the phone, they would go to And there were no cell phones, by the way, There were phones in every studio and sometimes a direct phone to this radio registry, and if
you didn't answer, they just greet the second guy. So the contractor and the arranger didn't really know who's going to come to this session. So it was really very different than the much more refined thing that had going on in LA, where they really cared and they really had people who were going to construct, hopefully a hit record, whereas we New York, at least in the circles that I was in, we were reading charts and doing just
regular records and sometimes film. There's also a lot of film in LA, but not so much in New York.
Okay, So you said you were doing that, and then you got invited to go on the road. What was the first act you went on the road with.
I was going spending weekends on the road with Gary Burton, a jazz wonderful jazz, a vibraphone player, and with Herbie Man. Herbie for years had different band every weekend, but I played with him for years, and mostly he intentionally did weekend shows. We'd go out for the weekend and let the guys get back to New York to do their sessions during the week. That wasn't so important to me, but it was okay, So I did that probably for a few years. I also played with This is really
digging into my memory. I don't think about this very often Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary was a solo act, and later I did the same with Judy Call a lot of weekends, maybe a few others that I'm forgetting, So weekends were spent out on the road. But the big change for me was when producer Bob Ezrin asked me to play at this session for a young guy, Peter Gabriel, whom I didn't know, and I went up to Toronto and met Peter and met Robert
Fripp and I played on his album. And when he asked me to go on the road, that wasn't for a weekend. That was for a real tour, a rock tour, and I was all one hundred percent into doing that because playing this music live is why I went into music. I don't mind recording, but I love playing live and having the audience be part of the whole thing that's going on. So that was the beginning of the end of my career as a studio player, but happily beginning of my career as a road player.
How'd you know Israel? I don't know how I.
First know him. That was not the first album he asked me to play on. I'll ask him how we met, I don't remember. I had played at that time on Lou Reed's Berlin album and on a number of Alice Cooper records. Those are the only ones I remember doing with Bob, and he just he thought of me. Bless him. He thought, this studio guy, he's a rock player. He wants to be playing distorted bass and that stuff. And he was right, and he heard that, and I happily went along.
At what point did you develop your look of the mustache and the shaved head.
I'm squeamish about the expression developed my look because that wasn't the way it came about, But I guess it's sort.
Of how did it come up?
Yeah, one summer it was hot, it was really hot, and I said, heck with this, I'm cutting off my hair. And I did it regularly that summer, and for a few years, as soon as it got cold at Chili in September, I would grow both hair and beard through the winter. I was certainly not concerned with how I looked. I looked pretty pretty strange both ways. At that time, which is a long time ago, it was unusual to
be bald. I can describe it in this way. People of people on the street who just couldn't help but say something, would say, hey, you'll referring to yul Brenner. Later they would say hey, Kojak. Not much later, maybe you're half six months a year. And again these are people I don't care, but people without a filter. And that's fine. You just have to say something to a bald guy. Kids would point, you know, kids, oh look, daddy, that guy got no hair. So it was very unusual.
It was interesting that I was that way. Then maybe there were some other rock players without hair. I don't really know, but not that many years later it became quite common because guys, you know, for a number of reasons, but one of them is guys realizing they have no more hair on top, might as well cut the whole thing off. And and for me, after a couple of years of the beard, uh, I would say a little
bit of vanity crept in. And so many people told me, hey, you look good without the hair, and hey, you don't look so great with the beard and the semi hair, and I just kept shaving. So that was it. I don't really remember where the mustache came in.
Do you ever change your look now? Do you ever say hey, I'm sick of this. I want to go incognitum, let my hair grow, shave my mustache.
I can't do it so much I used to. I used to change be way into changing the look with different hair lengths. I've had shoulder length hair. I never had a lot of hair on top. But I had shoulder length hair and full beard. But it can't change it much. I think the I think once in a while I'll grow a little more of a beard or what do you call it, a vandyke, But pretty much I don't. And it's not because I wouldn't like to.
It's just a I don't have the materials anymore. Through the hair is not growing, and I will say that I die my mustache, of course, because it would be almost invisible if I didn't.
Okay, few technical questions. Traditional p bass four strings? Why four y five y six?
Wow? I think the four decision was made maybe in the eighteen hundreds. My dogs have entered the house. By the way, I think the decision for four strings was made. What we call the upright bass was developed. I'm not sure the history of that. I only played four strings.
I guess in classical we had an extender for the low east ring that would bring it down to a low sea, a little device, mechanical device on the top that you could have your base adjusted to have that, and it was necessary for some symphonies, but not for most of them. And then when I moved to Fender base, it only had four strings. Later, much later, when music banned, there were five strings, but I wasn't interested in trying them.
It's funny when I think about myself, I guess I'm a combination of being very open to new ideas like the Chapman stick and the funk fingers and things that are really weird, and in a way being not adventurous at all and not trying a five string based because I just wasn't interested. But when Ernie Ball music man said we got a five string, and I think, I said, well, does the E sound the same? Because the other five
strings I've played, the E doesn't sound the same. And the E is my life, that's where I live, that's what I want. I want that E to have that power. And they said it does and it did, so boom. I played five string and pretty much only five string for quite a while. Of course, at my home studio I have the four strings, which have their own sound, and I use them plenty. And by the way, on the upcoming beat the tour, I will do what I
did in the eighties. I'll play that bass with the four strings and in the same bass, with the same sound. It'll be great. As for other the six strings I've never tried to this day, and I don't know why I haven't tried it. It just hasn't fallen into my hands. I do play the Chapman sticks, which mine has twelve strings, so I can handle more strings. But on all of these really what I'm looking for is to be able to do a versatile and worthwhile and meaningful bass sound
on the low notes. And if it's got high stuff, that's good, that's a bonus. But it's those low notes that matter to me. When I first heard of the Chaplain stick, when I first tried it, I found it very different than the bass and really suitable for the progressive rock stuff I was doing, the odd of the ordinary of stuff I was doing in the early eighties
with King Crimson, and also down low. It had not the big, fat sound that I always wanted, and not the powerful sound, but a lot of articulation so suddenly I could play very fast, very low, and I thought, well, there were some certain situations where I'm going to want that, and those situations are going to bring out this instrument, but only in those For years, I only brought it out in those situations.
Okay, I certainly remember going to see shows all of a sudden the Chapman stick appearing to me. It seemed like it's sort of heat and it's not as popular now. For those who don't know, tell us exactly what the Chapman stick is.
Yes, Emma Chapman in about I'm guessing nineteen seventy five invented it and it's or finished inventing his instrument and released it. That's designed to be played with a hammer on or a tapping technique. So you don't fret the note the way you do on a bass or guitar with your left hand and plunk plucket. You don't do that. You just touch the fret with your left hand or your right hand and the note comes out, which involves, of course the strings being set up very low action,
so you don't have to really hammer on. I call that hammeron playing, but it isn't. You can just touch it and amme it at the same time developed an instrument vertical, not at the same angle as a guitar that hooks in your belt hook sorry, it hooks into your belt so you can play it in a vertical way. And his instrument had five bass strings and five guitar
strings on the same neck with a stereo output. So for the first time I had heard of of any instrument, it had two outputs that are completely two different instruments. And if that wasn't unusual enough, the hammer on and the stereo output, Emmett decided to have the guitar strings be tuned in forth and the bass strings tuned in fifths and backwards. So you have a very unusual instrument outside of the norm. And it's kind of easy to
pick in a way. It's easy to pick it up and play it because you don't have to have that fretting and plucking. You just touch a note and there's your note put in a way for some especially for some of us, it's kind of hard to get used to. So I jumped on it early for the reason that I used to play the I still do play the bass with a hammer on technique, and I thought I got to try this instrument. It's designed to be played that way and by the way. Eventually there became a
twelve string instrument and that's what I play now. And a few years ago, quite a few ten fifteen years ago, I decided to form a group called stick Men, where we only played the Chapman stick, two of us and
a drummer, Pat Macelado. And then after a few years the other stick players replaced by Marcus reuter Or, a great touch guitar player, who he played the Chapman stick, and then he developed his own instrument called the touch guitar, which is played the same way but has kind of different elements to it.
So my perception is is it's not as popular as it was in the seventies. Is that correct or incorrect.
I'm not the guy who would know. I could write an uncomfortable email to stick enterprises and ask them, but I have no idea. I know, once in a while I hear other players, and I'm always impressed with the things they do that I couldn't do, And maybe if I practiced, I could. It's kind of a Wild West instrument in that you can develop your own technique, you can have your hands wherever you want. So players are always finding things to do that the rest of us
didn't think of. And that's a wild thing about the instrument. But how many people are buying it and how many people are playing it is really not something I know about.
So when would you use it with someone else's music?
Easy to talk about, Peter. I go show up at Peter gabriel session, which I did about a year and a half ago for what became the Io album, And I have in my trunk of basses a fretless and that NS electric upright, and a five string and a four string and a vintage four string, and I have
the Chapman stick. And he plays the piece, and I don't think the musical part of my brain becomes quickly attached to whatever he's playing and singing, whether he's doing it live or playing a recording of what he's got down so far, And I become a fan of that piece of music. I'm saying with Peter Gabriel it would be the same somebody else. I become a fan of that, and I kind of start fashioning in my musical brain what sound might be good for it, and if it could be.
Very low.
Okay, the stick. Hey, the stick does that. Or it could be chords way up high in a way that the stick does well. Or it could be a big fat sound that the NS electric upright gives me. Or it could be a heavy rock sound that my music
man four string might be good. So I don't think about it, but I kind of get a sense of what sound would be good, and then I look around at the instruments I have, and maybe I think, well, this bass would be good, but only if I put foam rubber under the strings or something like that to make it more dampened than shorter notes. And that's how I choose what to play. And by the way, Peter might hear it and say I think I'd like the upright on that, and case I make a quick switch.
But it's a musical decision. Sorry for the long answer to your short question. Not an intellectual decision or not based on history. I just kind of go by what it feels like would be the right instrument for that particular piece.
What about Jock Opustorius.
Obviously a great player For those who don't know, he was maybe the most famously great jazz fretless bass player of all time. I met him a couple of times, and my brother played with him a lot. I'll tell you an interesting thing about his playing and mine intersecting in a funny way. I heard about him when he came out with a solo album and I heard it and I thought it was great, but not really kind of. It was very technical and almost phenomenally technical, and I
wasn't interested in that. It was pretty musical, and I liked that, okay. And then two things happened. I found myself on a session. I don't usually play solos, but I was on a session one day in a studio and there was a bass solo and I said, you know what, I'll overdub it. So the other guys went out and into the control room and I'm playing a rare jazz bass and I see Jacko coming in to the control horrum and I thought, you couldn't script this
better than this. You know, not a nightmare, but this is really awkward. I can barely play this file. And now Jacko was listening to me. So there was that. But also when he played on Joni Mitchell's Hegira record, that was a whole different thing for me. His playing was so sublime that I didn't want to hear myself play the Fretless anymore. So I put away the Fretless and for ten years I didn't play the Fretless at all. I thought I'll never play it again, because, yeah, I
think I already expressed it well, but I couldn't. He was playing the way I dreamed I might be able to play. And I don't mean fast, just the right notes and the right sound and impeccably in tune and phrasing that's just doesn't get in the way of the piece, but on its own, the phrasing is magical. So I just couldn't hear myself doing that. And yeah, after a whole long time, someone asked me to play Fretless and I had, frankly to tell you the truth. I had forgotten.
I've forgotten how I felt hearing Hajira, and so I said, okay, I'll try. I'll play Fretless again. And I've later a great deal since, and I've got over that hump of not comparing myself in any way to Jacko was playing any.
Other bass players who you look up to or think are great and either have recognition or deserve recognition.
I think names don't come to mind. But I am influenced by a whole lot of bass players, a whole lot. And from the beginning I mentioned Oscar Petiford back when I was ten years old, So I in a way, I think we bass players, not just me. When we listen to any music, we're sort of aware on some level. We're aware of what the bass player is doing and
if it works, and if it doesn't work. It could even be even some record I'm not talking about live or in the here's something and jeez, names aren't coming to mind, but the base is just doing exactly the right thing, and I'll think, oh yeah, and I'll try and obviously I'll try and incorporate that into my musical sense of what might work, or I'll here in some way it could be sonically that the bass and drums don't work together or something like that, and I'll think, well,
I don't want to do that. So I'm being influenced all the time, and I think a lot of bass players are by a lot of players, And the only thing that's changed in the last few years is the young players who are there on YouTube for us to hear doing things that I could never do. And I will never do also influence me. And I decided in that lockdown year, when I had time to I wasn't doing so many records, and I had time to listen
a lot. I decided to look at them as more my teachers than where do I fit into what's being going on now? And in some cases I would if it's a video and I can see the person's finger and it's a woman player, and that's great. Now I can see how they held their wrists or something like that, or their fingers the palm of their hand to dampen the notes, and I'll try and learn from that.
Okay, you work with Peter Gabriel on the Flour solo album, you meet Frip, you go on the road with Frip. It's his act, not yours. That two ends.
Then what you mean the first Peter Gabriel tour, No, the way you said it.
Okay, After you cut the Peter Gabriel album, the one with Salisbury Hill, et cetera, do you then go on the road with Peter or then go on the road with Frip.
Both. Peter took that album on the road and Robert was one of the two guitar players Steve Hunter was the other and Robert, in his inimitable way, he was in the in the wings. He didn't want to be seen and he didn't want Peter to introduce him as Robert Fripp. Dusty Rhodes on guitar was what Peter would say every night, and the whole audience knew that it was Robert and they were looking in the wings anyway. Yeah, so we did a wonderful tour, not an ideal tour.
There was a problem with the sound that the band was just too loud on stage and there was no way the sound engineer could get us to turn down. I say us, but frankly, it wasn't me. It was the guitars and drums. It was too loud for the venues. So it was less than an ideal tour. But Peter was fantastic, and you know, he pretty quickly went into starting thinking about the next album and the next tour, and I was one hundred percent in for everything he's done since then.
Well, I guess my question is, you know a lot of these are not traditional bands, and you make a record, you go on the road, and then you got nothing booked. I mean, I know somebody played on Elton's you Know Final tour. As soon as that tour ended, he was out with somebody else. Okay, so once she played that first album, the first tour has just been endless. Or you ever said, where's my next gig?
Well, freelance anything. We all say when's my next gig? Where is it? It happens to us all at any stage of success, unless you're well, I think everybody, there's times when you don't have enough gigs. This is why my brother taught me, take all the gigs. You're going
to need them. One day, you're gonna want them. I think I don't remember exactly what happened the year that Peter Gabriel's first tour ended, and I knew I wanted to do more of that, but I was able to do some stuff, and I think maybe it took me a decade or two to realize that it would be good to have my own music coming out so that I could form my own band and in a small way, to something to fill in the times between the big tours.
And that's what we have all learned that I was slow to figure that out, and I've done that ever since. So eleven brothers the jazz band with my brother. We can book that on short notice and go do some shows. Stickman can group book at rock clubs moderately, short notice, maybe six months eight months out. Who're a band like King Crimson needs to be over a year out.
Okay, do you have a manager or do you do this all yourself?
I don't have a manager, and I don't really do it myself. I get these calls I'm laughing. Just the idea of having a manager, Yeah, that would be a good idea, But I'm not that kind of player. I just and myself, and people regularly find me and ask me to do play on their records and record from my home studio where I'm talking to you from, and that's really great. I missed it in the early two thousands when I started doing that and less and less
studio playing in person in the studio. I was unhappy about it, of course, because I missed the experience of all being together in the studio. But now that it's become ninety percent more than ninety percent of the sessions everybody does, I've kind of learned tricks and ways to deal with it and get good music out of it. And I really enjoy that. When I'm home, I get
to do that. Similarly, if I play on someone's album, I play on a lot of albums, and if they ask me to tour with them, if the music is right and if I'm free, then then I can do that and be glad that I'm free to do that.
Okay, let's say you're going on the road with not one of your traditional acts. How do you decide what to charge?
Oh, I'm terrible at that. Ooh, I don't know what to say about that. It's not something I do if it's not something I'm good at and not something I want to deal with. So I deal with it because I have to. Sometimes we ask to be paid what the other guys are getting. There's that trick, and it's kind of silly that amongst the musicians who are backing someone up, it's pretty rare that we even discuss it. It ought to be the first thing we talk about.
But I'm guessing, as you can probably tell from listening to me talk that this about because most of us, like me, went into it for the music and they just kind of shy away from the business side of it.
Okay, Back in the earlier days after you work with Peter Gabriel and you still have holes in your system. Your rep is not as big as it is now. To what degree did you network and try to find opportunities? And to what degree did you sit there and wait for the phone to ring.
I never networked. I sit there and I don't sit there and wait for the phone to ring. I work on my solo albums and I and I call guys and ask them to jam. And you know, I do the other kind of music that we all do, but I do not. I don't know how to what would you call how to fish for work? I just don't know how to do that. And by the way, and by the way, at every you're talk to me about
me like I'm extremely busy, and I am. As we talked today, I have a huge amount of touring coming up, but then actually have a little something in January and then I might I don't know. It could be months or even six months before I get anything good, in which case I'll finish the second another album.
So let's say, I mean I know how to contact you. Most people do not. But assuming they can get to you, will you basically take any gig?
No, not at all. I want to hear the music. It's become easy from the internet used to be more complicated. But what was the It wasn't Facebook. There was a MySpace that was it where they could play me the demo and everybody could find me. That was kind of cool. I don't know why it went away, but yeah, it's not only that it wants to be good music, but I want to hear that I have something to offer for that music. I'll take an extreme example. Let's say
it's disco. If you today, Bob, you send me a disco track, and maybe I could technically do it, and maybe it's a really good disco track, but I have you know, the demo bass part would be fine, better than what I could do, or as good as what I could do. So I have nothing to offer to that track. So I would say with respect, I was saying sorry, not for me. And and a guy comes to mind, what's his name, really good h Nick di Virgilio,
very excellent singer and drummer. And sometimes I play on his records progressive rock, wonderful stuff and one once in a while, I mean, he'll have me play on a track. And a couple of years ago he sent me one where he had played the bass, and I listened. Usually I only give one listen to the bass part that's there, and then I want to hear it without it. But I kept listening to it, and the bass part was great. He's a friend that I've worked with him a lot.
But I had I had a writer him. I said, I, All the best I could do is do exactly what you did. Did. I couldn't even improve on the sound. So let's uh, you know, right on right on that track that the bass player said, you got it, you did it really well.
So how'd you end up working with Paul Simon?
I think because of the great engineer and producer Phil Ramone. He had used me in the same rhythm section on a number of sessions, and because he was doing Paul. My memory is not perfect of this, but I'm guessing I certainly didn't know Paul himself, and Phil was the producer, So it was Phil who brought in Steve Gadd and
myself Richard t on piano, Eric Gale on guitar. We were sort of a rhythm section that had done a lot of records together, and the experience of working with Paul, of course was super special and remained that way for the few years that I worked with him, both live and in the studio.
So what was it like being in the movie One Trick Pony? That was?
That was not thrilling to me. I didn't I didn't really want to be an actor, but there I was the bass player in the band, in the real band, and trying to play the part of being the bass player in the pretend band. Yeah, it was. I only had a few lines, so it wasn't saying the lines. It was a lot of hanging around in Cleveland and having makeup put on and taken off and put on again and taken off to be to look like a band in a club, which is sort of what I
look like to begin with. And I couldn't even use my name because, uh, for some reason, Paul had called himself Jonah Levin. That was the name of the lead character, Paul, and so I couldn't be Tony Levin. That would be confusing, even though we're only talking script because nobody says, hey, Jonah, how you doing, It's not not necessarily in the dialogue. So my name I got a big kick. My name was John de Bautista, John the Baptist.
Okay, there's a scene in that movie. You were driving in the van, you're playing dead rock stars. I remember seeing that movie when it came out and said, oh, I know who's alive and dead? How come they don't know?
Now?
I played that in mind as that I can't you know, remember, can you tell me anything about that scene?
Yes, Paul had written it with his sense of humor and irony. You know Paul, what Paul's like as a writer. And the guys in the band could learn it. But but they didn't know what they were talking about because Richard T and Eric Gale and Steve Gad they didn't know any of those bands. They don't listen to. I don't know who it was at Fleetwood Mac now it was yeah, the plane going down? It was Plenty. Yeah, yeah,
they didn't They just didn't know. So they're reading that and the director who didn't realize that, Bob Young, very good director, who was in the band with us somehow. So okay, let's do it again, and this time you guys just ad lib, just make up names of bands that died. We couldn't do it. These are not actors and these are not guys a verse in the history of rock and roll. So yeah, it was awkward. Well
you told me, Just tell you one more thing. There was for some reason, there was a thing about Tim Harden, Uh a joke. I think the scene ended with somebody saying Tim Harden and someone else saying scripted saying, oh, he's not dead, he just hasn't had a record out in a while or something like that, and the lawyers later said, you got to reshoot that scene. And then Tim Harden died, right, Yeah, so there was that about that scene.
Okay, now you talk about some legendary people. You worked with, John Lennon, Peter Gabriel. What was it like working in the studio with Paul Simon.
Terrific I did a lot over a long period of time, and Paul would well, of course, the songs are so great, they're really special. But he his process seemed to be an internal one and that he was going to search for the right field for that piece until it was right, and until it was right, it just wasn't going to He wasn't going to be happy, it wasn't going to work. It could take a month or it could take an hour.
So typically he would play the piece. Sometimes it had all the lyrics, but if not, he would just hum it, and he would go over to Richard t the great, great keyboard player, usually on the Fender Roads, always on the Fender Roads, and play it as a duo until he was happy with Richard's part, which took about thirty seconds, because Richard always played great stuff, and then Paul would come over to me, or to Steve Gadd the drummer, maybe to Eric the guitar player, but usually Eric could
kind of cop what Paul was doing on guitar, and Paul would come over to me and sing the melody, but he would also kind of hum or sing imply a bass part. And it was fascinating to me that it was a very melodic not surprising there, and more melodic than I would normally play. And I would start to play something like what he's doing, but also I'm the bass player and I need to ground it, and
so the end product would be something. Pretty quickly we'd find something we're both happy with that's more melodic than I generally play. After a while playing with Paul, I became a more melodic player. I became more likely to go up high and play a chord way up high than I was before that. So I was very influenced by that experience, and you can imagine I treasure it a lot. But also he let me play the low
notes and the simple parts. You know. A great example is Fifty Ways Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover, an amazing song lyrically, even I love the irony and the not just the chorus, the famous part, but the first verse starts in a wonderful way. But in the beginning I'm playing high and playing chords can be a melodic bass thing. But then the when the chorus starts, I'm just playing quarter notes down low in a gospel kind of way, just the way, very very simple, And I
love the contrast between those two. And it reminds me if I hear that, it reminds me how much I learned from Paul melodically about what I can do on bass to.
What degree you talk about getting the feel right. But when he got in the student, were the songs finished and just tweaking them or would he change them in the studio.
Both Sometimes it was finished, done deal, and sometimes he had no lyrics. Sometimes I think one song called have a Good Time, Maybe it was he said his son had just said something that morning to me, and they all had a good time, and that was the song was going to be about that, and he he I don't remember how long we worked on it could be days, could be one day, I don't know. But once we had the track in a way that made him happy. The next morning he came in with the finish lyrics.
He had written them that night. I happened to come in early and I heard him singing a song that sounded like it took a year to write. So that's what I meant about, when things were right for him, that he could he could complete the song.
So let's say you're working with him for months once again, how do you decide to charge? You make it a union? Raid? Do they make you an offer beforehand? How does that even work?
I think back in those first of all, I don't I'm squeamish about all that. I don't pay much attention to it. But back in those days, it was called the there was a union scale. Maybe some of the other guys made what's called double scale on that session. I don't really know, but I was getting paid by the hour, not tremendous pay, not terrible pay. I wasn't really thinking about it then, and I don't remember. I'm
gonna guess I know. When I started in New York, a double sorry a session, a three hour record session paid sixty dollars or something like that. So maybe it went up to one hundred and eighty dollars or something like that, but for a three hour session, and those would have been six hour sessions.
Now you're literally classically trained. A lot of rock bass go the and then you have Paul McCartney, who was famous for Melody on the base, certainly untrained. What is your view on McCartney's base play.
Yeah, fantastic, fantastic stuff that influenced all of us, but me included for sure. Even though you know the training, it really has nothing to do with it. When I came to I'll tell you a little thing about that, the training. I was a classical musician. So when I came to New York and started doing sessions, when there was a chart and an arranger who would write out every note to play, I would play every note the way he wrote it, the way a classical player would.
Even when I I'm not proud of this, but if I saw and just knew that it was not the note that was wanted. I would still play it because that's what classic I'm not. It's silly, but that's what classical players do. Literally, if a fly poops on the page, you're going to play that note. And you just pointed the page, all it's there. Okay. So I did that
for a minute and New York minute. I did that for I don't know X number of months before I realized that what I want to do is figure out what the arranger wants and play that in spite of what he wrote. I actually don't remember what your question was, but it started me off on thing about reading Bob McCartney. Yeah, okay, So I didn't really in my early session years have a style of playing. I was doing what I thought
was wanted on that on those on that particular record. However, I was influenced, given the chance to plitt, to make up my own part, which I often wasn't. I was influenced by Paul Mark McCartney to do a great deal not only the choice of notes, which are very fantastic, you know, beyond description fantastic, but the sound he was playing, famously ah Hoffner, which sounded very different than than the Fender base that we all were playing on. All the
records made in New York in those days. Nobody had a Hoffner or Gibson, and if you did and walked into a session, a normal session, the engineer would never use you again. The producer, they wouldn't like the sound you had. So I wasn't allowed the latitude of sound that Paul really made use of in a great way. And I'm also going to add d Murray, the unheralded wonderful bass player with Elton John on his early records, also played in a wonderfully melodic way, and that influenced me a lot.
Okay, so let's say someone makes contact with you, you're out with the bead, you're out with whomever, and you can't do it. Who do you tell them to call?
Very very funny question. That has happened in the last couple of days. A few times I've got emails about doing a track, because that's I do. Get those emails, and I had to say next year I could do it. It is not a thing at all in the industry where I live that a bass player would be asked to recommend another bass player just doesn't happen, so nobody they're not if I can't do it, they're not really interested in who I like. They're going to get another
bass player they like, or that the drummer like. That's not an even better idea.
Okay. So traditionally, a session player, a band member gets paid by the hour or the gig, other than the records you've put out yourself. Do you have royalty interests in any of these records?
Some there's publishing. If you had publishing is big, if you had something to do with writing the piece, as I do in King Crimson, the bands that I'm a remember of, and if you were a band splitting the royalties, there's that. Of course that's great. If you're a quote session man playing being paid by the hour, then I wish I was. I don't wish, but I'm not an expert at this. But in general you're just paid by the hour. There is no royalty factor. However, in the
last few years that's changed a bit. There's a big fund of money from record labels. I guess that's divided up somehow in a complicated way among all the people who did all the sessions, and so there is that payment. And then there's another thing that's different. In Europe, there's an organization that keeps careful track. I don't know that there's one in the US. If there is, I guess I ought to find it keeps careful track of who played on all records and gives them some royalties from it.
So European recordings, yes, there's some extra payments. I don't know anything about how that works or what the percent is.
Forgetting the money that you've put away. Are the royalty interests you have over your fifty odd your career significant such that you could live on them, or they can basically pay for dinner.
Yeah, somewhere in between, but a little closer to the dinner thing. And caveat is that I haven't counted it up and done that math. I've been too busy playing. And I like the joke, but with a little bit of serious, a ring of truth to it that we musicians are very smart in that we've chosen a career where we have to keep working until they pull the instrument out of our our frozen hands and we can't play anymore. And it was a good decision for I think.
For all of us, and how many times, you've been married.
Twice?
And how old were you when we got married the first time?
First of all, I'm baffled why you or anybody would want to know this. I can tell you the important one, The now one has been eighteen years.
Okay. Then let me ask you. Let me ask a couple of questions a different way. How long were you married the first time?
First? More important, I'm gonna trump you with it. The current one is twenty eight years, nine eighteen years, and that's the more important one. So I was married for ten years, from nineteen sixty six to seventy six.
Okay, so we were relatively young when you first got married.
Why didn't those numbers weren't correct? By the way, it wasn't sixty six, it was seventy nineteen seventy in nineteen eighty.
Okay, Why did you choose to get married at that time?
I'm baffled by that question. I have no worthwhile.
Well something, you know the reason I'm asking this. And there's a human you're a road musician. I remember Metallica. We're all married. They went on the road that came on, they all got divorces. I mean, you know, it's not easy to sustain a relationship when you're a road musician. I've talked to certain people. They say, oh, thank god he goes on the road, he drives me nuts when he's home. It all works. So I guess I'm asking.
Sometimes people want to get married because the musician wants an anchor, or the person at home says, hey, you know, I want a commitment. Other times, irrelevant of how the relationship started, the fact that one person's on the road one person is not ends the relationship.
Good point, and yeah, now I understand the the issue behind the question. It's a very good question. I think how many years it last, it doesn't matter. It was always difficult, always has stress on a relationship to have one person gone all the time. And there's also in the old days, in my case, when tours were longer, when they were eight weeks, ten weeks, twelve weeks, and then two weeks at home, and then more they're not quite that long usually anymore. This upcoming one is, but
that exacerbates that factor. Then you're really not a person at home, and then when you come home there's a period of adjustment. It's just a different world. No matter how ground did a person you are. Animals and kids help a lot because they don't care that you are on the road. But no matter how grounded you are, you've had a life where you or your band is the center of attention of everybody. You meet, every worker, every day, every not just fans, but people working us.
It's all about you, and interviews and all that all about you. And then you go home and it's you know, literally, people walk up to you on the street and you start to reach for a pen to sign our autographs and you're just a home. You're nobody, thank goodness. So
there's that, and that add that to a relationship. It is, of course to strain, and it was harder in the even harder in the old days when we didn't have cell phones, when you had to make phone calls from hotel rooms, which were very notoriously expensive, really expensive one hundred dollars phone calls, and if you started to have some issues and want to have a fight or a long talk, it was it was more than you could
afford from being out. So that in that one case, there's a couple ways that being on the road got a lot easier. The other's GPS because we used to be lost a lot of time and no phone to be able to call and ask directions. Okay, so yeah,
I got more mature. We all got more mature as we got older, and hopefully and in my case for sure, found a partner who understand what understands from the beginning, what's involved with somebody who's not around all the time, and hopefully found ways to connect emotionally and meaningfully while you're apart. That's a big part of it. But at the end, I'm going to just say that I'm no expert at this. I'm just saying what little comes to mind in my case about it.
Okay, you've been on the road and been married, not been married. You know, traditionally people took advantage of the so called peroks of the road, certainly pre cell phone camera and you know, I've been out there myself. I've seen, you know, people who were married and they're taking advantage. I'm not going to say anything code of the road,
so to speak. Was this a lifestyle the people you went out with partook of if that's the word or that you partake or just the acts you were out with, that just wasn't a thing.
No, never toured with that kind of act. I know that they're out there, and that kind of rock and roll lifestyle is out there, and I've bumped into it sometimes and seen other bands that are like that. The never anything like that in the band's I tour with.
And do you have any children?
Yes, My wonderful daughter is thirty nine now living in Los Angeles and writes and directs horror movies.
And if she off the payroll, I don't know what that.
Means, off the payroll.
Do you support her?
No? No, I don't. Oh that's funny. She's thirty nine.
I think, Hey, listen, I know people in their seventies.
Okay, she'll support a valid question. Yep. I'm looking forward to only a few years from now when I'm known as the guy who's her father.
Let's hope. So you start working with Peter Gabriel in seventy six. The album comes out in seventy seven. The first Album's Got a Push, does have Salisbury Hill. Second album, Irrelevant of Quality, does not have the same commercial impact. Atlantic won't put out the third album That's on Mercury, which is really the best of that realogy. Then he shifts to Geffen. Has a certain amount of Action has a double live album, then all of a sudden, SO
comes out and it's gigantic, but sledshammer, et cetera. From the inside. What did this look like? It was like you were in the wilderness. Was it like you were in the wilderness and didn't care. Was it like you knew it was only a matter of time? What was it like?
I was never good at knowing what's going to be a successful record or not, and I don't. Plus I don't pay attention to it. Plus it doesn't really matter to be the bass player on those records or be the bass player on the tour. So it's not that it didn't care about it, but I didn't care enough about it to be involved in it. I only vaguely knew that that stuff was going on. And I'm you know, I still get to play on the new material and I still get to tour, and that's a win win win.
Well, let's say that album specifically, although usually the rhythm section is early he records, so which then us which you know, gigantic. When you're playing on those songs, you say, wait a second, this is something special.
Not the case. No, Peter's Peter's songs almost always had or some of the songs had that element of, oh, this could be you notice that this could be a radio play record, not a hit. I'm not the guy to predict that, but oh this is this could be very popular, and one way or another, Peter would sabotage that part of that song. So he always did that.
He just has it built into him that that the song would get longer and longer, and then eventually that first part would be gone, or the second, the core, whatever it was, the hook, what you might call the hook. Who knows why. I never asked them why, just I saw a lot of them come and go, or we recorded them, and then they weren't there on the final album.
And it was an exception when Sledgehammer came out. I thought, and I'm not really the expert at the history this, but I believe that we had finished the recording of the album and Peter, in its quirky way, said let's
do a song for the next album. And Manukach was literally packing up to go back to Paris, and he set up again and we played one or two takes on what would became Sledgehammer, and I think that wasn't meant for the record, and I think the label heard it and insisted that he put it on the record. So even that one, the Tony Levin opinion, as Peter would have sabotaged it in some way. It may had a five minute introduction to the hook or something like
that had he had the chance. But he didn't have the chance.
And in terms of recording Peter's music, to what degree is it finished when you show up, or to what degrees it worked out in the studio.
It's a very long process with Peter. I'm used to it. It takes a long process and can go on for years. You can keep coming back and playing the same songs, or it could be done. I don't know there and I leave and I don't know is it done this record or will I be in the next decade playing it? And I just take a pretty deep breath. And that's the way it is. And it lies within Peter's sensibility, and I'm not the one who's there day to day to find out how it's going.
So in the last thirty years or so, Peter has been less active than he was in the previous fifteen or twenty. So you have to book a schedule. What do you do if Peter calls.
Yeah, that's an element in my life because without question, I want to without question, he's the first priority. I want to be available for Peter's stuff. And if he just book was the kind of person or act or had the kind of management that he decides a way
ahead of time, life would be easy. In fact, the two things are coupled that he's my top priority, even over King Crimson, and he's the last one to decide decides because these things need if it's an arena tour, it needs to be booked way ahead of time, but he still decides a little bit on the late side, which makes it very hard, especially did when I was
actively touring with Peter and with King Crimson. In fact, when email was invented, the first thing I was early to hear about it, well, when it became I don't know about invented, but when it became popularly used, and I used it to connect the management of King Crimson with the management of Peter Gabriel so they could talk from different countries about the next where I was going to be in October, because otherwise, with phones and time differences, it was very hard to work out, so that, Yes,
that's been an element in my life for a long time, and it is now. I haven't heard anything about Peter doing any touring next year, and it's too late to book the spring or the summer. But when hopes, I haven't heard any thing, you think being in the band, I would know, but I don't, And like any fan, I hope there's stuff and I will hold off as long as I can, and then maybe i'll I'll try to contact him and say, are you sure you're not
going to do anything. It's a common Oh, here's Tony reaching out to say, next September, I have a thing, what do you think might you be doing something? And often I don't get a definitive answer, but we work it out, and it almost always has worked out that I'm on the tours.
Generally speaking, you know, you work with a lot of people. Do they only make contact when they want work or do you maintain like regular contact like Peter could years go by, we don't hear from them or easy checking in or you checking in a regular basis.
It's different with everybody. Peter's an old friend. We don't chat often when we're not working together, but the lines are open and we see each other when we can. And Robert Fripp's an old friend and I've worked with him a long time, and I have an open invitation to visit him at his house in England, and I think I took him up on that one time, but it's a little awkward to have the time to do that, so I haven't done it lately, but the good friends.
So it varies a lot with different people. When I'm going to be in La soon rehearsing for a long time, and I will indeed have a few breakfasts and dinners if I can with some recording artists who I've become friends with and who I've worked with.
And to what degree do you think about legacy.
I don't think about that. I'm lucky, as if you heard me say a few times, I'm so lucky to be doing what I'm doing and to be able to have done a career of it, and I have visions of being able to do it into the future, indefinitely crazy visions, and so that's enough for me. I'm lucky about that.
So the world has changed because no music disappears with the Internet and streaming services, whereas in the old days. You know, old records might disappear. If you're eighty eight and everybody else's passed and there's a club and there are going to be fifty people there, are you going to show up and play.
When you say everybody has passed him and everyone in the band.
I guess what I'm saying is you are a musician to a great degree. Other people are calling for you to play in their bands. Some of these you're always in the band, like Peter Gabriel, but it's not like he's working every year. What I'm trying to say is, certainly in the old days when the records were unavailable, there's some people say I'm not going to do it anymore. There are other people who stayed on as long as someone was willing to pay them. They were out there.
Of the ladder. But it's not correct to say as long as someone's willing to pay, as long as there's good music to be made. Like all my friends who are musicians, with one exception, like all of them, we're going to do it. If we're able to bend the knees and have to walk to that walk onto stage, and the music is good, we're going to do it.
The one exception is Bill Rufford, my band made in King Crimson in the eighties, who not bizarrely because it's a normal human thing, but he decided to retire from
touring and from playing music. And it's totally unusual in my genre, in their genre I live in, and among musicians, he's the only guy I know who did that or would do that, and bless him is his decision to make, and it's kind of to people who are a professor, it's a normal decision, but us musicians, we musicians tend to want to do it until they pull the instrument out of our fingers or we can't bend our fingers anymore.
And to what did we Let's assume you're on a you know, a family trip. Can you go without playing the instrument for a week, or you're the type of person who says me and I got to play it and when you're home, how much do you practice?
I don't practice is very much. I ought to practice more. In some years I practiced more than others. A couple of years ago, I started taking base lessons online. I've got a great kick out of that, and I learned a lot. I'm fine not playing for really any amount of time. It's what I do, and work will come in or work on my own music, and then when
I come back I have learned through the years. I've learned, Okay, if I've been two weeks without playing, then it's going to be three days or something like that of playing before I have it back. And since I'm on the subject, the biggest technical thing about coming back is playing jazz. When I haven't been playing jazz for some reason, the
technical thing of my fingers is very different. So I could be playing my butt off for six months with King Crimson and I come back and go out on the road with my brother playing jazz, and I need a week a full week of playing every day before that, or I just don't sound good. So the switch from rock to jazz is a profound one. But the switch from not playing at all to rock is only a few days for me, and to play jazz again it would be a whole week.
Speaking of fingers, what's this funk fingers thing?
On the SO album in nineteen eighty five, on one track called Big Time, I ask Jerry Marauder, the drummer, if he would drum on the bass strings while I fingered the left hand. While I'm saying this, I'm showing you the funk fingers. So that piece, Big Time came out fine. And then the year after, we were touring with Peter Gabriel in nineteen eighty six, and I found that I couldn't play the darn part. I held one
drumstick in my right hand. I'm trying to play that, and I was practicing all the time, maybe obnoxiously, and one day Peter Gabriel walked by me at soundcheck and looked at me and said, when you put two drumsticks on your fingers. So Peter, in that moment, invented what
I later called funk fingers. I had my bass tech, Andy Moore, make them up and we did a lot of experimenting with stretch velcrow and dipping them in rubber so they didn't break the strings, so they had some rubber factor to them, and I played them ever since. Not a great deal, but I played them on one track on my new album, and I played them I don't know the odds, maybe one out of fifteen tracks that I do for other people.
Okay, so they're like five or six for those you can't see the zudio, only they have a little finger attachment. Then it looks like, you know, a piece of plastic. What actually is it?
It's a drumstick. These last sometimes they're red, these new ones, but usually they're drumstick colored. And the end is dipped in very weird stuff called tool handle dip, really weird stuff that you just dip something in it, for instance a hammer handle, and it comes out as rubber as soon as you take it away from the can as dry. And that's weird, but that's I found that to be the perfect product for the end, to make it so it doesn't actually break the bass strings. I did a
lot of experimenting. If it was the string, the sticks are too heavy, they break the strings. If they were too light, they bounce in a way that you can't control. If the stretched velcrow was too tight, my fingers turned purple. If it was too loose, the sticks would go flying into the audience, which they have done a lot. And when I got it right, which is stretching adjustable vel crow, when I got it right, I got a guy to
make a whole bunch of them. My hope was in the beginning, which would have been in the late eighties that a lot of bass players would just get them. I think I sawd them for ten dollars online somehow, I don't remember through what mechanism. So I hoped a lot of players would use them and play them, and that didn't turn out to be the case. I'm sure a few guys, a few guys, a few bass players have them, and I hope they're using them, and I use them quite a bit.
And what's the difference between and your feelings about pick versus fingers.
I've never been. I wasn't. I didn't come up playing pick, so I'm not very good at it. Sometimes if that's the sound that I hear for that piece, then I'm going to play with a pick and hope that I can work it out. That happens sometimes lately not so much. I think thinking back to Don't Give Up, Peter Gabriel's thing, I think on the record, I did play it with a pick. It just seemed like the right piece, the
right sound for that. But as soon as I got playing live, I found a way with thinkers to make it feel good. By the way the song Don't Give Up, I had mentioned my daughter being thirty nine, so in nineteen eighty five. There she was with me two months old in the studio in England and her mother and I had packed diapers into the base case because naively I thought, well diapers, England doesn't know how to do diapers, so we had pampers in the base case and on
that piece. Don't give up. When I was looking around the last part of the piece. It has a different feel, different groove, which frankly we did later after we had the first part of it, and I was looking around for some dampening material and I saw those diapers and I put a diaper a pamper under the strings the sound which Peter Gabriel quickly named the super Nappy bass sound.
And I have to smile when I think about my daughter Maggie now hearing that piece and knowing it goes back to the very beginning of her life that she was connected with dad on the road and dad recording with Peter Gabriel.
And tell me about taking bas lessons online.
Yeah, Scott's base less and I recommend them. They're great, and I take a peek at them once in a while. And I decided a few years ago, while I was touring with King Crimson and the other guys were practicing in the other rooms. I was taking actually beginner, not beginner, but basic the basics of bass playing, like how to hit the how to pluck the string and things like that.
So I'm in my dressing room playing one note at a time on the same note for five minutes, just one note with one finger, and then I go on stage and play King Crimson concert, which is pretty complicated, and I appreciated the irony of that, but also I learned. And the fact is I confronted the fact that I was trained as an upright player, which is a different technique than the electric bass, and when I switched to having frets, there were no teachers to show me, Oh,
here's the way you do that. So I just did it whatever way I did it, not necessarily the best way. And it's good to finally be aware of some of the options, of technic technical options of how you can do that. Okay, so this is youtubeh No, Yes, some of the clips are on YouTube.
Yes, okay, Just so I know for people who are interested, this is lessons that you pay for and you watch videos. What exactly is it?
Either one you can see Scott's based lessons. He's an excellent teacher, more than anybody I've met. He understands the technique behind playing this simple instrument in the electric bass and so yes, you can see clips on YouTube. But I contacted the website and what I don't know how you call I subscribed to a series of twelve lessons, I think twelve hour long lessons.
Does Scott know you're taking his lessons?
I think so.
Yeah.
I haven't spoken indirectly, but I've spoken to one of his co teachers who does know. But I did buy it. I don't want to be given it.
Tony. I want to thank you so much for talking to me and my audience. Amazing thing is seen you on stage in a video a million time, and you have sort of a dark persona, which as a regular person that's not the case whatsoever. Kind of shocking. You've been very open and honest. I want to thank you again for talking with me.
Thank you very much. Maybe you just caught me on a good day when the dark persona is not there. I don't know, but I appreciate your expertise and the wisdom behind your questions. I really do appreciate that.
So thank you for having me okay, you know he's got a new album. You definitely want to see the beat on the road. In any event, that's been Tony Levin with Bob left sets. Till next time. Thanks,