It was the best of times, and the worst of times, all at the same time; my days in Los Angeles in the mid to late 1980’s. I was playing the bass in several bands, sometimes different gigs in the same week with different bands. So crazy. Oh, and recording too, I learned to keep a “bass mobility kit” together for those last-minute studio calls when they happened. Word of mouth around Los Angeles about you as being a good bass player will help facilitate this, I quickly learned.
The festivals in the city were a joy to play at; the Sunset Junction Street Fair, and the West Hollywood Street Fair, among others, were the best, to me. There were other festivals, but those two stood out during my days of playing bass with the band known as Urban Artillery. I saw that the band was asked to return to those festival band line-ups for a few years running during the late 1980’s into the early 1990’s.
I loved playing in this band, as I was one of its two (yes two) electric bass players, and the drummers that did pass through the band were simply amazing. One drummer who played with the band at a West Hollywood Street Fair concert one year went on to play drums in the touring band for Kris Kristofferson. And yet another drummer who joined the band for a concert performance at the Sunset Junction Street Fair went on to play drums in the band called 4 Non Blondes. The band had a strong social message and stage presence that many people in Los Angeles took to and really liked.
The festival’s organizers liked the raw power of the band; they liked its originality and its style. I remember a couple of memorable performances at the West Hollywood Street Fair, and one in particular where I, the keyboard player, and the lead singer, were jumping really high into the air on stage during a particularly rousing song. The lead singer did a jump with a kick that launched one of his shoes at least 40 feet back into the audience.
We found it hilarious as a band, and wouldn’t you know it, someone in the audience returned the lead singer’s shoe after the band’s performance that afternoon. That’s the kind of people who attended these festivals back then; they loved the bands and saw them all as original with something to say, and stars in their own right whether they became big or not.
It was the worst of times because of the nature of the music industry itself. It is an extreme hit or miss industry, and those who miss find it hard to move forward, but not always. As a band, just because you miss once or twice back then didn’t mean that you weren’t going to get another shot at the big time.
This was Los Angeles after all, one of the key cities in the country to make a way forward in the music industry. And some of the bands there did move forward with their careers in music; a couple of them are still together today from back during those years that I lived there. And they still sound great. But not all of the bands made their way forward; not all of the bands found a lucrative career in the music industry. It was a tough way of living for me as well as so many other musicians that I knew back then.
Throughout the passage of time though, I have seen many of the band members from several of the bands that made music in Los Angeles back in those days on today’s social media, and one thing is in common between those days and these times. Our love to play music is above all else, and in the end, it didn’t matter so much whether there was a lucrative music industry deal or not. What did matter was the fact that we were and are musicians first, and we continue to compose and play the music that comes from our hearts, spirits, and souls.
And that’s a pretty good place to be.
The single “Beautiful Country” by Urban Artillery in Los Angeles, CA, 1988Urban Artillery in Los Angeles circa 1988
I did not grow up as an only child; I had sisters and a younger brother around me. My two older brothers were old enough to be out and living on their own by the time I had discovered my interest in playing the bass. I have two older sisters closer to my own age, and one younger sister. I speak of them lovingly here because of their unknowing involvement in my musical development, in my bass playing.
My two older sisters were the ones to go out and buy all the new recordings of the day. Back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s music spoke loudly to the masses, and if a person wanted to be in touch with what was considered cool, they had to know about the latest release of certain songs, or more specifically, the messages contained in the latest releases. My older sisters brought home so many records during this time; we listened to 78RPM, 45RPM, and 331/3RPM discs as often during the days and nights as possible. My sisters were quick to point out the message in the music to us younger ones; they were trying to get us in touch with the times that we were living in, trying to bring us up to date in a way.
As the love of music by my older sisters unfolded in front of me, there was all kinds of music that they brought home from the record stores; it was every genre, and they did not discriminate. Lots of soul and funk music, lots of r&b, lots of rock, lots of Latin soul, lots of blues; even Caribbean and Reggae music, found its way onto the turntables in the house. It helped to have a couple of inexpensive turntables in a couple of different rooms in the house. I remember the Christmas that my older sisters received a new turntable setup for their records; they were ecstatic, and that was when an intense musical education began for me.
The year that I got my first electric bass guitar and bass amplifier, I began to learn how to find the bass notes that I heard being played on the many records in my older sisters’ large record collection. I was taking electric bass guitar lessons from a neighborhood music teacher, he was great, and he taught me the fundamentals of playing the bass that stay with me to this day. But at the time, those fundamentals were also helping me to understand the role of the bass guitar in a group or band setting before I had even joined my first real band. In the school system that I went to at that time, I was also playing the upright bass in the school orchestra, and reading scores with bass notation printed on them. I used to think at first that this was the way that I was going to interpret music during my lifetime, by reading scores and playing in orchestras.
But learning to listen by ear and to try to copy the bass line that I was hearing on all of these different records was a huge revelation to me. I learned so much; that all the recordings were not recorded and mastered at the same level; the fact that all of the recordings were done to analog tape, and thus the overall tuning pitch would vary from record to record; the fact that the bass track on the record could be sitting either very forward or very far back in the overall mix. Before playing along to some of my favorite LP records, I would have to play a sample of a song to get a reference note to tune my bass to, and after I had re-tuned my bass, I would then play along with the entire record.
I learned so many different songs in those earliest years of my bass playing, and it turned out to be a real gift to me later on. Sometimes on weekend nights, when me and my sisters and brother had time, I would get my bass and small bass amplifier out and set it up to play along with the favored records of the day. We all loved to dance, and when I was playing along on my bass to a really popular song, the low end was much more fun to dance to; everybody wanted to dance to that record. My sisters began to marvel as I learned so many songs note for note on my bass, and after doing this for a couple of years, they couldn’t tell if I was playing along or not, especially if my bass amplifier’s level matched the stereo’s volume level. We would all laugh at that experience; it was fun for us all.
I found that all my sisters became my first fans, and when the adults would gather at the house on weekends and during the summers, my sisters would tell me to go and get my bass and amp to set up and play along with their favorite records. It turns out for most every musician that your family is your first audience, and to play my bass in front of the adults was as much a thrill to me as it was for them. They responded well, and they gave me encouragement to continue to play the bass. Because of the kindness of all of my sisters, I had a positive start to my early bass playing life. It is because of them that my mind was opened up through music to the times that we were living in. They showed me that there is a message in the music that we hear. They tried to get me to listen for a message each time I listened to music, and that sometimes I would have to listen a few times to a song before I really understood it. That there is a message in the music. And there is. Thank you, my sisters, I love you.
The Bass. My love for the instrument goes back many years now. In fact, when I got my first electric bass guitar, the electric bass guitar itself as an instrument had been sold to the public for only 19 years. So, I started early in my life with an instrument that was still relatively new to the general public.
Oh yeah, the Beatles and the British invasion had come to America and done their thing, and people bought more and more musical instruments, bass guitars among them. Motown Records and Stax Records were hot too, and their artists inspired many other people to take up an instrument of their choice. There was a lot of inspiration coming from the artists and the music of the mid 1960’s that in turn launched the next movements of music in the country.
The LP records that my older sisters bought had us kids dancing and playing lots of air guitar (and bass). I remember some of the names of the early electric bass guitars that I saw as a kid; Gibson, Fender, Hagstrom, Rickenbacker, Kay, Danelectro, Carlo Robelli, Guild; even department store retailer Sears had their own name brand guitar (the Silvertone) on offer. I was seeing the bass being played by both men and women, but at that point in my young life I did not yet own one myself.
It’s because my first instrument (after learning to play the flutophone/recorder) was the viola and my future thoughts about it at that time in my life were the reason why I did not have a bass guitar. I was in the elementary school orchestra, and my music teacher was giving me lessons on the viola that were having a positive impact upon me. I mean, I was getting a good tone on the instrument at an early age. My young fellow orchestra players liked my sound. And as the neighborhood kids I went to school with would watch me carrying my viola in its case back and forth from school on the bus, one day they challenged me to play it in front of all of them at our bus stop one morning.
It was cold and snowing that day, with a good amount of snow already on the ground, and more coming down. I grew up on the east coast, on Long Island, and the winters there could be rough sometimes. But I was undaunted in front of those kids that morning. I had been practicing my scales and etudes. I had been rehearsing with the school orchestra. And like I said earlier, I had a good tone on the viola.
Snowing or not, I set my case down in the snow, and I took my viola out of the case with no hesitation, quickly tightened up the bow a little and then proceeded to play Greensleeves right in front of them all. I knew the song from memory, so I played it down. A good tone goes a long way, and the kids became excited and clapped their hands after I was done playing the piece.
That moment and that day put me on the road to thinking that the viola was going to be my instrument for life. From my sixth-grade year going into my seventh-grade year, I began to imagine my future self having finished college with a music degree and dressed nicely in a tuxedo playing the viola with a fine orchestra somewhere and making a good living doing just that. While those were good thoughts to have about a future playing the viola, life has its own way of stepping in and changing the circumstances of how we live out our musical lives. And step in it did.
Arriving at my school district’s junior high school as a seventh grader, viola in hand, I thought that I would begin to learn to play more difficult music on the instrument. I noticed this starting to happen in elementary school; the music became more difficult to play with each grade we advanced as students. I was alright with that; I simply wanted to get better, to sound better on the viola. About a month and a half into the new school year though, that’s when life stepped in, and brought along its change for my own musical life, and a profound change indeed.
The junior high school orchestra had a good sound to me, and we were learning to play in tune much better than in elementary school. I could easily hear when we were not in tune as a viola section, and if too many mistakes were made, the conductor would then stop the orchestra and make the viola section play their parts alone as a section. This of course would single out those who needed to work on that particular piece as a player or would help to clear up issues like timing. While this was going on, I was concentrating on the viola part in front of me, and I really could not hear the entire orchestra from my chair in the viola section. But my conductor could easily hear the whole orchestra, and he was beginning to have an issue with another section of the orchestra, the upright bass section. Why? Because there was only one upright bass player in the orchestra at the time! Of course, it would be difficult to hear his parts when everyone played. So, what did the conductor do? He asked me privately one day at school to consider learning to play the upright bass. “I can’t hear the bass parts when we play our pieces, and I think that you might be a good bass player if you give it a try.” He added, “If you don’t like playing the bass after the Winter Concerts, it’s ok, you can go back to playing the viola and we will be fine.”
Looking at the sheer size of the upright bass made me wonder how the students in the elementary school orchestra were even able to play it. I was used to the size of the viola, and the size of its strings. “Why play such a large instrument?” I thought. But the key to this time in my life was my music teacher, who was also the school orchestra’s conductor. He spoke to me in a kind voice, and it was ok for me to make a mistake on the bass while I was learning to play it. He showed me how to read the f-clef (bass clef), because during my years playing the viola I had learned to read the c-clef (alto clef). I quickly began to look forward to having our music lessons at school, I remember learning the Arco techniques, which is playing with a bow, and how I struggled with trying to get a decent tone on the upright bass. It seemed much easier for me to play the Arco techniques on the viola. One day, during a bass lesson at school, I was holding the upright bass rather far away from my body and holding it like that makes it even more difficult to play. I was struggling that day, and I did not know why.
But my bass teacher saw exactly what was going on, and why I was struggling to play. He came up behind me, grabbed the body of the bass with one hand, and my shoulder with the other and brought the upright bass right up against my body. Then he said to me, “Hold this instrument close to you like it’s your girlfriend!” I laughed like only a twelve-year-old kid could laugh, and no, I did not have a girlfriend at that time. But I certainly got the meaning of what my music teacher was trying to tell me. Holding the upright bass close to my body made all the difference in my playing as I could really feel the deep vibrations that emanate from its great size.
And the idea of holding the instrument close to my body was not lost on me. From then on, it mattered more to me, in more than just a physical sense. It also mattered in my life’s perspective as I began to love playing the upright bass from then on, that love was close to me too. I stayed with it, and after the junior high school Winter Concerts, I continued to play the upright bass and did not go back to playing the viola. And a year later, I finally got my first electric bass guitar, a Kimberly four string model that was violin shaped like the famous Hofner basses that Paul McCartney played in The Beatles.
It’s the beginnings of how I got here, and it has been my life’s instrument.
The Bass.
Jerome Lee in concert in Teulada, Sardinia, Italy, 1998Jerome playing the Spector NS-4 Electric Upright Bass in a studio in Parker, Colorado 2014Jerome Lee in a Farmingdale High School winter concert, 1973
Thank you for visiting my new WordPress site. This site serves as an extension of the Blog page at my official website. As a musician and bass player for over 50 years, I wanted to simply and humbly share my experiences in the music industry with fans of mine and music listeners alike. It has been quite a journey indeed, and I began posting blogs at my official website back in 2016. I will post blogs from that time over here and they will lead up to current blogs I have written more recently. Again, thank you for visiting!
