How Carol Kaye inspired The Beatles album ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’
Carol Kaye has changed music irrevocably. How could she not? She’s played on so many songs that nobody knows the exact figure. The best guess stands at around 10,000. And being a Los Angeles session musician in the 1960s means that a fair chunk of that whopping number are bonafide classics.
What’s more, she was a trailblazer. The sad truth is that Kaye couldn’t just settle for being a brilliant bassist; she was handicapped by her gender on that front. No, her unfortunate predicament was that she had to far outstrip her male counterparts if she was going to make it. However, as Quincy Jones famously remarked, “She could leave the men in the dust”. And as she famously added herself, “When you hear somebody with balls, that’s me”.
Kaye’s origins in the music world were as a jazz guitarist. She laid down riffs for Sam Cooke and many other greats, then the bass was thrust towards her by Phil Spector in 1963. Hollywood’s premiere bass player, Ray Pohlman, was suddenly unavailable for a session. So, Spector swivelled his eyes around the room and asked Kaye if she would step in.
She later recalled: “Suddenly, I was able to play a lot of the stuff that had been in my head for years; all those funky basslines. But there was the added advantage of not having to cart around a whole bunch of acoustic and electric guitars, 12 strings and two or three amps. I became obsessive about practising on this new instrument to get my approach together.”
This meticulous practice, along with her jazz guitar origins, meant that Kaye had a very singular style on the instrument. And with musical progression moving on at quite a lick in the mid-1960s, that made her singular style very in demand. One record that really was set to shift boundaries was Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys, so Kaye became the obvious choice to match their keyless revolution.
Pet Sounds would go on to inspire The Beatles in every way imaginable, with Paul McCartney famously commenting, “I figure no one is educated musically ’til they’ve heard Pet Sounds.“ But there was one practical piece of musicology that he thought he could nab rather directly: the bass playing of Carol Kaye. She shifted the dynamics of the song by adding quirks to typical conventions.
As McCartney would later explain: “Pet Sounds was my inspiration for making Sgt. Pepper. I was really blown away with how clever it was and how intriguing the arrangements were. There’s a very interesting bass, it’s always nearly an off beat. If you’ve got a song in C the first bass note will normally be a C. But Carol would play a G. It still fitted, but it gave you a whole new feel.”
Carol Kaye’s percussive sound would feature throughout McCartney’s back catalogue from thereon.
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