And the most in-the-background bassist from the biggest band of all?<\/p>\n
It’s Garry Tallent’s<\/a> sixtieth birthday today.<\/p>\n And the more you listen for Tallent, the more of him there is to hear.\u00a0 Tallent, for a bit player in a big, big band, is an extraordinarily fluid, mobile bassist.\u00a0 In fact, it’s easy to miss how much of the band’s motion he provides.<\/p>\n Think about it.\u00a0 Max Weinberg, the band’s drummer, is a Charlie Watts-style human metronome; he has to be, to keep the whole nine-piece melange in time.\u00a0 You can count the times he’s gotten to cut loose in the past 35 years – “Born In The USA”, “Roulette”, “Candy’s Room”, “Jackson Cage” – on a hand, with a finger or so in change.\u00a0 The other key elements – Roy Bittan, the late Danny Federici (and his replacement, Charles Giordano), and the band’s guitar line, whether the classic Springsteen\/Van Zandt pairing or today’s Bruce\/Steve\/Nils\/Patti onslaught – and of course Clarence Clemons and Soozie Tyrell, are all layers piling on top of the whole mass of sound.\u00a0 Weinberg may as well be playing drums in a symphony orchestra, for the all the room he has to stretch out, beyond the occasional accent here and there.<\/p>\n But Tallent is a sly one, if you pay attention.<\/p>\n “Fire<\/a>“?\u00a0 Well, that’s a no-brainer.\u00a0\u00a0The verses are\u00a0pretty\u00a0much bass solos.<\/p>\n Much more interesting, though, is\u00a0last series of choruses in “Incident on 57th Street<\/a>“; as the band builds momentum after the final verse, Tallent starts an increasingly aggressive bass line that sneaks up on you behind the wash of keyboards and backup vocals, until you realize that Tallent’s solo is driving the whole thing.<\/p>\n “Trapped” is even more clever, in its own way.\u00a0 One of Springsteen’s very few recorded cover songs (until the Seeger sessions, anyway), it’s an almost unrecognizably rock-y remake of a Jimmy Cliff reggae classic.\u00a0 The rest of the band bashes into it like it’s a Who cover – not that there’s anything wrong with that, per se.\u00a0 But it’s in Tallent’s bass line that you can hear a faint echo of the song’s roots, just a little zing of caribbean syncopation to counterpoint the rest of the version’s Jersey Shore rock’nroll brawn.<\/p>\n I’ve written about\u00a0“Backstreets<\/a>“, of course, over and over again; it’s the best breakup song ever written, it’s one of Danny Federici<\/a> and Roy Bittan’s best moments together.\u00a0 But throughout, especially in the song’s choruses, Tallent’s bass line takes what could easily have been a pretty blah mid-tempo ballad, a John Cafferty wham-bam\u00a0one-to-minor-six etude, and adds an agitated pulse in the middle; it’s disquieting, and carries on the agitated theme that Bittan and Federici set up in the song’s intro.<\/p>\n Could I go on, sure.<\/p>\n But it’d be much better to go turn your internal equalizer way, way down and listen for yourself.<\/p>\n Anyway – happy birthday, Garry Tallent!<\/p>\n UPDATE:\u00a0 Wow – this is cool!\u00a0 Welcome, Backstreets <\/em>readers!\u00a0 I remember when I was a kid, thinking “how cool would it be to get an article in Backstreets<\/em>“?\u00a0 This is just about as fun!\u00a0 Thanks, all!<\/p>\n And if you like this, I’ll direct you to my tribute to Darkness on the Edge of Town<\/em><\/a>, and my memorial to Danny<\/a>.<\/p>\n And my thirtieth anniversary of The River<\/em>?\u00a0 Oh, yeah.\u00a0 Wrote it six months ago!<\/p>\n Thanks for stopping by!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When you play bass, you’re rarely the focus of attention.\u00a0 The guitar is usually front and center; the drummer gets to smash things, at least by appearances.\u00a0 Not a lot of bass players get much attention, and when they do it’s usually because they sing lead (Rush’s Geddy Lee, the Grass Roots’ Rob Grill, Chicago’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[172],"class_list":["post-5289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","tag-springsteen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5289"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5609,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5289\/revisions\/5609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.eldiariomontanes.es\/blogfiles\/elbufondelucifer\/newsGarry07a.jpg\")
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