‘Thank You’: The Sly and The Family Stone bassline that redefined the sound of funk
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but combination must be the father. There’s nothing that’ll get you something new quicker than taking two concepts and bringing the best of them together. Music is full of examples of this. Pick two genres out of a hat, and there’s probably someone making that combination of music, but in Larry Graham, bass virtuoso and Sly and The Family Stone legend, we have someone who went a little further.
Graham’s technique gave the world slap-bass and changed the sonic landscape of an entire instrument, putting him up there with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Rich for influence. Not bad going.
Graham was born to a musical family in Beaumont, Texas, who moved out to the Bay Area of San Francisco when he was a teenager. At 15, he formed a band with his mother, Dell, where he played organ and guitar. The eagle-eyed among you may notice that neither of those instruments is the bass, and well done you, because this is where necessity comes in. Larry was playing the low end for the group, but when the organ itself broke, it had to come from somewhere else.
At around the same time, Larry’s mother decided that she’d had quite enough drummers, and suddenly, the percussion had to come from somewhere else as well. So, a teenage Larry had to figure out how to be a band’s low-end and percussion on one instrument that he didn’t know how to play. Rather than do things the given way, though, Graham did something different.
He told Bass Player: “I wasn’t interested in learning the so-called correct way of playing, because I wasn’t planning to be a bass player. I was basically trying to play drums on the bass. I would thump the strings with my thumb to make up for the bass drum and pluck the strings with my fingers to make up for the backbeat snare drum”. This combination meant the band could continue well into the ’60s when his inspired playing style caught the attention of local radio DJ Sly Stone, who was looking to put a band together.
Watching Graham play, Stone saw so much more than a way of not having to put up with a drummer. In fact, quite the opposite. He felt that combining his striking sound with a full rhythm section could unlock melodic and rhythmic avenues that few other musicians around were tapping into.
As Graham put it in the same interview: “When I eventually worked with (drummer) Greg Errico in Sly and The Family Stone, it was either going to work and be totally cool or it would be a train wreck – I didn’t know which. Greg, being the drummer he is, totally played around what I was already doing: he didn’t ask me to lighten up, it was just very natural.”
The Family Stone would become a national concern in 1968 with the single ‘Dance To The Music’. However, Graham iconic slap-bass style (although charmingly, he never stopped calling it “thumping and picking”) would only be heard on record later. His iconic style would power their second number-one single, the ludicrously titled ‘Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)’. With it, a whole new generation of bass players were born, and the likes of Abe Laboriel, Victor Wooten, Thundercat, Nik West and thousands more were inspired to pick up the baton and run with it even further.
