One of the 70s’ favourite session men has left us with… well, hundreds of recordings to his credit. And what recordings, too. He’s probably most famous, of course, for Mr Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”…
…in which he plays both electric and acoustic double bass because, as he said later, he got paid two session fees because he played two instruments. The really cunning trick, though, was playing the electric bassline one tenth above the upright bass, thus producing that very particular bass sound. He did a similar trick with this…
…where he doubled the bass parts again (as well as his session fee!), only an octave apart this time, but the slapback echo applied here makes all the difference, and the bass really is the main instrument, almost serving like the whole rhythm section by itself (I’m not even sure if there are actual drums on here or not). Genuinely stunning production even 50 years after the fact, manages to sound completely like 1973 but also like the future still to come. But then there was this which came before either of those two…
…which I’d never actually given a proper listen to before last night, until I saw someone mention it on Threads and they said something about the detuning solo. And holy shit they were right; not only does brother Herbie kick off proceedings with a truly mean and great riff, there’s a bit where Flowers detunes his bass while playing it and just… goddamn. (Parenthetically, what a cast list on this recording, Chris Spedding and Klaus Voorman on guitar, Jimmy Webb on piano, that tragic unfortunate Jim Gordon on drums—how good is he here?) Hell of a career young Brian had.
