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 ...
Poetry and Songwriting from the Bronx