The wild way Carol Kaye got her start in music: “I’d never seen a naked lady”
Everybody has to start somewhere, even somebody with as illustrious and extensive a career as Carol Kaye.
She might have played a role in some of the greatest pop, rock, and soul records to ever grace the airwaves, but it was in the dark confines of a 1950s strip club that the prolific bassist-for-hire first earned her musical stripes.
Kaye is simultaneously among the most successful and most underappreciated musicians in American history. If you look through her credits, you will find a wealth of utterly iconic hits, spanning the spectrum from early Sam Cooke cuts to Frank Zappa experimentalism, stopping along the way to contribute to Motown masterpieces and – perhaps most impressively – the Batman theme. Yet, her role as a session musician, albeit an incredibly in-demand session musician, rarely afforded the Washington-born multi-instrumentalist much of the limelight.
Nevertheless, her unbelievably extensive career, spanning over half a century and a countless array of beloved tracks, has certainly been more glamorous than her early beginnings. It was at the age of 13 that her musical journey first began, gifted a guitar by her mother. At that time, during the late 1940s, the era of big band jazz was in full swing (pun not intended), particularly in Kaye’s Californian surroundings, so it didn’t take long for the hopefully young guitarist to identify the world of jazz as her true calling.
Nobody becomes Duke Ellington overnight, though, and Kaye commenced her journey into jazz by playing guitar in local clubs around Los Angeles. Typically, though, late-night jazz clubs were a little out of reach for a teenage girl from Washington, so, instead, Kaye scored a regular gig at a club with a much more laissez-faire attitude. “I played in a high-class striptease place called The Gilded Cage,” she once told KGET-TV in California.
A rough timeline would place Kaye during her mid-to-late teens during her time playing at that apparently “high-class” strip club, but things were seemingly a lot more relaxed back in the 1950s. Even still, it was quite a shock for the young guitarist. “I’m playing the music and I’m looking at the naked gals and they’re throwing their things around,” she laughed. “I never saw a naked lady in my life, and they had plenty in the striptease place. I could hardly play the music, you know.”
Distractions aside, working those shifts in the seedy nightclubs of California was enough to get Kaye’s talents out into the world, where they eventually caught the attention of one Robert “Bumps” Blackwell, the producer whose roster boasted, at one point or another, the likes of Little Richard, Ray Charles, and, most pertinently in Kaye’s case, Sam Cooke.
“He asked me to do a record,” Kaye recalled.
Kaye jumped at the chance, going on to perform on Cooke’s recording of ‘Summertime’, and found that she could earn a lot more as a studio performer, where she wasn’t distracted by the rows of naked women.
“I knew when I did a record that if I started studio work – ‘cause I saw it happen, we all saw it happen – you would lose your place in jazz,” the guitarist shared, harking back to her internal debate over becoming a session artist. “You have that factor that if you wanna make money for your family, you’d better do studio work. So that’s what I did.”
It is fair to say that choosing that path paid off for Kaye, setting her on a path to become one of the most prolific, successful, and sought-after session musicians of all time, while still retaining a great deal of her jazz credibility. Either way, she has certainly come a long way since those evenings spent playing jazz in local strip clubs.
