Buying a Bass

An ongoing conversation about what it means to be a man in the 21st century

Not long ago I spent nearly two hours on the phone buying a Fender Geddy Lee model jazz bass at a post-Thanksgiving 20-percent-off the already artificially and universally discounted price of $799.99. 

 

It was a torturous morning for me. 

 

When I couldn’t get a line (“All circuits are busy; please try your call again at another time”), I waited half an hour in queue for a live Internet chat with a Guitar Center representative. I watched my spot in line slowly count down from 30 to 1, then groaned at the popup message—“No representative is available”—and shot an annoyed email into the void.

 

Then I trained my left-hand middle finger to alternate between the “redial” and the “flash” buttons on my phone, and I settled into a deep boredom, warm in bed, except for my left hand holding the handset. After 37 minutes of this nonsense, I failed to hear the signal ascending trio of beeps, I stayed my practiced finger, and I settled in for another 20 minutes of holding (after selecting my desired menu options), barraged by a stream of commercial messages and song snippets.

 

But I am writing not to tell you about my frustrating morning of Black Friday shopping, nor to wring out the suspense I felt not knowing whether I’d ever get a chance my credit card to shell out $681 of my hard- money, nor even to argue about how hard- that money really is. 

 

Instead, I’m intrigued that as I talked to the salesman who eventually picked up my call, I immediately adopted several of his vocal mannerisms. Here I was, a 36-year-old college professor. I should be confident in my speaking ways, winning him over to my practiced, measured manner. Yet I was drawn in by his moxie, his dude-speak: “That’s a sweet bass, man. An unbelievable price, too.” It was a kind of growl, and his vowels were all diphthong and dance.

 

He’s trained to say that, of course, though for me, it’s true. It is a sweet bass, and its discounted price made it suddenly available to me. I’ve never owned a bass, primarily because my father wouldn’t let me buy one back when I was in junior high. “The only thing you can do with a bass is play in a rock band,” he warned. Well, yeah, I thought, though I tried to make reasonable counterarguments. 

 

I was at the time enamored of U2, Yes, and Rush. Something in their basic underpinnings especially resonated with me. The stuff Adam Clayton played seemed easy enough to mimic. My mother’s coworker had known him back in Dublin. He was just a strange kid, she’d said. That was certainly attainable even for me. Chris Squire and Geddy Lee, on the other hand, were running their fingers up and down the fretboard in ways I couldn’t even always hear correctly. And Geddy was singing on top of that. 

 

I knew even then that my likes were not necessarily my influences, that I was limited, too (too much), by my ability. I was noodling around at the time on my friend’s El Cheapo, with its tendency to buzz even on the headstock-end frets, and we enjoyed playing simple three-chord songs in his garage. It was our harmless rebellion. 

 

In the end, though, I dutifully saved my money and settled for a guitar. Yes, you could play guitar in a rock band as much as you could play bass (more so, even, with bands like KISS and Iron Maiden running two axmen), but you could also sit around a campfire with your friends or write a love song to your girlfriend or walk with her up to Stewart Falls to give her the diamond ring she’s deserved for a decade and sing her your own version of the Beatles’ “I Will” with lots more verses.

 

Thus I became a poor guitar plunker. There have been few campfires, but, more important, there has never been any seri- ous danger of my joining a real rock band, unless you count   which is just me and my friend Joe, a Berkeley- guitarist who humors me whenever I return to  hometown in New Jersey. He is the kind of guy who’s actually been in a real band, playing shows at CBGB’s and releasing an album, but that hasn’t gone to his head, and he holds a steady job and loves his wife and three daughters with a little left over for his friends. And, hey, Dad? Joe even cut off his dreadlocks a few years ago, and I don’t ever see him wearing those earrings anymore. The soul patch remains.

 

As does his New Jersey accent. It’s a less grating version of the one you hear on Saturday Night Live or in Governor Chris Christie speeches; to me it’s kind of endearing, a subtle sonic madeleine. When I’m around Joe, I slip back into certain pronunciations, even phrasings (lots of yeahs, naws), but they’ve never really been mine. Though I grew up in New Jersey, I don’t really speak it. I mostly learned to talk by imitating my father’s soft Wisconsin inflections. I like to have fun with people, bust their stereotypes. “I’m from New Jersey,” I say. “You don’t sound like it,” they reply. It’s always been a source of pride for me, that I escaped the stain, though I happily accept any tough-guy stereotypes you want to expect of me.

 

My friend David Lazar spent years consciously effacing his Brooklynese. Even among his high-school peers, his accent was noteworthy, made fun of. When he got to Brandeis, it was one more difference between him and his upper-crust classmates:

“I kept refining my accent, moderating my vowels, soften-

ing my consonants. A friend at the time said I sounded like
an English don. That must have been my progression from
Brooklyn don. Corleone to Cambridge, made easy.”

 

My mother, also from Brooklyn, never quite got out of her pronunciations, though just recently, as she drove me home from the airport, she noted, with a touch of disdain, the ugly accents of New Jerseyans. I thought, but didn’t say, “That’s pretty much how you talk, Mom.”

 

Paul the Apostle manages to sound cool claiming to be “all things to all men,” and he meant it as a proselytizing method, not an excuse for his malleable habits of speech. But what if he was just rhetorical, not to say conniving? Or wishy washy? What if such adaptability is not a going with the flowing, but a lack of self? 

 

I seek Ralph Waldo Emerson and his hobgoblin to bail me out here:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds….
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He
may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.
Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow
speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though

it contradict every thing you said today.”

 

Or, perhaps, speak in softened words, a kind of drawl, a valley twang, a northwoods nase. I want to soften the stigma of molding oneself to the environment, recast it as adaptability, a kind of subversion of expectations.

 

It feels like time to get back to my phone conversation with the Guitar Center salesman. This is him speaking again:

“And let me tell you about something totally excellent. I’ve got it myself, on my Les Paul. It’s Performance Protection, man.”

 

“No, thanks.”

 

“You sure, dude? ’Cause it’s like you’re getting it free, with your discount and all.”

 

“No.” In my mind I heard my father’s reasoning: “They’re banking on you never needing a major repair. In any case, I take care of my things better than most people do.”

 

“All right, man. If you change your mind, you have 90 days to upgrade.”

 

“Okay, but I won’t.”

 

I count this a small victory, a repudiation of the vortex.

 

So I guess I’m not just thinking about the ways we absorb the speaking styles and inflections of others, or about whether such flexibility in our accents indicates some lack in our constitutions. I’m thinking about the small rebellions in life: the book and flashlight under the covers, the raucous racket playing on the stereo, the cigarette out in the woods, the initials carved in the beech bark. I’m thinking that my father was probably right, and I’m glad now to be able to strum up a tune to sing along to, and that I’m also right to finally own my own bass. I’m thinking about the Christmas Eve just after my purchase, when my father turned 64, and we gathered the whole Madden clan with piano, guitar, bass, and clarinets to sing for him “When I’m 64” with slight lyrical changes to accommodate the grandchildren on his knee.

 

I’m thinking how, more than any salesman or community of peers, my father has molded me, in ways I can sound through deep reflection and ways I cannot fathom. And I’m thinking about how the world became a better place when Stu Sutcliffe and Astrid Kircher decided to shack up, leaving Paul McCartney to string-up an upside-down Rosetti Solid 7 with piano wire to create a makeshift bass. How Chris Squire split his bass signal into both a bass and a guitar amp to achieve that heavy treble and heady growl to underlie the orchestral arrangements of Yes. 

 

How sometimes all you need is a steady da-da-dee-da-da-dah-dum da-da-dee-da-da-dah-dum to conjure images of a quiet New Year’s Day, a world in white where nothing changes.

 

And how can Geddy Lee split his brain like he does, play with his hands those intricate bass lines and sing on different rhythms, different notes? This is a mystery I am content to witness without understanding, like my toaster, my computer, my wife’s love, my children’s wonder, my father’s long wisdom, and the ways we resist and rely on each other, we grow and empathize, meet another soul along the way, and resonate.