In ’79 I was hired to play in a country band. In the beginning I played bass. Piano, bass, drums, and lead singer who ran the show. A Loretta Lynn style voice, she had steady gigs in the New England area, primarily booked through an agent who had built a circuit of restaurants, bars, and bottle clubs throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine. It was steady work and the band got along as well as can be expected. We worked every Thursday through Saturday, but we would have off weekends here and there. That’s how I came to play with Sleepy LaBeef. One weekend– four gigs. But with true originals, that’s all it takes.
The piano player called me to see if I was up for playing, a formality really, because of course I was. The story was that Sleepy was temporarily out of a back-up band. We found out later that the week before the gig that we played with him, the bass/drums duo that usually backed him had trashed a couple of hotel rooms, so Sleepy had to fire them. I think later he re-hired them.
I was excited to play with an actual rockabilly legend. That is no exaggeration. What was even better was that I didn’t have to practice some sort of special set of songs. At the time country music was going through its changes, ramping up to songs that required charts and arrangements. Repeat this section, go the bridge, then there’s a four bar half-time vamp… “Play me some country music…” Because, well, someone must have decided country music wasn’t selling so they started writing songs about what it was like to listen to country music as if it didn’t exist anymore. Piano players could get away with reading a chart if only because nobody noticed but not on bass. I was expected to memorize every song. I couldn’t be up on stage peering over a music stand. And piano, electric guitar, it’s easy to fake it, in the harmonic sense. Even in this new style the root of the chord must be played on the first beat of the measure. And in that regard, the bass leads the band through the harmonic changes. The drummer hits on 2 and 4. A keyboard can vamp on syncopation and fills, but not so the bass. You have to land that first pitch before anybody else. It can throw a singer off if you don’t play absolutely straight. If she hears the subdominant when she’s supposed to be hearing the tonic, she’ll look at the band wondering what the hell is going on. People don’t even realize how important that bass player is until he misses that first beat of the measure. ( or she, because I do remember at least one female bass player) And the singer doesn’t need to know anything about music, certainly not scale degrees, to know something is off. The sun rises in the East. Whether you believe we revolve around it or it around you makes no difference to a vocalist. The song revolves around her.
But that isn’t what I came to talk about. With Sleepy we played four sets a night. Forty minutes a set. He would have us play the first couple of songs, so in all he’d play about two hours worth of songs over the course of the evening. I don’t know why, but every song he played, some I knew, many I didn’t, had that three or four chord feel, and I never had a problem following him. Even a song like Blueberry Hill, that has those tricky bridge chords, not a problem. I’d be nervous starting out each set, but after a few bars the drummer, piano player, and myself would settle in like nobody’s business.
It wasn’t until the middle of the Friday night set that I experienced what can only be called rockabilly satori, that moment of insight, that flash of lightning. Elvis Costello had recently released an album of country tunes, with the Attractions playing backup, I think. Nobody C&W that I remember being featured. (maybe Pete Drake?) Anyway, I learned Costello’s version of “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down” from the LP. I had a drinking problem so it was an appropriate choice. Costello’s version wasn’t like the original, didn’t have that full fledged depressive nihilistic hopelessness Merle Haggard can convey so well. Costello’s was more like a sort of Ric Ocasek celebration of hedonism, like the whole thing was a pose. Believe me, I listened to The Cars A LOT.
So there I was, thumbing out a walking bass line, key of C, singing in my thin, hundred and ten pound voice about how I’d always had a bottle to turn to. That may have been true, but somehow it didn’t sound true. Art doesn’t always accurately reflect life.
Now Sleepy, during our two or three introductory songs to each set, would sit quietly at the bar, nursing a cranberry juice over ice. Something either tickled him or ticked him off, I never asked, but he got up from his seat, pulled up his belt, trucked his hefty presence up onto the stage and picked up his guitar.
I’ll have to tell you this was distracting to say the least because I thought maybe we’d played too long, or he wanted me to stop, I don’t know, but I definitely thought I’d messed up somehow.
He plugged in his guitar, flicked off the standby switch on the Twin Reverb and I got to tell you, the jet engines burned awake. He pounded that guitar through a combination of the fires of hell tuned only by the grace of god. And then he smiled and ever so politely moved me back off the vocal mic and proceeded to make those lyrics bounce off the windshields of the two cars parked outside.
Wasn’t a celebration, wasn’t stupefaction, he was breaking that bottle against the rocks of time that had so cruelly betrayed him. In a raspy-loud, unapologetic tenor reply.
Whatever I was playing it didn’t exist any more and that was a good thing. Someone took a b&w— me onstage with Sleepy— but as I’ve moved a number of times since then, can’t find it. A lesson there, too.
HinjNoiz 