Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

Bass porn

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 18:04:18 -0800

That's what the Freekbass show at The Haunt was last night: pure bass porn! Nearly two hours of thumb-slapping (and occasionally fuzzed-out) bass, hard-rocking guitar, and funky drums, and that's after two good opening bands, all for a five dollar cover charge. Now that's living! I wasn't familiar with Freekbass's material going into the show, but "Mission," part of the opening medley, was especially catchy:

Freekbass: Mission

The touring band is a trio, but a highlight of the show was an impromptu jam with four members of Yo Mama's Big Fat Booty Band on tenor sax, trombone, and percussion. Freekbass also worked a couple of covers into the set, the funkiest-ever renditions of "Fame" (David Bowie, not Irene Cara) and "Come Together."

Freekbass is well-regarded in his home town of Cincinnati. Here's the video of his song for the Cincinnati Reds where you can check out his "custom-built Mutron bass":

"Reds Fan" by Freekbass

I meant to write up a little about the Rozatones too, but I'm too exhausted from my late night out. So that'll be next.

Update 11/10/07: The Ithacan, the Ithaca College newspaper, published senior writer William Earl's interview with Freekbass on the 8th. It's worth a read as it goes well beyond the standard bio material that you find everywhere else on the web. Why is his bass shaped like that? Freekbass explains, and now it makes sense.

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Zillatron

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 17:44:00 -0700

I've been hankering to listen to Zillatron's Lord of the Harvest again recently, and after about a week of looking I located a copy. "Zillatron" is one of the alter egos adopted by Bootsy Collins for this 1993 album, produced by himself and Bill Laswell for Ryko's shortlived Black Arc imprint (and reissued by Innerhythmic in 2004). The other driving force behind this album is guitar phenom Buckethead; the album as a whole achieves a weird balance between Bootsy's supremely funky bass playing, Buckethead's metal licks, and a running thread of William Burroughs paranoia and Area 51 UFO conspiracy theories, either sampled from movies or narrated by Bootsy through a vocoder. The sound is rounded out by P-Funk alumnus Bernie Worrell's keyboard wizardry. Frankly, all the crazy talking can get tedious when you want to hear music, so I've snipped the first minute and a half from the album's tour de force, "Fuzz Face" (another character played here by Bootsy):

Zillatron - Fuzz Face

Zillatron

This is another album from my earliest days of parenthood, when I couldn't afford to buy any music, so I would tape the new CDs that my friend Brian (a.k.a. "Tumbleweed") brought over every Saturday. I distinctly remember listening to my Zillatron tape in the car on September 23, 1994, driving home after spending the night in a recliner in my wife's hospital room with our newborn son. I was exhausted, but "Fuzz Face" woke me right up and carried me home. (And when it got to the part where Bootsy says, "My speakers blown, my speakers blown," it was almost prophetic, as I'd cranked it all the way up by then.) It also carried me home from work last week, but that wasn't quite as momentous.

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Cruisin' with Bob Musso and Bootsy

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 05:06:26 -0700

Robert Musso's "All Funked Up" isn't fast enough to be a cruising-down-the-freeway song, so it is my official "cruising-down-the-boulevard-with-the-top-down" song (with the same qualifications as the previous entry, plus there is no boulevard in Ithaca). Musso is a recording engineer, best known (to me) for his work on countless Bill Laswell projects. He is also a musician, primarily a guitarist for his solo albums and his noise-jazz group Machine Gun, but also a synth whiz for his albums as Transonic. On this track from his 1992 album Active Resonance, Musso is joined by Bootsy Collins and the JB Horns for an infectious funk workout.

Robert Musso_Active Resonance_03_All Funked Up

Robert Musso

Bootsy may be the funkiest dude ever; all he has to do is say "Aw, yeah" and a song immediately becomes funky before he even touches his Space-Bass (which then increases the Funk exponentially). What is the Funk? Where did it come from? How does it work? How did Bootsy get it? What happened to it? Fans of The Mighty Boosh (the best comedy series of this century, and possibly the most creative ever) will know already, but others should watch and learn from Old Gregg:

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