You're a teenager and in love with music. You don't know the how's and why's; you just want to make it. Someone suggests that you buy a bass- they tell you it's easy to play- no chords. And you've noticed the bass, particularly if you grew up in an era when funk and disco put the bass out front. For me "New Wave" (no one called it "post-punk" back in the day) was as much about white English kids responding to funk as it was about "softening" punk.
My father was a music professor. He bought me a p-bass copy when I was a junior in high school and got me some lessons. The lessons didn't stick. I couldn't articulate what I wanted, but learning scales from a guy that looked exactly like your prototypical prog-fusion cover boy didn't seem like a direct line to anywhere. I just had a sensual attraction to the bass. I wanted to put my hands on it and start to chisel out simple lines. I thought of it like a giant pencil in my hands.
I read interviews with band leaders like Andy Partridge whom I thought were really cool. I don't think I fully understood what I really wanted to do- I wanted to write songs. I tried answering some ads and they were probably some of the most humiliating moments of my teenaged life-I couldn't play, I couldn't even play scales. I just wanted to trade records with the people whose ads I answered and it was really confusing to me how they could play and sing and yet seem so stupid. They could do something I couldn't (play) and yet they could be stupid. It took me years later to figure out that musical intelligence was its own thing, and like that joke about the mom that tells her little daughter in response to her question about why she doesn't have a wee-wee, ("Relax, with what you've got, you can get all the wee-wees you want"), writing songs, being a writer, meant you could find all the musicians you wanted.
It took me years. Years of reading to realize that writers found their own ways in the dark; that there was a path, an obscure one of being a songwriter...and it meant you didn't want to be a virtuoso; you didn't need to be in the closet and be intimidated by these muscle-shirted guys in music stores while you stole glances at a Rickenbacker or Jazz Bass. There was a fine tradition of songwriters who couldn't play very well, stretching back at least as far as Irving Berlin.
The bass is a pencil and a drum machine could be a typerwriter.
