Count Zero : Articles : He's got The Urge (Bass Player July/Aug 1991)

“Actually, I’ve got lots of urges,” says Hamm, “although, I’ve managed to keep some of them under control.” The title of his new album comes from one of the songs, a crunching rocker, where Stu sings: “That’s why I’ve got the Urge/ To live today, like there’s no tomorrow/ You can’t ignore the urge/ So follow the voice that you feel inside your heart.” (Stu sings? More on that later.)

Is Hamm hearing voices? Well, no – but something to make a different kind of disc this time. “Now that I’ve gotten people’s attention,” he says, “I thought I’d shake things up a bit. I didn’t want to do another all-instrumental album like Kings of Sleep; that would be just more of the same. I wanted to feature myself in some new ways, and I wanted to do something that really rocked.” Rock it does, with smoking guitar solos by Eric Johnson and Shotgun Messiah’s Harry K. Cody and killer drums courtesy of Jonathan Mover, Steve Smith, and Motley Crew’s Tommy Lee. (Tommy Lee? More on that later.)

Hamm, 31, recently scored an unprecedented double win for Rock and Jazz Bass in Guitar Player’s 1990 Readers Poll. On The Urge, he flashes the full range of his award-winning style, from a live recording of his two-handed solo extravaganza to piercing lead-bass lines and multi-tracked Kubicki orchestras. Much of the time, though, Stu just nails the groove. “That’s what it’s all about,” he emphasizes. “There were places on the album where I thought I should do lots of different bass parts. But the more I worked on some of those songs, I realized I just needed to play the groove. More than anything else, I wanted this album to have a feel.”

The Urge begins with “Welcome to my world,” a strange aural collage. How did you put that together?

Well, it was one of those days in the studio when nothing was working. We recorded the album at Rumbo Recorders [in Canoga Park, California], which is the Captain & Tennille studio. They have a large room there, and we were trying to get some natural reverb effects, with my Hartke speakers set up around the room and miked. The studio also has a great old Ampeg B-15, and we had put that in a long hallway, facing a bathroom, with a mike in the shower stall.

What we were trying to do wasn’t happening, so I said, “Hey, let’s be creative.” I had this sound in my Yamaha SY77 that sounded like the Hitler Youth marching; we fed that through everything, and then we started screaming into mikes and mixing in the samples of industrial noise. Finally I added the ‘demon bass.’

Demon bass?

That’s my red Kubicki, which is usually tuned [low to high] B-E-A-D to approximate the range of a 5-string. When we were messing around, I put four B strings on it and tuned them so they were flapping. It makes the whole bottom shake. Welcome to My World is just a little intro piece to set the tone – although there are some people who would say it’s a fair representation of the inside of my brain [laughs].

You have six Kubicki Factor basses. Did you use them all on this album?

Yes. In addition to the red one, I played the blue one with the black front; the black Raider bass, which has the logo of my favorite football team, the Los Angeles Raiders, the yellow fretless [see cover]; and the piccolo bass, which is tuned [low to high[ E, A, D, G but an octave higher. That’s a standard Kubicki with piccolo strings .020 to .050, but they’re building me another one that will have a 27” scale. I also used a new bass, the white one, which has a P-bass pickup between the two Kubicki pickups [see]. With the active electronics, there are about 50 different tones I can get out of it. I used that bass a lot to get deeper sounds.

Thanks to Micajah Ryan, my co-producer and engineer, al the bass-parts realyl sound good on this album. Micajah has worked with bands like Guns N’ Roses and Megadeth, and this experience really helped. Sonically, this album is the closest to what I hear in my head.

Did you do any engineering yourself?

Are you kidding? I’m such an untechnical guy – they wouldn’t let me do anything. At one point, we had a cassette mix of a tune on a Walkman, and I managed to mess it up by hitting RECORD twice while I was rewinding it.

When I was recording my parts, I’d be sitting there on my stool, with my cigarettes here and my glass of water there, with a wire into my headphones and a line into the tuner and the DI box. Within ten minutes I’d be hopelessly wrapped up in cords. They’d have to come in and extract me from the chair [laughs].

Aside from the bass with the Precision pickup, have you modified your Kubickis in any way?

I’ve done a few little things, like putting on pickguards. When I am playing pops, I’ve found there’s a little too much distance between the strings and the body. If I rest my finger on the body, a lot of it gets underneath the string – all the way up to the first knuckle. So I added the pickguard, which closes the gap by just a fraction of an inch. Now, when I rest my finger on the pickguard, I’ve got just the right amount of finger under the string.

I also have my necks shaved down a bit, and I have most of the finish removed. There has to be a little finish to keep the wood from fraying, but I like the feel of the natural wood. And I put a little piece of Velcro on the front of the body. I loop that around the cord, and it keeps me from yanking the cord out when I step on it in the middle of a show. As I inevitably do [laughs].

Are you still using a standard medium-light set of GHS Boomers, .045 to .105?

Yes, I haven’t found any better strings. For me, the strings are about 75% of the sound, and I change them before every set. I want to get a bright, harpsichord kind of sound, and when you sweat as much as I do onstage, the tone is dead after half an hour of serious playing. Because my strings are always bright and fresh, I’ve been able to avoid using any outboard gear.

You get a strong lead-bass sound on the instrumental called “The Hammer.” How did you do that without effects?

I wanted to use the bass as a lead instrument without putting distortion on my piccolo bass and playing fake guitar. To get a true, natural sound, Micajah and I took an old Leslie cabinet, put it in the big room, and pumped the bass through it until it started to distort. We recorded it with mikes all the way around the room, and I am really happy with the way it turned out.

Did you use amp miking on other tunes?

Overall, it was about 80% DI [direct input], with a little of the amp sound for thickening. I like the straight direct sound. When we did use the amps and mikes, it was to get natural reverberation, I’ve never liked effects, and my live setup is still very simple [see signal chain]. The sound you get is in your fingers and the bass. I try to use gear that gives me a true reproduction of that sound, without having to mess with a rackfull of parametric EQs that are always going down. I’ve always loved the fact that when we get to soundcheck, we just set up my speakers, put up the amp, and plug in the bass. That’s it.

I wasn’t miked at all when I toured with Joe; it was just direct signal to the board. I’ve heard varying reports on how well the bass came through. It can be frustrating to play your ass off, and then get offstage and hear, “Well, it looked like you sounded good” [laughs].

Which bass do you use for the solo on “The Hammer”?

The blue one, [serial] number 45 – my baby. It’s the best. I used the white bass for most of the groove parts; on this one I wanted to get a killer sound, so I played it with my thumb and then doubled it with a pick. I was going to have a guitar player do that, but I couldn’t get a guitarist to play it right. For some reason, guitar players are unable to play eighth-notes without going doon-doon-DAT-doon-doon-doon-DAT-doon. I just wanted to hear a straight doon-doon-doon-doon-doon-doon-doon-doon, so I did it myself.

On “Who Do You Want Me to Be,” you sing: “Who do you want me to be today/That’s a game I just can’t play.” Is that a personal statement about your role as an artist?

Absolutely. Some people may not buy what I’m doing here; they expect me to keep putting out Bach tunes and complicated two-handed riffs. That’s what they want me to be. In the last verse, I’m answering those expectations: “I’m sure you all mean well/Have you heard about the road to hell/We’ve all got our own lives to lead/And it’s on different bread I feed.” I have to be who I want to be.

Which includes being a vocalist?

I’ve sung throughout my whole career, actually, and I enjoy singing. It’s another way of getting involved with the music. My problem has always been coming up with lyrics. I read a lot, and I admire good writing. I hate the overtness of, “Hey, baby, I love you, let’s get in my car and buy some burgers,” so I tried to come up with something else.

So you sang during your formative years?

Absolutely. Where were you when I was in Bally’s Park Place in Atlantic City, wearing a tuxedo and singing “Blinded by Silence” [laughs]? Singing in the studio was new, and it frightened me at first. That’s where Micajah’s experience really helped. It takes a while – I mean, you hear your voice on the answering machine and it doesn’t sound like you. I just had to sing for a while until I became more confident.

Were you influenced by Joe Satriani’s decision to sing?

When Joe started singing, a lot of writers criticized his lyrics and his voice – but when we played in front of 8,000 people and he did a vocal, people immediately latched into it. Consequently, more people were exposed to his music; they went back and listened to Not of This Earth and Surfing with the Alien [both on Relativity]. I was impressed by that, so I came up with some songs I enjoyed singing, songs with lyrics that meant something to me.

The title tune reminds me of a Joe Walsh song. Your vocal has this tongue-in-cheek quality, and there’s a thunderous drum part…

…which was played by Tommy Lee.

How did you meet Tommy?

Jonathan Mover introduced us. We played at a big rock festival in Alpine Valley [Wisconsin], and one of the bands was Motley Crϋe. Jonathan said: “You’ve got to see them play; they’re great.” Like a jerk I had this preconceived notion: “Oh, those guys can’t be any good. They’re a bunch of rock bozos.” But they were great. They really played together as a band.

Tommy Lee besides being one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, turned out to be a big fan of Joe’s music. He had also heard Kings of Sleep, and he was really excited when I invited him to play on the new album. It just goes to show that you shouldn’t get locked into preconceptions, because Tommy has one of the best feels of any drummer I’ve played with. I hope a lot of people who have prejudged this guy, like I did, will take the time to listen to him. He’s an exceptional musician.

“If You’re Scared, Stay Home” is kind of a funk/rap concept piece. Did living in LA inspire you to write that tune?

That’s certainly part of it. Sometimes, you’re trying to get on a freeway, and there’s someone with a Tennessee license plate, who’s too scared to merge with the traffic, and it starts a big traffic jam. So the message is, “If you’re scared, stay home.” I think it could become the new theme song for Los Angeles.

Musically, I wanted to do a heavy groove, and the drum parts Steve Smith came up with were awesome. For the samples, we just taped the news for a couple of days; fortunately there were the usual number of gang killings and traffic jams. We cut out all the best pieces, put them on a ¼” tape, and then cycled them around, so we had two tapes going at the same time. We brought up the faders to bring out certain lines, and then we had everyone who played on the album, yell “If you’re scared, stay home” and put that all together.

You play a slap groove, and then there’s a section with several basses going in and out.

There are a lot of bass parts. The intro is fretless basses panned up from side to side. The choruses were all doubled on the white bass, and in the middle there’s some triple panning. The little swing lines were done with the blue bass and the piccolo bass. On the solo, we tried to get as many different sounds as we could, some of them doubled with the piccolo. There’s a plethora of bass sounds in that little 16-bar solo it ought to be fun trying to reproduce that live [laughs].

On the ballad, “Our Dreams,” you play harmonic chords that sound unusually big. How did you record those?

I doubled all the harmonics with the regular bass and the piccolo bass, which turned out to be ridiculously hard. The harmonics at the 4^th and the 5^th frets were out of tune, so I had to tune for each harmonic chord. We would go through the song, and I’d play just one chord, and then I’d retune and do it all over again.

At the end of the verses, there’s what we called the ‘whipping bass choir’. I pushed the string against the fret and wiggled it to make a whining sound – I think the first person I saw do that was Jonas Hellborg – and I recorded it on four tracks, with the G moving down to F#. After all the bass parts were done, we flew to Austin and Eric Johnson out on the guitar. I met Eric the first time I played in Austin with Joe. Later on, he opened for us; it was great to sit on stage every night and listen to him play.

Eric returns on “Lone Star.”

I wrote that song with him in mind, Eric is probably my favorite guitar player right now; he’s got such a feel. On the demo, I played the melody on my piccolo bass through a distortion pedal; it sounded dreadful. I sent that to Eric, and when he recorded it, the melody just sang. And the solo he played still gives me shivers.

“Lone Star” has a great live sound, but we actually recorded all three parts at different times, with the drums going down last. In fact, that’s how I did the whole album: backwards. On my other albums, I recorded a scratch bass with the drummer and the click track. Then if there were places where the drums rushed or lagged, everything had to follow that. This time, I programmed my sequencer with all the drum parts I wanted, and then I did the real bass parts along with that. I felt that if I could get it groove with quantized computer drums, get it to feel the way I wanted it to feel, then I could just have the drummer accent the groove. It worked well, and I think we got a lot more of my feel on the album.

Are you comfortable working with a sequencer?

I like it. Some people don’t realize that you can play on top of the beat, behind the beat, whatever you want. Knowing that the drums were perfect, I could really get it to groove. And it was no problem for a great drummer like Jonathan or Steve or Tommy to hook up with the click track afterwards. As a result, the grooves were truer to what I was trying to achieve.

The solo piece has an interesting title: “Quahogs Anyone? (119, 120, Whatever It Takes).” If I’m not mistaken, a quahog is a…

Clam. Draw your own conclusions [laughs]. That’s a live recording from Santa Barbara concert on my last swing with Joe. The subtitle – “119, 120, Whatever It Takes” – refers to the number of times I played it last year.

That’s the real thing; there was no fixing at all. We recorded three nights, and the idea was to go into the studio and take one part from one version and one part from another and make it “perfect”. But one night we were listening to the [live Weather Report] 8:30 CD. Jaco’s solo, “Slang,” is poorly recorded, and you can hear all these crackling chords – but it’s got something. So Micajah and I decided to do it without the net, so to speak. It was recorded on DAT through the board, and the tape sounded kind of thin, so we fed that into all my speakers, to try to get close to my onstage sound. It’s a little rough – but it came out totally clean, people would know it wasn’t me.

“Quahogs” is a kind of a greatest-hits medley. What are the different sections?

The opening is “Surely the best”, a piece from Kings of Sleep that was written for my wife, Shirley Best. A little pun there. It starts with harmonics, and I do a sliding that’s similar to “Flow My Tears” from the first album: outlining a chord on the bottom – usually root, fifth, ninth – and tapping upper-structure triads above that. Then I bang the bass and switch into the Peanuts thing [“Linus and Lucy”]. This is, I hope, the last time I’ll play that for a while. I’m going to do my best to put it on the shelf for a couple of years. I enjoy playing it, and it was one of the first two-handed, contrapuntal things I learned – but it’s time to give it a rest. After that, I modulate up and do some riffing in E before going into the groove from “Count Zero” [Kings of Sleep], which is a fast, double-time rake. On that one, there are a couple of places where my fingers got caught under the strings [laughs].

That’s how we know it’s a real human being playing. It’s important to have those things.

I agree totally. After I finish with “Count Zero,” I do the tapping from the intro to “Sexually Active” before the big polka finale: “Country Music (A Night in Hell)” [both tunes from Radio Free Albemuth]. I love getting up there and playing that in front of people, and I’m glad to finally have that on a record. Also, by including it, I took some pressure of myself. Without it, I might have felt compelled to put a break with some really fast tapping into one of the songs – which I didn’t want to.

I’m a bass player, I’m a songwriter, I’m an arranger – it’s all music. Music doesn’t have to be just fast technique. I hope people will get the feel from this album and enjoy it.

You seem to emphasize that point by putting “The Urge” right after the solo piece.

Right. It’s funny – that’s the title track of the album, and it was the least work. It’s just bass, drums, guitar, and vocal. Harry Cody plays a burnin’ blues/rock solo; it’s great. We had to egg him on, I think he expected something more along the lines of Kings of Sleep, where he worked our all his parts in advance. I had to keep saying, “No, no, just play a rock and roll solo.”

Some of the players we tried out for the album didn’t understand what we were trying to do. They knew I had played with Steve and Joe, so they came in and played all these squeals and fast runs; they didn’t realize that this wasn’t a “show off your chops” record, but a “cook” record.

“As Children,” the last song, features your two brothers.

I was fortunate to come from a musical family. My father, Charles Hamm, is a famous musicologist who heard the music department at Dartmouth College, my mother is a voice teacher and opera singer. I’m the youngest of three brothers. Bruce, the oldest, was one of my idols; he had an electric guitar and listened to Miles Davis and Pink Floyd when I was a geek into [trumpeter/big-band leader] Maynard Ferguson. My other brother, Chris, was the scholarly type, and he enjoyed madrigals and that kind of singing.

“As Children” is a personal song; it’s about me and my brothers playing baseball in our backyard in Champaign, Illinois – we lived there before my dad got the job at Dartmouth and we moved to Vermont. Chris is now teaching English in Taiwan, so I had him sing a scale into a DAT; we put that in the sampler and made a choir. Bruce is one of the best American players of Indian instruments; he teaches at Ali Akbar Khan’s school of Indian music in San Rafael [California]. He came down to the studio and played the sared, which is like a fretless sitar. It has a metal fretboard, and you play it with your fingernails. The sared has a wistful nostalgic kind of sound, and that’s what I wanted on that piece. I got the lead-bass sound with the raider bass and the Ampeg B-15, the one we put out in the hall-way for natural reverb. We also recorded a bunch of kids running around in the studio, and you hear that at the end – this little sound of kids’ voices in the background. Even though the album is pretty aggressive, I wanted to end in with something that was a little more subtle.

Now that the album’s done, are you going to tour with your own band?

Absolutely. When I was writing the songs, I was thinking about what would be good to play live. My other records had all this incredibly hard stuff; I’d get up there and try to play it and think, “Why did I write this?” I don’t know who’s going to be in my band yet, but we’ll hop in the van, start off in the little clubs, and work it up from there.

The ride with Joe was great. The first time we played L.A., it was at the Palomino, which is a cowboy bar; on the last tour, we were at Irvine Meadows in front of 10,000 people. I’d love to have something like that happen with my own career. Even if it doesn’t, it will still be fun to get out there and play and see what happens.

Do you still want to focus exclusively on your solo career, or will you still do some gigs as a super-sideman?

I want it all! I want to play my music, but I would love to work with Miles Davis or Elton John or Hall & Oates or Whitesnake. Anything. I love different kinds of music, and I would hate to be categorized as a one-dimensional player. One of the dangers of playing the “Moonlight Sonata” on bass is that people hear it and think, “Well, we can’t hire that guy for our record – we need a groove.” That’s why I made The Urge.

Count Zero : Articles : He's got The Urge (Bass Player July/Aug 1991)