The Beatles songs that made Geddy Lee pick up a bass: “So round”
There isn’t a lot in rock you can’t credit The Beatles with doing first. Writing their own material, stadium tours, and ill-advised TV movies about weird buses, all standard fare for the top tier of pop musicians to this day, The Beatles did first. However, what can go slightly under the radar amongst all the other ink-spilling about the four scouse scamps and their mopped tops is the effect they had on instrumentalists.
True, Beatles songs mostly sound like three-chord singalongs that anyone who looked twice at a triangle could pick up and play, but that’s one of the many tricks of their songwriting. It sounds as natural as breathing, until you try to play it. That’s when you find out that, secretly, all four Fabs were phenomenal musicians in their own right. Yes, including Ringo, he was superb and any drummer worth their salt will say the same.
However, of each Beatle, there’s an argument to be made that the most talented musician of them all was Paul McCartney. Not only could he probably play the most instruments of the lot, not only were the levels he reached as a singer and pianist superlative but his legacy, over half a century after his heyday, leaves him with a shout of still being the best rock bass player of all time.
Don’t just take it from me, though. Take it from someone who would know a thing or two about technically gifted bass players, Rush singer and four-string sensei Geddy Lee. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Lee puts Macca right up alongside Jaco Pastorious and John Entwistle for his ability to not just provide the low-end for his songs, but also add a melodicism that is fitting for one of the great tunesmiths of the age.
He says, “If you listen to ‘Taxman’, or if you listen to ‘Come Together’… that bass part is always so round. It’s always so bouncy and melodic, and I think that’s really no small part of the infectious nature of Beatles Songs. It really added a great element to those songs.” In fact, he says ‘Taxman’ inspired him to pick up a bass in the first place. High praise indeed coming from a man as technically magnificent as Lee, but he also names another player on his list who was just as much an influence to him as he was to McCartney himself.
On many occasions, ol’ Thumbs Aloft has credited the Motown maestro himself, James Jamerson, with inspiring the evolution of his playing. On The Ronnie Wood show, he told the Stones sideman that Jameson was “(his) big influence on bass. If I have to pick a bass player, ever, it’s him.” This is a feeling he shares with Lee, who credits Jamerson’s lines as the heart of all of Motown’s classics, “making those songs move.”
Which is always worth bearing in mind when it comes to discussing The Beatles. Sure, they were the first band to do a great many things in rock, but they were also listening to the music of the day, and being inspired by everything happening around them. It’s something they share with every great musician, from Geddy Lee, to James Jamerson himself.
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