Paul McCartney and the bass that changed The Beatles
Prior to 1965, most of the bass lines that Paul McCartney laid down were fairly pedestrian. It is not that McCartney wasn’t a talented bass player – quite the contrary. The problem was that McCartney had to prioritise function over fancifulness. Arguably more important than McCartney’s job as a bass player in The Beatles was his job as a singer and songwriter. While on stage, McCartney couldn’t risk flubbing lyrics or messing up a chord progression just because his bass line was getting too intricate.
Occasionally, you’d get something truly remarkable, like ‘All My Loving’ or ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. Unfortunately for the latter, McCartney nicked the bass line note for note from Chuck Berry’s ‘I’m Talking About You’. But as The Beatles became more and more fascinated with experimenting in the studio, attention started to turn away from translating songs into live performances and towards simply creating the best art.
Once Rubber Soul came around, there was a massive leap in McCartney’s playing style. Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, McCartney was more fluid and dynamic in his bass lines, often utilising glissandos and non-chord tones to create bass lines that could act as hooks all their own. Even more prominently, McCartney was experimenting with new tones, including overdubbing fuzz bass onto the George Harrison track ‘Think For Yourself’. What led to McCartney taking such a big leap into stylistic bass playing?
There were a couple of different factors involved. One of the major ones was studio experimentation and the idea that not every song had to be played live. The lack of need to replicate a song on tour made McCartney more confident in playing more intricate bass runs. But two other prominent factors led to McCartney’s reawakening of his main instrument: Rickenbacker and Motown.
While in New York to play The Ed Sullivan Show in February of 1964, Rickenbacker employee F.C. Hall gifted Harrison with the second 360-12 string ever made. During the same visit, Hall attempted to give the band a 4001S bass guitar, but he had only brought a right-handed model that didn’t fly with the left-handed McCartney. Hall returned to the factory to produce a left-handed model, and a year later, McCartney was finally given a 4001S.
The Rickenbacker had a fuller and more round tone compared to McCartney’s then-current bass guitar, the Hofner violin bass. Help! would be the final album where McCartney favoured the Hofner, and by the time The Beatles were recording Rubber Soul, the larger sonic possibilities that the Rickenbacker afforded him led McCartney to permanently switch over to using the Rickenbacker.
Around the same time, McCartney and the rest of the band were listening extensively to records coming out on the Motown label. The legendary R&B/Pop label had a house band that recorded most of their songs, retroactively dubbed “The Funk Brothers”. More often than not, the band’s bass player was James Jamerson. Jamerson utilised a melodic approach to his bass lines, creating iconic runs from songs like ‘My Girl’, ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’, and ‘Dancing in the Street’.
The Beatles had previously covered three Motown songs on the album With The Beatles, so there was little doubt that McCartney was taking in the sounds of Jamerson’s bass. McCartney even professed later that Jamerson was his favourite bass player and that his style of playing greatly influenced McCartney’s own playing during the latter half of the 1960s. “James Jamerson became just my hero, really,” McCartney said in 1994. “I didn’t actually know his name until quite recently. James was very melodic, and that got me more interested.”
Going forward, McCartney favoured melodic bass lines in all of The Beatles’ songs, creating the iconic lines that appeared in songs like ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Lovely Rita’, and ‘Come Together’. Had McCartney simply stuck with his Hofner and not expanded his listening habits, he probably wouldn’t have pushed The Beatles into a new dimension of sonic possibilities.
Check out the isolated bass for ‘Lovely Rita’ down below.
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