Bass Nation

I try to browse my local craigslist musicians ads all the time just to see who’s out there and what’s going on with the local music scene. Last night I found a posting that was so funny I almost peed my pants. Here it is:

Fat Groove Drummer Seeks non-Retards (Walnut Creep)

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Reply to: comm-dgn3n-1220545234@craigslist.org
Date: 2009-06-13, 8:48PM PDT

Hey there; i’m an adult (aka “over 30″) who wants to find musicians who are not egomaniacal, strangely self-absorbed in their inflexible, hateful lame-ass unlistenable originals no one will ever buy a drink long enough to painfully absorb and if so, have nightmares about, and hopefully, people with chops who will sacrifice all things for music that has soul and danceability–even if its frigging metal, do you know how to groove it? Does James Brown have a place in your heart–even though you might also have a marshall stack, or a girlfriend who’s stacked, or a stack of money, or a smoke stack? WTF? I don’t know. All i can say is, getting into a band with people who don’t suck is like trying to date a hot girl and not expecting her to be freakishly stupid or intensely high maintenence. Why is this? I dont’ know. I guess people only evolve when nobody is looking. So if you are in it to get laid, and you suck, then good luck; if you understand dynamics, have a singer who is a singer and not a guy imitating a singer (especially guys who imitate like, Jack Johnson, who in my opinion, fucking blows), and i dunno, if you have a bunch of nymphomaniac rich girlfriends who hang out with all their friends and take shitloads of X and dance naked, oh shoot, now i forgot the question. Anyway, i am a trained drummer (trained to go in the box, trained to hate loud fucking guitarists, and paid money to go to music school and learn to read music which i probably should have saved for stuff like rent); i am also funny, unstupid, and have a recording thing that lets me record stuff, like, with really good microphones i have.

influences: Primus, Police, Public enemy, James brown, Soundgarden, The Who, The Replacements, Foo Fighters, The Jackson 5, The supremes, Rage Against the Machine, and the chick in the front row with the hot rack who keeps looking at me in a way that make me pretend I don’t notice.

Assholes encouraged to apply; retards, sure, because, if you are a retard, you don’t know it, so go for it; but really, if you want to just “get together and jam”, i will mock you and pretend i’m coming and then NOT come because you are a fucking hippie and must die.

• Location: Walnut Creep
• it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

This post has nothing whatsoever to do with bass, just some wild rock and roll stories.

So where do I begin? My old friend Gary used to say that Texas is such a bizarre place, that in order to stand out there, you’ve got to be REALLY strange, and that explains the Austin band Butthole Surfers. These guys ate a whole lot of acid, played insane music, and put on stage shows that included nude dancing, films of penis surgery and car accidents, lights, fog, fire, shotguns, and anything else that might freak people out. I saw them in the late 90’s and by then they had some MTV exposure and had considerably toned down their show, and I had only consumed one beer that evening but left the show feeling like I had been through a 12 hour psychedelic trip.

While doing my usual Monday morning blog rounds, I found a link to a story about a legendary Butthole Surfers show at City Gardens in Trenton, NJ. The original blog post has other great links and comments, so check that out. And also, don’t miss this classic Butthole Surfers video that you definitely never saw on MTV. Probably NSFW:

I got a response to one of my posts recently about a really neat web traffic generator. It’s called Alpha Inventions and it is indeed the shizzle! You go to their site and enter your URL, hit a button and botta bing, you’re in the rotation. The page refreshes and displays a new blog each time. It’s like speed dating for blogs. You get a quick look at a bunch of blogs and you can check them out if they look cool. And people get a quick look at yours. There are so many great blogs out there and it’s so hard to find ones that pique your interest, so this really helps you to quickly find some good ones.

You put a lot of time and energy into your blog, but it’s not a matter of “if you build it they will come.” Finding people who are interested in what you have to say is hard. Sometimes it takes years to build up a solid audience. So with tools like this and blog explosion and entrecard, it gets in front of a lot more eyeballs which with any luck will help speed the process of building a dedicated audience.

Check this site out today and watch the readers pour on in.

I love Opeth! I hadn’t heard about them until I found out they were on the Progressive Nation tour. I was going to see the opening band, 3, who are friends of mine from New York, but I wanted to explore the other bands a bit before going to see them. Dream Theater were the headliners. I’d heard them before and admired their abilities without really digging their style, and I reconfirmed that when I revisited some of their stuff. And then there was Opeth, giants of progressive death metal from Sweden. I popped in Blackwater Park and was pummelled by growling, snarling, grinding death metal. But then something strange happened. It got all melodic and intricate in between the pummellings. And then after I saw them live I was completely obsessed. They are an intense band with incredible musicianship and I highly recommend them to anyone and everyone. Check out this video for The Drapery Falls and see what I’m talking about.

Hellooooooo. Is anybody here? Probably not, as this is a brand spanking new blog and I don’t expect to get a whole lot of traffic on day one. But, here I am anyway with my first post because you can’t have a blog without any posts now can you? OK, enough with the small talk bullshit. You, the readers who I do not have yet, probably want to know who I am and what’s the deal with this blog, or at least you will want to know that once you start actually reading this thing. My name is Jason Buckley and I’ve been playing bass guitar on and off for 23 years.

My journey as a musician started sometime around 3rd grade when I started taking both piano and violin lessons. Fourth grade I traded the violin for an alto sax. Fifth grade I dropped piano all together because my little sister started lessons a year after I did and quickly passed the point where I was and I just couldn’t have that. In sixth grade I dropped the sax for an electric guitar. I really regret dropping these three instruments and thus ending my formal music education. I just really struggled with sight reading and the stuff they give you to play at that age is not the slightest bit cool.

I twanged around on my guitar for a while but never got particularly good at it and lost patience with it like I did with the other instruments. Then in 7th grade I went to a concert. It was Simple Minds at Radio City Music Hall, and that was the first time I felt the bass pounding through my body and I knew that’s what I wanted to play. It was also the first time I saw anybody smoking pot and I knew I wanted some of that, but that’s a whole other story! So that summer I sold my guitar and bought a used Fender Musicmaster bass with a 3/4 scale neck, and by my freshman summer I was in a hard rock cover band and actually played a few gigs. We parted ways when I discovered punk rock which I messed around with a bit without a whole lot of success.

In college I didn’t do much beyond a jam here and there, though after college I got into a band with a few of the townie kids who were still in high school but on the same musical wavelength. We played really dark and sludgy stuff and then disbanded when a few of us moved away.

I played in another couple of bands through my late twenties, upgrading my Fender with a new bridge, pickup and tuners. Then got married, moved across the country and started a family without doing much in the way of music for about 5 years. Then recently I’ve become very interested in playing again, only this time I’m taking it much more seriously. It was always fun being in bands, but I never really practiced much between our weekly rehearsals and gigs, let alone doing daily exercises to build strength and agility in my fingers. Now it’s an obsession, and although I haven’t been doing it for long, my playing is better than ever. My next step is trying to play upright.

I hope to share that obsession here on this blog. I want to share musical discoveries and influences, teach new tricks as I learn them myself, and  maybe even post some videos of myself playing.