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...
Allan: That's true, and I'll tell you why. You're gonna say, "what made him so special". Well, I'll tell you: the acoustic bass had been around for centuries. But the electric bass had only been invented in the early part of the 1950s. And pretty much for the first decade, nobody knew what to do with it; it didn't have a voice.
You know how when you hold an electric bass, you hold it diagonally? In the first years of the electric bass, you would see converted upright players actually hold it vertically! They just thought it was just a different upright bass, and they played it that way, not just in posture, but also in the types of licks. Most of the bassists were playing this kind of cocktail lounge kind of bass, playing a steady [hums quarter-note bass thump] boom, boom, boom, boom.
Article comments
1 - Philip Walker
I read that Allan slutsky was writing a biography of Junior Walker - is this true.
Please let me know
Regards
2 - Mac Diva
Barry Gordy did work on a car assembly line in Detroit briefly. It was sometime between his prize fighting career and when he penned his first hit for good friend Jackie Wilson.
I think the Motown assembly line myth is somewhat cliched. There is too much variation in how Motown acts sound for it to be really true. Phil Spector's wall of sound is more formulaic. As was Philadelphia International Records' sound later. What Gordy did was organize. He made acts fit a fairly rigid schedule of recording and performing. Some of the best, such as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, rebelled. They were not suited to regimentation.
The last word I had on the Funk Brothers was that they have fallen out with their 'discoverers,' i.e., the men who brought them out of obscurity. Litigation was in progress.