Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

by Will Carruthers

  I was all mellow smiles as I said that indeed I did want to hear the new songs.

  ‘Yeah, it’s been going well, man,’ Pete said. ‘Have a listen. I think we’ve got some good stuff down.’

  He played the first song. A spectral and elegiac organ motif ushered in one of those classic Spacemen 3 waves of sadness, beauty and hope, and I was instantly hooked. It didn’t sound like anyone else and it didn’t even sound like Spacemen 3 had sounded before, but then that was how they had always sounded, with each new album working as a progression and a departure from the record that had preceded it.

  ‘Wow, man, that’s fucking great. What’s that one called?’ I said.

  ‘Uh, “Honey”, I think,’ Pete replied. ‘I think it’s gonna come out pretty well. There’s no bass on it yet. Maybe we can do it tomorrow.’

  I smiled and nodded. Jason smiled and Kate smiled and Pete smiled. It was all good in the hippy-dippy hood as ‘Honey’ played itself out in a pleasant and lovely way. Next up was the backing track for ‘Che’, which was basic skeletal bones, a guide guitar, and a sparse click track, with a soaring wah solo over the top that arched and peaked and slunk back to a low growl around the constant drone. Bare as it was, it sounded like another world of possibility and I began to get genuinely excited at what I was about to become musically involved with. I fucking loved music and I wanted to play. Maybe more than I wanted to do anything else. The night blurred into hashish and good-natured chit-chat as the basic click tracks and chord structures for the songs played in the background. You gotta live it, after all. You have to get so used to the stuff that it becomes your bones, the meat of your marrow. You gotta dream it and breathe it and wish it into being and, at that point, it all seemed like a very possible dream indeed. By the time we had retired to our respective mattresses on the floors of the various rooms in the house, I was very happy indeed. I pulled the slightly washed blankets over me and felt that I was truly living the dreams I had painted in the dust during the long nights in the bolt factory in Rugby. It seemed like a different life.

  I woke up after a night of real dreams to find the sun catching the crystals that hung in the windows between the faded curtains and rags, which kept out a little of the daylight. I dragged myself to the edge of the mattress, sat up, reached for my clothes and found a fairly well desiccated cat turd crusted into the carpet beside my discarded belongings. It was a bright and clear morning and I took a peek out through the dirty windows into the garden beyond the overhanging ivy that covered the house. One of the owners greeted me from the kitchen and showed me where the tea-making stuff was. While the kettle boiled, he explained that the house had been an old tin miner’s cottage, and in the surrounding woods there was a warren of old mines that had been cut into the pale earth by the people who had previously lived and worked there. He told me that the nearby river ran like milk when it rained because of all the chalk in the ground, and that there was a cave in the back garden that glowed in the dark with phosphorescent fungus.

  ‘Glow in the dark mushrooms?’ I said. ‘Woah. I’ve eaten a few mushrooms that made everything else glow in the dark, but I’ve never seen one glow without eating it first.’ We both laughed.

  I opened the creaking front door and stepped out into the sunshine to drink my tea and smoke a cigarette while I tried to imagine what my first day in a recording studio might hold.

  Pete appeared after a while with a mug of tea and a joint.

  ‘Morning!’ he said, in a kind of over-exaggerated and deliberately comic accent. ‘Sleep well?’

  I replied that I had indeed slept well. ‘I like it here,’ I said, looking out over the tangle of garden and woods.

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘We’ll go for a walk up the back later. There are some crazy rope swings up there.’ He passed me the joint and we both sat in the sunshine, the black hash rising in heavy curls from the lit end of the spliff as we drank our tea.

  Pete was an odd sort, really. He could be difficult, pugnacious, charming and funny by turns, and he had the temper of the devil himself. Any argument with Pete was total war, and in those days he would sometimes go to war over a perceived slight then forget to stop. I had never had any major problem with him myself, but he certainly had a reputation for speaking his mind and for knowing what he wanted and what he didn’t. I think he regarded some of my previous antics under the influence of drugs he didn’t use with a kind of amused and baffled detachment, but we got on well. I think he respected some sorts of crazy a little bit, and so did I.

  We finished our tea and headed into the studio. Pat, the engineer, arrived around midday and we sat around chatting while smoking another joint. He threaded up the tape machine and fired up the desk and the outboard gear. He pressed ‘play’. The tape heads clunked into place and the tape whispered across the heads, the unedited pre-take sounds from the various tracks fading into the fuzzed-out wah and descending guitar chords of ‘Che’. It was a cover of the Suicide song but it didn’t sound anything like Suicide. Jason appeared from upstairs, looking dishevelled and amiable and sat on the sofa smoking his first cigarette of the day. Pete asked me if I was ready to lay down a bass track. I was nervous but I nodded yes, and Pat set up a chair beside the mixing desk. The whole studio setup was part of the front room of the cottage. There was a waist-high wooden railing across half of the room, presumably to stop errant hippies from stumbling into the recording setup while work was in progress. I sat on the chair and gazed at Pat’s back and beyond him to the confusing constellations of knobs, faders and flashing lights on the desk. It was completely new territory for me and I was a little bit in awe of proceedings. I still didn’t have a bass guitar, so Pat had borrowed one from a friend of his. He handed over a nameless and headless contraption that was painted a vibrant shade of glittering red. Given the choice, it was not a bass I would have taken from the racks, but then I was not particularly fussy, and there was no choice.

  ‘Errrrrrrr,’ said Pete. ‘That thing looks fucking horrible.’

  Despite Pat’s protestations that the bass had a good sound, Pete continued to take the piss out of it and he carried on making loud ‘eeeeeeeewwwwww’ noises as I plugged it into the tuner and started tuning up to 440.

  ‘We always tune a bit higher, man,’ Pete said. ‘Tune it up to the farthest mark on the tuner. It sounds more … tense.’

  Without asking why, I did what I was told, and then Pat plugged me into the desk while I played random notes until he had a good level and sound. I was totally transfixed by the job at hand, and my heart was beating like a Suicide rhythm track.

  ‘Just have a few runs through, man, and see what you think,’ Pete said in a reassuring way, like it was just every day that you got to lay down your first ever bassline.

  Pat pressed ‘play’ on the tape machine and the song started up again. I knew that both Pete and Jason were listening intently, but they both made an effort to appear nonchalant and disinterested.

  ‘Sounds good, man,’ said Pete encouragingly as I made a few tentative runs up and down the neck of the bass, trying to find the shapes that fitted the holes in the sound. ‘Keep going.’

  Jason smiled and nodded encouragingly from the sofa, where he had been joined by Kate. Despite my absolutely overwhelming feelings of excitement and terror at being sat in a recording studio laying down my first bassline, I settled into it until I was lost in the music and the hash, testing notes and scales and playing by ear and intuition. I was still a frustrated guitarist, in some ways, so I always had an urge to stray from the beat and the groove into more decorative areas, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone.

  ‘I absolutely hate the sound of the open E string on bass guitars,’ Pete said. ‘So try not to play it.’

  Mainly avoiding the bassiest of bass notes, I soloed and ran around the neck with varying degrees of success, while Pete, Jason and Pat made helpful noises that gave me the confidence to continue. I knew the sound and the feel they liked ‒ we had all b
een getting stoned and listening to the same records for so long that it wasn’t too hard to know what was required. Nothing that I was playing was from the Suicide song, but it didn’t seem to matter. Pete would nod at the runs and riffs he liked and then make a face when my playing strayed beyond his taste. I kept on noodling as the song played through a few times, until Pete said it was time to start recording.

  Pat pressed ‘play’ and ‘record’, and I was away, improvising around the themes I’d found. When I fucked up, or fell off the edge, they’d stop the tape, drop me in before the fuck-up, and I’d continue until we reached the end of the song. At the end of the take Pete and Jason looked really happy.

  ‘That’s great. Really cool stuff, man. But I don’t know if we can use that whole take. Lay another track down and see if you can do it better.’

  Pat armed another track and I laid down more improvised bass that sounded the same as the last one but different. I had no idea what I was doing. There were no vocals on the song and no cues to hit, so I was fairly free to do what I pleased as long as it got the nod of approval from Pete and Jason. It was their band, after all, and I was still very much a novice.

  This went on for a while until the two tracks of bass were down as well as I could play them, with each better-sounding take replacing the previous one. Pete and Jason were both standing up at the desk by this time. They ummed and ahhed about which track to keep and which one to discard. Tracks were precious, as there were only eight of them, and one of those was always occupied by the SMPTE code that would sync up the primitive drum machines, click tracks and sequencers, if they were needed. That left seven tracks to record on for the whole song. After a while of listening and pondering they decided that they would crossfade between the tracks and edit out the rough parts of my playing while bouncing to another spare track. With Jason on one fader and Pete on the other, they listened to the two basslines, decided which bits they liked best, then crossfaded between them live as the third track recorded. Bounce-downs were a staple of our recording necessities back then. When they were satisfied with the bounced track they erased the first two and I sat and listened to the song with the first bassline I had ever recorded mixed in. I was pretty pleased with myself, I suppose. I had never heard myself sound so good, and my new bandmates seemed more than pleased with the results.

  Hash Yoghurt and Hells Angels

  The night before, we had mixed a big chunk of hash into a pot of yoghurt and when we woke up in the morning, me and Pete ate it for breakfast. While Jason was at the studio working on some backing tracks, we headed out for a ramble through the woods to find the rope swings.

  Great scoops of earth had been mined from the hills behind the house, and these dug-outs had gradually softened and filled themselves in with trees and thick vegetation. It was a kind of paradise up there, really, and as the hash took hold we walked over soft cushions of moss and fought our way through thickets of brambles until we found the rope swing, which was a stick tied to a length of rope that someone had thrown over the high branch of an overhanging tree. Pete leaned over the void of the old mine, snagged the rope, and manoeuvred himself into a sitting position on the stick. He then launched himself off from the bank, swinging right out under the canopy of the trees and into green space, laughing, spinning round and roaring as he went. ‘Oh, man. That’s a fucking trip!’ he shouted as he swung back in ever-decreasing circles. ‘You gotta have a go.’

  I was stoned to the bone as I climbed onto the swing and launched myself out over the gorge. The trees and the bushes spun into a kaleidoscope with the blue sky. I laughed myself stupid as the pit fell out of my stomach. I was still laughing as Pete pulled me back in, and I fell off the stick and landed on the ground. After an hour of making ourselves dizzy on the swings we made our way back to the house.

  Jason had finished his work and Pete was going to lay down some tracks, so Jason and I moved out to the garden with a guitar and a bass and a couple of beers. We sat and chatted for a bit and he ran through a song he’d been working on. It was called ‘So Hot’ and we were both laughing about it because it actually was pretty hot in the garden. He showed me the chords and we ran through it a few times. It sounded great to me even though he didn’t have all the words. He had the chorus and the basic melody, and it just sounded like sitting in the garden on a sunny day drinking beer and having fun. It’s a melancholy kind of song, of course, but we were happy. After a while Pete called me in to lay some bass down on a song he was working on.

  I sat down in the recording chair and listened as the drone phased up and down and yawed into the void, before the church organs came in for a few bars and then settled back to the drone again. That one note sounded pretty damn comfortable with the back end of the breakfast we’d eaten earlier. I listened and drifted off with my eyes closed while Pete took the bass and played a simple two-note repeating refrain over it, to show me what he was after. After a couple of bars he said, ‘I might as well put this down myself.’

  So he did, and then he gave me the bass and asked me if I had any ideas. I played a few tentative notes until he nodded his head and then I found the runs and spaces between the notes that seemed to fit with the melancholy sound and the yoghurt for breakfast and it all started to make a mellow kind of sense to us.

  ‘That’s cool, man. That’s cool. RECORD IT, Pat. Not that. Play that run again.’

  So, the bassline started going down for what was to become ‘Let Me Down Gently’, and it was all so mellow that I was a million miles away, even as I was playing. The front door opened and in walked four travellers with two dogs and a baby. They walked past me as I was recording. ‘All right, Pat,’ one of them said, as they smiled and nodded at me and Pete on the way to the kitchen. We just kept on recording.

  But this did not sit well with Mr Kember. ‘Man. It’s not cool them just walking in here like that,’ he said. ‘We are trying to make a record here and we’ve paid for the studio. How are we supposed to record with people just walking backwards and forwards in the studio with dogs and babies and stuff like that?’

  Pat just shrugged. I guess it was normal in that place.

  Spacemen 3 were no longer recording in the seclusion of VHF down at the Arches Lane industrial estate in Rugby. This was a whole hippy-dippy different kettle of fish and it was bound to cause problems eventually.

  Regardless of any differences we might have had, we continued working. We’d lay the various tracks and get stoned and listen to them for hours on end. Then there might be a bit of tweaking and a drone added, and maybe Jason would add some guitar, then maybe Pete would lay some organ, and everyone was working together as far as I could tell. There were no arguments and the atmosphere was fine.

  Jason and I decided to take a trip into town to get some supplies from the supermarket. We walked down the hill, in the sunshine, chatting about nothing much and everything in particular regarding the music and the weather. We were cracking jokes and feeling good.

  As we got down towards the town, which was a walk of about a mile, we passed some houses and Jason pointed at a particularly rough-looking house on the corner. ‘That is where the Hells Angels live,’ he said. ‘That’s the Cornish chapter house.’ We walked past and peered into the garden at the old settees and the bits of motorbike that were lying on the unkempt bit of grass at the front of the house.

  After we had been to the supermarket and stocked up on beer and breakfast cereal and crap pizza (and whatever else we thought we needed), we decided it might be easier to wheel the shopping up the hill in the trolley rather than carry it all in plastic bags. It was a hot day and we were both feeling lazy. We took it in turns pushing the trolley up the hill towards the studio and, as we got closer to the Hells Angels’ house, we saw a bunch of bikers sitting outside drinking beer. Both of us knew the drill for not attracting violent attention. Don’t look over, eyes front, and keep walking.

  As we drew level with them, they started shouting over to us. ‘Oi. Where do you think y
er goin’ with that, then? Bring us a beer.’

  These were fairly gnarly-looking bastards, and there was no way on earth me and Jason were going to fight them. Nobody sane wants to get in a fight with the Angels and nobody sane wants to get in a fight with Jason either, especially if he’s on your side.

  ‘Just keep walking,’ I said. ‘Don’t look at them.’

  So we put our heads down and kept walking, while they kept on shouting and laughing as we disappeared up the hill away from them.

  ‘Fuck. I’m glad they never came after us,’ said Jason. ‘They might have taken the beer.’ And we both laughed and kept pushing the wonky shopping trolley up the hill.

  The next day, Pat arrived to start work and told us that we had been asked to go down and see the Hells Angels at their house. We were not entirely reassured by the news. ‘What do they want to see us for?’ asked Jason. ‘What have we done?’

  ‘They didn’t seem angry,’ Pat said. ‘They just said they wanted you to go down to the house. It’s probably best if you do.’

  We all stood around silently wondering what the fuck the Hells Angels might want us to go to the house for.

  ‘All right,’ said Pete. ‘Tell ’em we’ll go down this afternoon.’

  And with that, he disappeared into the kitchen to make another space cake.

  We had all eaten a piece of Pete’s lovely space cake and we were feeling the effects of its special ingredients quite strongly when the time arrived to go down and see the Hells Angels. Although we were understandably reluctant to go and see what they wanted, there was no getting out of it. The three of us left the house and started walking, very slowly, down the hill towards what we thought could be certain doom. It was hard to know with the Hellys, really. As long as you were all right with them they were normally pretty friendly, but if they felt that you had transgressed somehow, things could get very ugly indeed.