Remembering How to Play Bass

By the time I quit playing in bands when I was 24, I was a pretty good bass player.  I prided myself in being a bass player's bass player: I didn't screw around with a bunch of silly Primus-inspired riffs or try to pretend I was playing lead guitar; I played bass lines.  My playing consisted of the root of the chords, with little lead-in notes and the occasional flourish.  The way I distinguished myself (or so I told myself, anyway) was by nailing every chord change and laying down a solid rhythm.  I thought of myself as being the guy who kept the rest of the band on track.

I didn't play again until we moved back to Portland...considering I had quit a year before we moved and we didn't start The Nervous until the spring after we moved back, that means I wasn't really playing for almost eight years.  When Ransom and I had practices with just the two of us, working on songs, trying to figure out how to do vocals again, etc., we'd sometimes just do the proverbial forehead slap and wonder out loud how the hell we had been so much better back when we played in Mondale over ten years ago.

The answer, of course, is that we had almost all the time in the bloody world to spend practicing.  We practiced twice a week or more and we played shows a lot.  Now, a good month is one in which we get together twice, and we can just about hold it together for two solid hours of actually playing the instruments.

That all said, I feel like I've kind of started figuring it out / remembering it again.  I have high hopes to suck a whole lot less and rock a whole lot more in the immediate future.