Welcome to I Never Make My Move Too Soon

My name is Chris. I used to be a bass player. A good bass player. Like, a REALLY good bass player. A few years ago I found a couple of old day planners from 1995 and 1996 and I counted up: I played about three hundred shows in those two years and I played on more than a dozen recording sessions on various indie albums. I made most of my living that way. Then I quit, and I did other things for twenty eight years. Now I want back in.

This newsletter will be part journal and part memoir and part practical advice as I practice practice practice to get back the expertise I had back then, the strength and stamina and speed required to play pop music and jazz and blues and whatever else gets thrown my way at a professional level. The music world and the music business of 2024 is so radically different than that of 1996 that I can’t even begin to anticipate what it will look like when I get out there. This is where I’ll write down what I find.

But first I have to get good again. I have to get better than good. I have to on stage and melt faces, even if it’s just an open mike night, even if it’s just a jam session or busking on the street. I got this. I’ve been ramping up slowly but now everything is in place to pick up the pace. I figure it will take about six months of diligent practice to be base-level good enough to melt faces.

The title of this diary comes from a tune by the great B.B. King. When I first committed to trying to play bass for a living in 1984 at age 20 I had a mentor named Sammy Blue, who told me to take this tune to heart, something I never forgot. I knew HOW to play the blues; Sammy taught me how to LIVE the blues. How to read a room, how to be in the public eye, how to put across that soul that is the beating bleeding heart of American music. I never got to meet B.B. but Sammy did bring me backstage to meet Willie Dixon, an icon of both bass playing and songwriting. (And that is a story I’ll tell later…) I never saw Sammy again after about 1986 or so. He eventually wound up working with Taj Mahal a lot. Forty years later, not a week goes by I don’t think about that man.

My musical situation improved gradually from 1984 to 1996, as did my playing ability, as did my range. As a kid in 1978 I bought a brand new Fender Precision bass that I still own. It is a fantastic instrument in a lot of ways, it has so much soul. In the late 1980s I added an acoustic upright bass to my kit, and a little after that a fretless electric bass. Both of those made me stand out from the other bass players on the scene, and the upright bass in particular became something I was known for.

1984 was something of a false start for me. I made my move too soon for real. In 1987 I came back a better player with a much different attitude and started encountering more success. In 1990 I played SXSW. In 1992 my band opened 10 shows in 14 days for two top acts of the day.¹ 1993 I started a band from scratch and by 1996 I was touring the East coast constantly with six-week trips out to Colorado and Wyoming to tour the ski towns. Besides these projects I also had a serious² long-running jazz quartet that played casual dates for good money, and I was in demand as a session player on the Americana scene, especially for my acoustic upright work.

And that’s where I want to get back to. I don’t know if I can do it. I am pretty sure I can recover my physical and technical playing ability with some months of hard work but I am not at all sure that a place in the music world still exists for me. If there is such a place, my feeling is that I won’t be able to evolve into it the way I did in the 1980s and 90s. I am going to have to arrive ready to melt faces, with multiple instruments to hand and multiple genres of music under my fingers and in my head. I have a feeling that I will fail if I make my move too soon.

This project may seem like a mid-life crisis or some such but it’s not. I heard Dave Holland shred free jazz live on stage a month ago. He’s 78 years old. Sting is touring with his “3.0” band, he reworked his hits for a stripped-down guitar/bass/drums power trio. Sting is 73. I’m not inventing an imaginary past, I’m not putting up a facade, I am out to work at a level that I still know and remember quite well. There is nothing imaginary about what I am setting out to do.

So that brings me back to here. I’ll talk about my instruments and how I re-assembled my arsenal of basses. I’ll talk about my practice regime and the songs I’m thinking about and why those songs are important. I’ll reach back in time for people and tunes and shows and I will project what I remember from then into my present and into my future.

Over time I’ll add recurring features about what I’m listening to and what I’m playing. I plan to post simple audio files and some images of sheet music and such, and I’ll write about what I’m working on and where I’m trying to get to, song by song and lick by lick.

I hope these essays will amuse you even if you’re not a musician. I’ll surely write about some technical aspects of playing the instruments but for me, playing has always been in the service of the music, and the music has always been in the service of the audience. That’s you.

So until next time— I never make my move too soon.

1  Indigo Girls and Matthew Sweet co-headlined a big tour that summer behind the IG album “Rites of Passage”. IG had one hell of a band for that tour.

2  our first call sax substitute when our regular sax player couldn’t make a show would later be musical director for Jimmy Buffett. She got the job because she was friends with one of the Neville Brothers. Another sub for us was a guitar player whose regular drummer in his own band was Jaimoe from The Allman Brothers. (That was a tough time in history for the Allman folk