Dance To The Music!

When Larry himself thinks of his bass work with Sly, only one thing comes to mind: “My mother, Dell Graham. I hadn’t listened to any bass players when I took up bass with her when I was about 15, and I went straight from playing with her to playing with Sly. I considered myself a guitar player—my heroes were Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, Chuck Berry, and B.B. King—and I always thought I’d go back to guitar. So my only real bass influence was the way my mother carried bass lines with her left-hand on the piano. A lot of things she played went into my ear and my heart, and influenced me later as a bass player.”

Though Larry rarely used the normal fingerstyle playing (which he calls “overhand”), there’s much more to his lines than straightforward thumb-slaps. For example, when Larry employed octaves on “Fun” (Ex. 3, from Life)—presaging a technique that would soon became a disco mainstay—he wasn’t “thumpin’ and pluckin’” per se; instead, he was using his thumb and finger to stroke the strings like the fingerstyle guitarist he once was. And when he played octaves on parts like the main verse line of “Are You Ready” (Ex. 4), he’d slide into both octave notes together, then maintain a bottom pulse while plucking syncopated finger-popped accents. “It’s like two lines coming into one,” says Larry. “That’s the kind of thing you have to do as a drummer to keep the bass drum going with the snare. Remember, I played drums before I played guitar.” Still, on the quick-tempo track “Underdog” (A Whole New Thing), one of the Family’s first singles, Larry showed just how dexterous he could be with that thumb. Larry’s busy line cruises through the lively verse changes (Ex. 5), in pointed contrast to the chorus’s long-held dribble-fingered tremolo notes.

“I Wanna Take You Higher” (from Stand!) has all the elements of a great Sly & the Family Stone song—high-energy rhythm, a recognizable riff, and vocal shout-outs from various band members—but it also encapsulates the quintessential elements of Larry’s style. After the intro riff—where Larry’s snarling fuzz tone gives apt voice to bar 2’s sneering flatted 5th—the line goes into a short-long pulse (Ex. 6a). But first, the rhythm gets weird, as anyone who’s ever tried to work this line out knows. The secret’s in bar 3’s skipped beat, and knowing where to expect the vocals to come in—on the very next downbeat. How did the band come up with that? “Sometimes when you play live, things happen,” Larry laughs. After the chorus, when most of the band drops out to sing “Boom-shaka-laka-laka,” Larry reduces the short-long pulse to a one-string, ghost-filled bounce (Ex. 6b) that perfectly matches Greg Errico’s up-down drumming. Listen closely and you’ll hear multiple bass tracks in the recording, including the chorus’s fuzz-bass swoops up to the b7. Ex. 6c shows the longer album version’s offbeat bass solo—one of the few things Larry says he played fingerstyle—which comes in around 4:17 over a rocking bed of fuzz bass.

What does Larry think when he listens to these albums now? “They sound just like yesterday to me. We try to keep this music alive, too. It’s a part of me, and I love them just as much now as I did then.”