The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [73]
He may have felt a little bit excluded or undervalued. Maybe all those women were so many proofs of his manhood. And I think Bill might have just belonged to slightly different time. His being significantly older than the rest of the band would have made it tough in the early days, I suspect. There is a very great difference between being twenty and being twenty-eight when you achieve stardom. It’s sort of like why they draft kids between eighteen and twenty-one first off, for the wars. At that age, you can form the kids around the ideas they have to believe. But you’ll never get someone who is twenty-eight to believe that death in battle is glorious, if he hasn’t already bought in when he was younger. And maybe that was Bill’s life as a Rolling Stone. I certainly don’t know.
If Bill felt like a fifth wheel, I have to say, that’s not the way I hear the music, so I must respectfully disagree. I think I do grasp what I hear (remembering I’ve been very wrong before …). But I’m a bass player too, so I’m pushing forward on this one. Bill had to do a very un-bass-playerly thing to succeed with The Stones. He had to resist the urge to play with Charlie. No drummer would be easier to play with than Charlie Watts, but somehow Bill understood what almost no other bass player would get, which is “hey, being tight and close with Charlie’s kick drum will kill this energy.” Bass players just instinctively want to hear that kick drum, and if not to match it, then at least to play off of it. But Charlie wasn’t a kick-heavy player. Light right foot. He was and remains a snare and hi-hat guy. The kick is a time-keeper only. Perhaps it’s because Charlie always wanted to be a jazz player, but there just isn’t very much to work with in Charlie’s kicks.
If you hear a Stones cover from a bar band and it lacks energy, it may be because of a heavy kick and a bass player who thinks he should match it. That’s not how this music is played. Bill had the amazing gift also of staying out of the way, rhythmically. He walked and wandered and he generally visited the root of the chord somewhere in every four to six beats, but Keith was pounding that, so it wasn’t necessary. Bill has certainly produced two dozen bass fills that everyone hears and remembers, but his greatest contribution is the decision to use that thick, muddy, bass sound (common to many bassists of his generation) to bring the sound back around to what Keith had started but would never have time to finish (he’s always already on to something else). It is what Whitehead calls the “satisfaction” of concrescence, the moment when what is being made culminates and becomes a contributor to what will come next.
So Bill often lags even behind Charlie, who is already lagging, and does so in a way that stretches out the sound even more, and Bill gets away with it because he brings the bar back around to where Keith had started it, making a thick, deep, four string memory out of a thin and twitchy five string jump. Bill uses the power of repetition to blur the point of entry from the point of exit of a musical idea. It all sounds very sloppy, and it is, but it works. So Bill never really played the bass rhythmically, as most bass players do (and are conventionally told they should do). His decisions on which notes to play are often more chordal or even melodic than rhythmic, interpreting themes, whether dark or erotic or playful that are suggested by Keith’s riffs, and helping everyone see what was being suggested. This distributing of the goods is made possible by Charlie’s mediation and synthesis, which is so complete as to