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Best Bass Player?


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Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones

John Paul Jones has many talents, never got the credit he was due, but there again what Bass players do ? Duck Dunn is no punk, who's the guy on the Pulse, he's good, David Pegg is good, Rich Grech, Tim Bogart, there is so many................

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Wayman Tisdale might not be the best, but he certainly knows his way around a bass and personally, I like his style & phrasing. Oh.....and he's left-handed.

www.waymantisdale.com

What's even more remarkable is that he used to be a star power forward in the NBA for 12 years! Not sure I know of another pro athelete that retired and then went on to having a relatively successful career in music. Anyone know of another???

Can't miss him on stage either.

Tom

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From the All-Music Guide

Rick James

In the late '70s, when the fortunes of Motown Records seemed to be flagging, Rick James came along and rescued the company, providing funky hits that updated the label's style and saw it through into the mid-'80s. Actually, James had been with Motown earlier, though nothing had come of it. After growing up in Buffalo and running away to join the Naval Reserves, he ran away from the Navy to Toronto, where he was in a band with future Buffalo Springfield members Neil Young and Bruce Palmer, and with Goldy McJohn, later of Steppenwolf. As the Mynah Birds, they signed to Motown and recorded, though no record was ever released.

James had a journeyman's career playing bass in various groups before signing again to Motown as an artist, songwriter, and producer. His first single, "You and I" (May 1978), topped the R&B charts and reached the pop Top 40. "Mary Jane" (September 1978) was another hit. Both were on James' debut album, Come Get It! (June 1978), which went gold. Subsequent efforts were not as successful, though Bustin' Out of L Seven (January 1979) featured the R&B hit "Bustin' Out" (April 1979). James returned to form with the number one R&B hit "Give It to Me Baby" (March 1981), featured on the million-selling Street Songs (April 1981), which also featured the hit "Super Freak."

James turned his production attention to resuscitating the career of the Temptations, recently returned to Motown, and "Standing on the Top" (April 1982), credited to the Temptations featuring Rick James, was an R&B Top Ten. (He also produced recordings by Teena Marie and the Mary Jane Girls.) James' follow-up to Street Songs was the gold-selling Throwin' Down (May 1982), which featured the hit "Dance Wit' Me." The title song of Cold Blooded (August 1983) became James' third R&B number one, and the album also featured his hit duet with Smokey Robinson, "Ebony Eyes." James' greatest-hits album Reflections (August 1984) featured the new track "17" (June 1984), which also became a hit. Glow (April 1985) contained Top Ten R&B singles in the title track and "Can't Stop," which was featured in the summer movie blockbuster Beverly Hills Cop. The Flag (June 1986) featured the hit "Sweet and Sexy Thing" (May 1986).

James left Motown for the Reprise division of Warner Bros. Records as of the album Wonderful (July 1988), which featured his number one R&B hit "Loosey's Rap," on which he was accompanied by rapper Roxanne Shante. Nevertheless, his "punk funk" didn't seem to rest comfortably with the trend toward rap/hip-hop. In 1989, James charted briefly with a medley of the Drifters hits "This Magic Moment" and "Dance With Me." In 1990, MC Hammer scored a massive hit with "U Can't Touch This," which consisted of his rap over the instrumental track of "Super Freak." That should have made for a career rebirth, but James was plagued by drug and legal problems that found him more frequently in court and in jail rather than in the recording studio. The majority of his legal woes behind him, James returned in 1997 with Urban Rapsody, which didn't yield any hits but was well accepted by critics. Rick James died of a heart attack on August 6, 2004, at his Los Angeles home.

Mynah Birds

It seems impossible to believe, but it really happened: for a short time in early 1966, Rick James and Neil Young were in the same band. The group, called the Mynah Birds, also included bassist Bruce Palmer, who, with Young, would go on to Buffalo Springfield shortly after the Mynah Birds split. It is difficult to determine exactly what the Mynah Birds might have sounded like, though, because although they did an album's worth of material for Motown, nothing from those sessions has ever been released.

The Mynah Birds were a group on the Toronto scene that had been around for a while before Young was asked to join by Palmer in January 1966. Young had been struggling to establish himself as a solo singer/songwriter for some months without success, and was glad to join the band if only for steady work. Initially Young's role in the group was not major, as they did none of his songs; he described it, in John Einarson's 1992 book Neil Young: The Canadian Years: Don't Be Denied, as "a Rolling Stones kind of R&B thing." Rick James, then known as Ricky James Matthews, was the singer and frontman of the band and Young has remembered that he and James wrote some songs together.

Shortly after Young joined, the Mynah Birds were signed by Motown, in one of its very first ventures into the rock band market. They recorded 16 songs, according to Bruce Palmer, but the sessions were abruptly halted when Rick James was taken away by authorities for being AWOL from the U.S. Navy. The rest of the band, although they had known James was American, had no idea that he was evading the military. That spelled the end of the Mynah Birds, who broke up in March 1966. Fortunately for the musicians, although they had signed a long-term contract with Motown, this was canceled, freeing Young and Palmer to record with Buffalo Springfield with no complications.

The Mynah Birds tapes were believed lost, but again according to Neil Young: The Canadian Years: Don't Be Denied: "...a musicologist has recently stumbled upon them, mislabeled in Motown's vaults. A listen to the tapes reveals little sign of Neil's characteristic guitar or vocal. In fact, Neil did not sing on any of the recordings and his guitar playing is mixed down so low that it is virtually indistinguishable amid the other instruments. The only stand out feature is Ricky Matthews' voice." Only one James/Young composition, "I'll Wait Forever," was copyrighted, although Young remembers having written a song called "It's My Time" with James as well.

Although on the face of it the Mynah Birds experience seems like it could have hardly been more discouraging, some good things came out of it for Young and Palmer. Young had been playing a 12-string acoustic when he first joined the band, but millionaire John David Eaton, a backer of the group, got him a new electric Rickenbacker and got amplifiers for the whole act. This equipment, in turn, was sold to pay for Young and Palmer to take a trip to California, where they hoped to find Stephen Stills (whom Young had met in 1965) and form a band. Miraculously, they did find him, in a legendary incident in which they passed each other driving in opposite directions. And, with Richie Furay, the musicians formed Buffalo Springfield, one of the greatest rock bands of the 1960s. Young got his payback for that act of hubris when, in the early '70s, Eaton had a court order put a lien on Young's earnings from a Toronto concert until he paid Eaton back for the sold Mynah Birds equipment. Which Young did. And wouldn't you say the price was worth it?

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