Learn To Play The Commodores’ “Brick House”
| March, 2008
When celebrating the pleasing nature of a particularly curvaceous physique through song—especially when the lyrical focus is the alteration of a profane 20th-century slang metaphor about a sturdily constructed privy—it only makes sense to have a bass line that is, like the subject, built like an Amazon.
That’s precisely what Commodores bassist Ronald LaPread achieved with his vigorous part on 1977’s “Brick House.” Ex. 1 shows the song’s chorus passage, as it appears in the introductory vamp. LaPread constructs a robust two-bar ostinato that is, at the beginning of the first bar, like many archetypal funk bass parts, “on the one.” Then, the syncopated motif in the bar’s latter half leads into the second part of the phrase, which, true to form, ain’t holdin’ nothin’ back. Together, this juxtaposition of a stacked-and-that’s-a-fact first bar and the mighty, mighty second bar produces a swinging feel, perhaps evocative of the entrancing harmonic motion of a pronounced hip-swinging gait. Beat four of these even bars is left open to variation; in bar 4 it’s a suggestive slide up the G string. LaPread’s careful attention to note length—Ex. 1’s staccatos—is carried over to the tenutos and clipped 16th-notes in the verse part, demonstrated in Ex. 2. There, the rhythmic tension finds partial release with the fills at the end of bars 2 and 4. Ex. 3 shows LaPread’s line on the bridge, where his staccato octaves and 16th-note pull-off figures serve to complement the lyric, as they too shake-it-down-a-shake-it-down-down.
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