Los Angeles, early 1960s: It’s a perfectly normal day at work. Carol Kaye is sitting in the studio, ready for another recording session. The electric Fender bass rests on his lap, the plectrum is in his right hand. Around him sit professional studio musicians, exclusively men. One of them looks at her and smiles: – You play well for being a lady. Carol points her contemporary “cat eye” glasses at him and says: – And you’re not bad at being a man. Carol Kaye is unknown to most people, but remains one of pop history’s most central musicians. You have surely heard her: Of the around 10,000 recordings she has taken part in, many of them are big hits. “Good Vibrations”, “Somethin’ Stupid”, “Wichita Lineman”, the list is long (see playlist at the bottom of the case). Brian Wilson, the oft-proclaimed genius songwriter and arranger in The Beach Boys, only wanted to use Carol Kaye. “She was the world’s best bassist, a big star and way ahead of her time,” he has said. A reasonably well-known bassist named Paul McCartney has himself said that he was heavily inspired by Kaye when he played in The Beatles. INSPIRED: Paul McCartney on stage in 1964 with his signature Höfner bass. Photo: Ap Bassist Bent Sæther in the rock band Motorpsycho considers Kaye to be one of the greatest. – She was central in lifting the bass from being a background instrument to having an extremely important and decisive role in the music, he says. Carol has been asked many times what it was like to be the only woman among the industry’s most in-demand studio musicians. The answer has largely been the same. – There was zero stress. I was the best. Who was this chick that got stars in the eyes of the pop legends, and what made her so good? PRE-BASS ERA: Carol Kaye pictured in a Los Angeles studio in the 1960s with her Epiphone Emperor electric guitar. Photo: Getty Images The first guitar From her home in California, the now 88-year-old Carol Kaye can look back on an adventurous musical career, which began all the way back in 1949. When Carol was 13 years old, her divorced and impoverished mother was visited by a door-to-door salesman who sold guitars. The piggy bank was broken, and the music-interested teenager quickly recovered. The following year, when Carol was just 14 years old, she was hired by local big bands playing jazz. School and teenage life were combined with playing guitar at parties and nightclubs with grown men. She earned good money, helped her mother with the bills and bought the most expensive guitar from the manufacturer Gibson. In between all this, Carol had her first child, aged just 16. To avoid unpleasant questions, she pretended to be a widow. Eventually she became a permanent member of a big band that toured the country. Carol married the bass player and had another child. Then one night, while they were playing at a seminar for funeral directors, the bandleader dropped dead from a heart attack. The orchestra was disbanded, and the marriage broke up. Life was now at a crossroads. Carol was 22 years old, single and responsible for her own mother and two young children. Could this musical life really continue? Or should she do what society expected: remarry and become a housewife or a secretary? FAST DOLLAR: Carol Kaye has had a payday and poses with her children in front of a brand new Rambler car. Photo: Privat Professional life Carol pointed the finger at fate and went for a back-breaking combo solution: boring typewriter job during the day and bebop jams at local clubs five or six nights a week. The 22-year-old now started to become really good at guitar, and her name spread in the industry. When she got her first offer to play on the record of later soul legend Sam Cooke, life as a studio musician was underway. Working exclusively as a hired musician was a stable profession that paid much better than playing concerts. The choice was therefore easy for Carol with her burden of support – even if it was hard to leave jazz. Soon she found herself as one of the regular guitarists for sensational producer (and later murderer) Phil Spector, who dominated the charts in the early 1960s. Her efforts can be heard on mega hits such as “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” by The Righteous Brothers and “Then He Kissed Me” by The Crystals. FIRST CALL: Studio musicians Carol Kaye and Bill Pitman at work in the early 1960s. The guitar was still her main instrument, here a Fender Jazzmaster. Photo: GAB Archive/Redferns Carol now became busier than Bettan and Kurt Nilsen during Advent. The money flowed in from recording music for records or soundtracks for films and TV series. Then there was a day when one of the other studio musicians didn’t show up for work. “The First Lady of Bass” “Ray on bass is sick today. Can you step in for him, Carol?” Phil Spector asked. A small adjustment in the duty schedule was all it took to get her hooked on electric bass. She loved the instrument from the first moment; it was right in her hands, had weight, and she liked to improvise funky bass lines. The electric bass was now on the threshold of making its broad breakthrough in popular music. Before, everything had been about the upright bass, which was a more invisible workhorse that held the base tone and gave weight. Elbassen was to have a more central place in the soundscape of pop music. Carol Kaye was a pioneer here with her hard and clear style. Motorpsycho bassist Bent Sæther is one of those who pay tribute to what she did. – You can hear very well in the bass playing that she was actually a guitarist, he says. ICON: Bassist, vocalist and songwriter Bent Sæther in Motorpsycho considers Carol Kaye to be one of the greatest bassists in music history. Photo: Erlend Lånke Solbu / news Sæther explains that Carol formed a school by playing with plectrums and having very little “bottom” in the bass. – The “plonk plonk” plectrum sound is her trademark, and she made the bass a more important ingredient than it had been before, he says. He explains that many copied her blunt and very precise bass sound. – You hear it on the Beatles records “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper’s”. And if as an instrumentalist you manage to inspire and influence Paul McCartney himself – then you have done something important for the history of music, says Sæther. When McCartney has praised Kaye, it has not only been about her playing style, but also her distinctive tone choice. She liked to steer away from the basic tone and play things that the bass is not really “supposed” to do. If the chord was a C minor, she just as easily placed the bass on G or E, which are the other two notes in the triad. This is particularly evident on The Beach Boys albums such as “Pet Sounds” and “Smile”. Bent Sæther says that this move makes the music less set and airier. – When you choose slightly less obvious notes on the bass, the music takes on a kind of ambivalence that makes you perceive the total differently. It gives the music extra life because the listener wonders what is really going on here. And it’s incredibly fun. Sometimes she received clear instructions, other times she improvised the bass lines. – Regardless of who wrote the bass lines, it was her Brian Wilson chose to call, even though there were probably a hundred other bass players in Los Angeles he could have contacted, says Sæther. SMIL: In the mid-1960s, The Beach Boys were a very ambitious project. Los Angeles’ best musicians were brought in to play on albums such as “Pet Sounds” and “Smile”. The band’s mastermind Brian Wilson only wanted to use Carol Kaye, who he referred to as the world’s best bassist. (The picture is from 1999). Photo: Paul Natkin/Getty Images Bassing with the guys Kaye doesn’t see her career as a feminist heroic story. She sees herself as a respected and skilled musician “A note has no gender. Either you play it well, or you don’t,” she has said. Some of the jazz musicians she played with early in her career were women, but they disappeared when they got married. “So great that your husband lets you go around and play”, is a comment that came more than once. Of course, there was a heavy boyish atmosphere among the professional musicians. Like when she turned up heavily pregnant at a gig and the conductor said loudly: “Can the father of Carol’s child stand up?” whereupon the whole orchestra rose at the same time. She even liked to shout “I slept with your husband today!” to musicians’ wives who stopped by the studio for a visit. The rough humor suited her well, and few were tougher in the face than Carol. Throughout the rest of the 1960s, she was part of a permanent and highly sought-after group of studio musicians, which was later called “The Wrecking Crew”. They were “first call”, i.e. the first to be called when the producers needed musicians for record recordings. And they had plenty to do. There was no automaticity in the fact that the band pictured on the record cover played the instruments themselves. It was often an advantage to bring in the best musicians. Where some bands could be haunted by internal passive-aggressiveness and unstable personalities, the studio musicians showed up on time and did the job professionally on the first try. Kaye estimates that throughout her career she has played bass on over 10,000 recordings – which is referred to as a possible world record. Three to four gigs every day was the norm. Carol Kaye plays bass on “I Am A Rock” from this Simon & Garfunkel album. Nancy & Frank Sinatra’s mega hit from 1967 has Carol on bass. Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation” from 1968 as well. Composer Quincy Jones was one of those who called her regularly. “Carol Kaye is the best bass player I have ever heard,” he wrote in his autobiography. At most, over NOK 100,000 a week could flow in, converted to today’s currency. For fun, she earned a few extra dollars by tricking fellow musicians into buying perfectly ordinary guitar picks that she said had been used by The Beach Boys. The bass deck In 1969, Carol Kaye took a several-year break from studio musician life. The arthrosis in the wrists needed care, and it was time to get to know her three children better. A car accident in the 1970s meant that she gave up as a performing musician – with a few exceptions. Since then, she has made a living by passing it on. Carol has been a private teacher for many later top musicians, including two of the bassists in a later fairly well-known band called Toto. She has written around 30 instructional books for bassists and guitarists, with a young Sting avid reader. Studio musicians rarely receive much public attention for the work they do. But Carol Kaye’s efforts have definitely been noticed. When Rolling Stone magazine named her the fifth best bassist of all time, they also stated that traces of her can be heard everywhere in modern pop music. Just listen to a band like Tame Impala, for example. Kaye has also been given column space in the music press when there have been arguments about who actually played on old recordings. The doubt has arisen because it was not always documented who was hired. Then she was able to show photos of her old, tasteful appointment books. SEVENTH SENSE: Carol Kaye has posted many photos of her appointment book on Facebook. Here from a usual busy working week in June 1966. Photo: Privat Answering what has been the highlight of my career is not easy. – I have played on so many incredible records and worked with such fabulous musicians that it is difficult to say which has been the biggest or best. That list can change from week to week, she said recently. Because she has plenty to choose from. – When I turn on the radio and hear a song and think: “Oh yes, it’s me playing! That’s a good song.” Carol Kaye has not responded to news’s request for an interview. We’ve put together a Spotify playlist of career highlights. Everything is her on electric bass, except for the last five tracks, where she plays guitar: Text sources: “The Wrecking Crew” by Kent Hartman, excerpt from Carol Kaye’s autobiography, reproduced on her Facebook page, Mojo, Guitar World, New York Magazine , New York Post, Musicradar. Hey! Do you have any thoughts on this matter that you’d like to share – or ideas for other stories we should tell? Feel free to send me an email! The rest of news Kultur’s long readings can be found here. Recommended further reading: Join the road trip with the mastermind behind the Beach Boys. Meet the man behind the myth and some of the music legends he has meant a lot to. Shoe player Lena Clarkson is found dead in Phil Spector’s home. He claims that she took her own life, but the police have doubts about his explanation.
ttn-69
Carol Kaye was called the world’s best bass player – Kultur
