If Greg Lake didn’t already have an appreciation for the unique syncopations of the Beatles rhythm section, he certainly learned a thing or two while on tour with Ringo Starr and his All-Starr band.
From Paul McCartney’s melodic style on the bass to Starr’s intuitive responses at the drums, there is still a lot to be loved, Lake says in this newly posted talk with Inside MusiCast.
“First of all,” Lake says of McCartney, “he’s a wonderful musician. So, whenever you hear him place something, it’s usually dead right. There’s not much you can fault musically with him. He’s not a virtuoso player, but he wouldn’t claim to be. But you’ll never hear the wrong bass note being played with Paul. Everything is perfect. What he doesn’t play is lovely, the spaces he’ll leave … and he can really rock, too — like on ‘I Saw Her Standing There.'”
Put that technique in a band like the Beatles with Starr — and magic happens, says Lake, himself a respected bassist for both King Crimson and Emerson Lake and Palmer.
“All he needed was exactly what he had, and that was a drummer who knew exactly where to put the offbeat,” Lake says. “A little bit behind the beat, that just slightly late delivery — that really gives you a backbeat feel. Those two things were the Beatles.”
Lake, who was part of the 2001 edition of the All-Starr Band — performing a number of Beatles songs on stage — gives a specific example of a wildly underrated part by McCartney.
“You listen to something like the bass part in ‘With a Little Help From My Friends,’ that active, dancing bass part — I played it, when I toured with Ringo,” Lake says. “I learned it note for note; it’s a beautiful part. It’s so articulate. It’s almost like a Bach piece, you know?”
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Mr. Lake, the maestro, how are you doing? I despise McCartney’s plasticity and his ego, but I’d definitely call his bass work on ABBEY ROAD an example of virtuosity.
I think what Greg Lake means is that ‘virtuouso’ implies a certain consistency that is missing with all of the members of The Beatles (with the possible exception of Ringo); Lennon and McCartney in particular are ‘primitives’ who seem to be rediscovering their instrument from scratch a lot of the time (even now with McCartney) and this is because they were so defiantly against formula. Indeed, the current commentary that McCartney’s ‘New’ song is reminiscent of a couple of Beatles’ tunes marks one of the first times when, across a vast catalogue, one thing resembles another. This is probably an outcome of the desire, shared by John and Paul, to hook to inspiration rather than technique.