Writing The Book

Allan: I started a series of guitar books in the early '80s called "Dr. Licks". I would transcribe note for note what Eddie Van Halen, or whoever the guitarist was, played.

My ads were all over the place in "Guitar Player" magazine. And then I got picked up by Hal Leonard, who's a big publisher, and they were issued by Hal Leonard for years.

And then I wrote a book called The Art of Playing Rhythm and Blues, and it was kind of a survey of different '60s R&B styles. So I got to the Motown chapter, and as I was transcribing it, I thought, "Jesus Christ, listen to these bass lines!"

As a kid, I just took that stuff for granted. Everybody was so enamored of the Temps and Stevie and everything, and like everybody else, I never thought of the musicians. I thought of the guitar licks, but I never knew it was the same guys playing on every record. To me it could have been the Temps' road band, or whoever.

So I was talking to a friend of mine, who's a famous bassist named Gerald Veasley, and he said, "that's James Jamerson!"

So I said, "Oh man, really?! Well, maybe I should do a book on James Jamerson bass lines". So I went to Detroit to find his widow, who I found through the musicians' union, and thought, "I'm just going to do a book on James Jamerson bass lines".

I met her, and she took me to some of the Funk Brothers, and I was expecting to get some musical tips about the way he played bass, and instead, I was getting all these incredible stories. I instantly realized that I had stumbled upon something special, something very valuable, and it was really the last great untapped story of rock and roll.

So I said, "what am I going to do with this?!" You know, I'm not a writer--I flunked high school English! I didn't have the money to hire a ghostwriter, so I just thought, well, I'll give it a shot.

And three years and $64,000 later, I had this book, Standing in the Shadows of Motown. It came with two CDs, where we had everybody from Paul McCartney on down talking about Jamerson and playing his lines, and it gets nominated for the Ralph J. Gleason award from Rolling Stone.

I thought I didn't have a chance in hell. It winds up I was the unanimous winner. So what happened was, at that point, I figured well, maybe there's a movie in this.

What Made Jamerson So Unique?

Ed: I was listening to the two CDs that accompanies the book, and at one point, session bassist Anthony Jackson really waxes poetic about Jamerson, praising him effusively, and calling him one of the great musical geniuses of the 20th century...