One Note

EPMD were my introduction to “I Shot the Sheriff,” which is a ridiculous thing to admit, because it means I somehow got to the song past Bob Marley and Eric Clapton. But that’s how it went. Some of my formative music years were spent deep in the golden era of hip hop with tunnel vision. Tunnel ears? The first time I heard that bass was under Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith in 1988, chopped into pairs, and I didn’t find out for years that it was a reggae song, or that the version they used was Clapton’s version of Marley’s.

The line is one note. That’s the reveal, and it’s also why it’s here. Tiny Bass Lines is me, a beginner, learning favorite bass lines a few notes at a time on a ukulele bass and filming them on my mini ramp, and a bass line with a single pitch is pure rhythm, which is the one part of this instrument I can actually do. If you just want to play it, skip to the line.

A sheriff, and a deputy

Bob Marley wrote “I Shot the Sheriff” for Burnin’, the Wailers’ 1973 album on Island, with Aston “Family Man” Barrett on bass. Marley said later that he’d wanted to say he shot the police, and that the government would have made a fuss, so he said sheriff instead. The song is a confession with a loophole: the narrator admits to the sheriff and denies the deputy, and the whole thing rides on a one-drop rhythm where the bass leaves holes you could drive through.

That’s the thing to hold onto. Reggae bass, as I understand it, is about what it leaves out. The notes are few, the gaps are wide, and the groove lives in the gaps.

Miami, 1974

Eric Clapton came out of three years of heroin in 1974 and went to Criteria Studios in Miami to make 461 Ocean Boulevard with Tom Dowd producing. The band was mostly Tulsa: Carl Radle on bass, who’d been with him since Derek and the Dominos, Jamie Oldaker on drums, Dick Sims on keys. George Terry brought in the Marley song. Clapton didn’t want to cut it, by his own account, and then it became the only record of his career to reach number one in America, in September 1974. Not with Cream, not with the Dominos. A reggae song he had to be talked into. Clapton is in good company there. George Jones fought “He Stopped Loving Her Today” for the better part of a year because he thought it was too morbid, a story I told in Again, Funnier, and it went to number one too.

Miami, 1974.

Clapton’s version matters here because Radle’s part is a reggae bass played by an Oklahoma rock musician, with the same holes Family Man left. Under the verse Radle plays the figure single, single, then a quick pair. But a Miami rock record in 1974 was cut dry and close, the bass sitting out front with nothing stacked in the gaps. That’s the sound a sampler wants: one clean note with air on both sides of it. Radle died in 1980, at thirty-seven. The bass line that two Long Island teenagers would build a career on was, by then, six years old and its player was gone.

Brentwood

Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith grew up in Brentwood, on Long Island, and named themselves after what they were: Erick and Parrish Making Dollars. Their first single, “It’s My Thing,” came out in 1987 on Fresh, the Sleeping Bag imprint, and the album followed in June 1988. Strictly Business went gold on the strength of a sound nobody else had: slow, thick, lazy, two rappers who sounded like they’d never raise their voices, over loops lifted from records most rap producers weren’t touching. Zapp. Steve Miller. Eric Clapton.

I’d spent the mid-eighties making my own questionable rap tapes on a cassette deck and a Radio Shack mixer, lifting hooks off other people’s records, so by 1988 I knew exactly what a sampled bass note sounded like. I just couldn’t have told you whose it was. The title track opens on a rumble, and then the Clapton record comes in and the two of them introduce themselves. It was 1988, before anybody had to clear a sample, so they took the bass as a sound and used it like a drum. One note, triggered in pairs. The drums are a sampled break. The groove is the gap.

Which is where I have to be straight about a call I made. The sources all say the record samples Clapton. None of them says the bass was replayed, and to my ear the pairs are too identical to be fingers, so the site credits Carl Radle, sampled. If someone turns up a session player for EPMD, I’ll fix it.

The line

Here it is, with the drums. Hit play, then mute the bass and play along.

Counting the silence

One note means the whole line is rhythm. I had the plucks in a minute: three pairs, each a quick double hit, the first pair starting before the bar so the riff seems to begin early. Then I played it along with the record and it was wrong, because I kept playing. The gap after the third pair is nothing at all, the whole back half of the bar, and my hands wanted to fill it.

Thelonious Monk told his band that what you don’t play can be more important than what you play. I put that line on the About page as a guidepost before I understood it. This riff is where I understood it. Count the gap, out loud if you have to, and let the drums have it. I’m still learning it. This line is the reminder.

The gap I had to count is older than EPMD. Radle left holes because Marley’s song had them, reggae bass being mostly air, and EPMD kept the holes because that’s where the sampler stopped. So the pause I had to learn to leave is a Jamaican habit, carried through Miami to Long Island by accident. The last note of the third pair is the other half of the lesson: ease the finger off so it stops like the sampled note did, instead of ringing into the space you just learned to leave.

The uke bass

The one note sits low on the neck, the 3rd fret G on the low E string, where the frets on this little bass are about as wide as they are halfway up a full-size one, so for once the uke’s cramped frets don’t come into it. The stop is the only technique, and on the Fullerton easing the fretting finger up does it cleanly. Then you wait. The waiting is the line.

The note-by-note breakdown, where your fingers go, how to read the notation, and a printable line sheet are all at Tiny Bass Lines.

Somewhere under all of this is Carl Radle in a Miami studio, leaving a hole in a bar because a Jamaican song told him to. Fourteen years later two teenagers kept the hole and threw away everything around it. One note. Six plucks. It took me longer to count the silence than to find the note.