Jealous basslines
I ditched the guitar at 24 years old and started with ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ on the bass. It was then that I began to understand music.
I once read an article which said that Paul McCartney played “jealous basslines” on Something. It was rumored that John Lennon and Paul were both surprised when George Harrison — the Beatle who quietly wrote songs beneath their tandem’s shadow — came forward with a song that would arguably be the Beatles’ best ballad of all time. To somehow bite back at the competition, Paul poured all his might in building what could also be considered his best work on the bass. He fit his melodic style perfectly in between George’s words, leaning low on the calm parts and punching through with the shuffling of Ringo Starr’s drums. So goes the story of Paul’s “jealous basslines.”
Those two words got stuck in my head and often caused me to wonder, how could basslines be jealous? It didn’t make much sense to me, this idea of notes being green-eyed. I put the song on repeat and in an attempt to understand, picked up my guitar and plucked out its notes. Over a few weeks, I shaped my own instrumental rendition of Something on the acoustic guitar. But the basslines largely remained a mystery, a different animal altogether. I was still a sophomore in high school back then, with all the time in the world to play my six-string Yamaha.
I first learned how to play a song on the guitar when I was in fourth grade. Sitting in front of me in class was Mel Pante who knew all the chords to Parokya ni Edgar’s Harana, and he was kind enough to write them down — in proper song hits format no less — on a page torn off his notebook. He played it well too, and was often tasked to serenade the crowd with the same song in many intermission numbers until we reached seventh grade. Our batch of 550 pubescent Ateneans, however, never seemed to grow tired of it.
I then asked my eldest brother, who was once in our school’s rondalla troupe, to teach me its chords. But I never seemed to get past that bar chord on the second line. Starting out with the guitar was painful for me, and yet I wanted to sound pro right away. For a long time, I resorted to playing songs without bar chords. In that short list, Inuman Na was a favorite.
AWKWARD YEARS
Eventually, I learned how to make a bar chord and continued playing the guitar until my first year in college. In those awkward years, the guitar became my constant companion. I picked it up whenever I wanted to hide in a corner by myself, and my friends were bound to sing along. I also played in a couple of short-lived bands, practicing in bedrooms and at times, the rehearsal studios in Katipunan and Tandang Sora, with torn-off foam and papier mâché egg trays for walls. One of my bands, The Mingoes, even won first place in the battle of the bands in our school fair. However, we only lasted for three gigs all in all. It just wasn’t feasible to play while in high school. It wasn’t even that fun; our intentions for playing were quite shallow anyway.
Unknown to me back then, I was drifting away from the guitar as I stepped into college. It was a quiet admission to myself that I was no longer improving, and that I had plateaued quite badly. It was a slow realization as I watched my batchmates whip out John Frusciante’s riffs and slay Joe Satriani’s solos, while I, on the other hand, remained stuck with my repertoire of Beatles songs and covers with an augmented chord or two. When the B string of my guitar snapped, I never bothered replacing it. While my fingers could still play, the guitar became my constant source of frustration. Sure, I can press its strings just fine. But whenever I heard myself, I heard the same sorry sound from that boy who couldn’t do a bar chord right.
I never thought I would go back to playing after that, not until a friend moved to Vancouver and decided to lend me his bass guitar for safekeeping. That was only two years ago, but it was only then that I really got to hold an instrument other than the guitar. At 24 years old, I decided that it was time for a fresh start. I shelved whatever I knew of the guitar and started with Mary Had a Little Lamb on the bass. It felt good to play measures I never knew how to play before.
METHOD TO MUSIC
With no one to teach me (as my contemporaries have all grown too busy with age), I taught myself with books and video tutorials online; I also found new idols to idolize. I realized, more than a dozen years too late, that music has a method, and that there is more to it than just knowing how to move your fingers. Music is a language with its own set of rules, its own words, phrases, expressions, figures of speech, etc. and it takes a lot of time to understand what every note combination, what every chord, what every interval, and what every pattern means. And to speak this language requires even more practice.
I can’t say I’m good at playing the bass now. I still cause the ire of my two bandmates whenever we jam Joe Cocker’s version of With A Little Help from My Friends. Sometimes, I return to playing from mere memory, not from comprehension, that I sound bland. But at the very least, I can say that I understand music better now than I did three years ago. I learned that a lot of what made music good are in the changes you place (or avoid placing) from one measure to the other.
With a bass in hand, I listened to Paul’s basslines in Something once more. I played along with it and understood it for the first time. I heard Paul play as if he vied for attention — like a wronged mistress, popping up at all the right times — though he hardly overpowers the song. Notwithstanding Paul’s dominion over the low end, Something remains George’s one, true, and unassailable love. But that story, beautiful as it is, can never be told without Paul’s jealous basslines.
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