CREEM SHOWCASE

CREEM SHOWCASE

GOODNESS KNOWS BILLY SHEEHAN

by

Dan Hedges

He’s the Baryshnikov of the bass. The da Vinci of da bottom end. As the nuclear-strength lower register of David Lee Roth’s thrills-n-spilis kamikazi, bassist Billy Sheehan cops equally from Bach, Boeing, Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton. The proverbial pickless wonder, he’s got the fastest fingers in the neighborhood. Maybe the entire Universe.

“I avoid the word ‘progressive,’” Sheehan says, revving up for a gig in Portland, Oregon. “Me and Steve Vai play a lot of notes, and both come from the same background. Bowie, Hendrix, Zappa. Even Dave is into all that. But it’s the humor of Zappa for him, and that’s the glue that holds it together for all of us: the humor factor. It gets to point of ridiculousness sometimes when you’re playing so many notes. You have to take it as a joke, otherwise you’ll go over the heads of most of the people watching. I mean, how can you be serious in a 20,000 seat hockey arena?”

Mind you, this is a guy who was all but unknown 12 months ago. Years of dues-paying in East Coast cover bands (“21 gigs in a row, up to five sets a night”) and a decade-long haul with Talas might have been relieved by brief stints with the more visible UFO and Michael Schenker. But it’s only since hooking up with Roth, guitarist Vai, and drummer Gregg Bissonette for Eat ’Em And Smile that Sheehan’s finally crept out of the shadows.

And he’s no Neanderthal. No slouch. There’s that Bach connection, particularly in his epic soloing. “It seems cliche nowadays to mention classical influences,” he says. “But I remember listening to Bach’s well-tempered clavier and various keyboard pieces, picking off the easier lines, and then the more intermediate lines. With Bach, you have six things going on at once, and they all work together. Like a machine. That relates to playing bass in a band. Play all over the place, as long as it fits with what everyone else is doing. So Bach was a real big influence on me.”

So was Tim Bogert from the old Vanilla Fudge. To this day, Sheehan says, “I don’t know of an album where the bass flies around and yet works so well in the context of the tunes as on the first Vanilla Fudge album. When I heard him, I knew I’d have to be a finger player bedause there were things he did that I couldn’t get with a pick.”

Many drummers pale at working with adventurous bassists, but Sheehan found that Gregg Bissonette had no problem. But then, he’s always made it a point to zero in on the drummer, “learn his moves before I learn anything else.

I sat down with Gregg without the rest of the band, and we worked it out.”

He found that their musical heritages were similar. “My first few bands were horn bands, that Chicago/Blood, Sweat & Tears sound. The bass players in those bands were very busy. They were jazz influenced, and knew how to play within the context of a song. Gregg also played with a lot of horns early on, and I learned as much of his drum vocabulary as I could in order to copy it on bass. When he does a tom-tom fill, I’ll play those same beats melodically on bass. But I mostly work with the bass drum, the bass and snare figure.”

And once you ve got it down, you can play rings around it.

“Exactly. But I’m moving with the drums, not cluttering things up. I’ve been working on a three-piece format for ages, never had to deal with rhythm guitarists or keyboard players. Had to do all those parts myself. I learned to weave in and out of the lead guitar without getting in the way, while keeping it in the context of the song. It’s a fine balance, but I can weave between Steve and Gregg, have plenty of room to play and still be in the pocket.”

Sheehan got his start during the ’60s as a guitar player, “but I always felt the bass was bigger and heavier and cooler-looking. Guitar amps were dinky little things, but a bass amp needed three guys to carry it in. Plus, the guy from around the corner in Buffalo had a band. When they practiced, all you could hear from my house was the bass. I keyed in on that. Fuck the guitar, I want to play bass.”

After honing his four-string chops for years, however, he went back to guitar for a spell to better understand the art of playing lead and how to slip around it on bass. ‘‘People use the term ‘lead bass,’ but it’s a mistake because that equates it with lead guitar. You’re pulling it out of the context of a band. It may happen with me occasionally—I may come out front, but I don’t mean it to be anything other than a band instrument. If my playing pops out, I think it’s only because it’s unusual in rock.”

Many younger bassists, he’s noticed, ‘‘can solo their asses off,” but don’t know how to play in a band, play with other musicians. “People get isolated. They get a drum machine and practice alone, but it doesn’t do any good unless they’re playing solo by themselves.”

Equipment-wise, the source of Sheehan’s cutting sound is the Pearce pre-amp. “Pearce is a Buffalo company, and I’ve been using their stuff for about five years,” he explains. “It’s solid state, the best sound-shaping stuff I’ve found, and I’ve literally been through everything on the market. I wanted to imitate what I used to do with my old Ampeg SVTs, but in solid state so I wouldn’t have to change tubes and speakers every few months.”

Effects-wise, he uses Eventide Harmonizers, “along with some Yamaha SPX-90s, which I think is just about the best all-around effects device on the market now. In the Pearce pre-amp, there’s a special distortion built in which mimics tube distortion perfectly. It doesn’t change either, whereas with a tube amp the distortion can change from night to night and even song to song.”

He uses three at once, one in stereo with screaming distortion, one that’s clean without a lot of low end, and one with super-deep low end. “That way, you can play a lot of notes and articulate them, but never lose your bottom. I use Yamaha TC-2002 power amps, six of them, but they’re not all up full blast. I get my sound cl,eaner that way, rather than running everything super-hot. My speakers are all JBLs.”

In instruments, his prized bass is the heavily-modified Fender he calls “My Wife” that’s been with him on every one of the over 3500 gigs he’s played over the years. “It used to be a sunburst Precision, but it’s worn right down to the bare wood. I’ve replaced everything except the body, the pickguard, and the ground wire. It has a 1968 Telecaster bass neck, Bad Ass bridge, Hipshot D-tuner on the low E string to knock it down to a D note, and two DiMarzio pickups.”

It has no active electronics, though Sheehan’s installed individual volume and tone controls for each pickup, with a separate output for each that goes to separate amps. The strings? Rotosounds.

Lest that bass eventually fall victim to foul play, he’s in the process of breaking in what he calls “My Mistress” for road work. “It’s a Yamaha, made for me by the company. It has the same pickup configuration, but enhances the strong points of my Fender and eliminates the weak ones. I do vibrato by pushing the back of the neck. The Fender’s bolton neck tends to shift, whereas the Yamaha has a onepiece neck through the body so it can’t. The radius of the frets is flatter on the Yamaha, because it makes the strings easier to bend. And I bend a lot, so they go out of tune on the Fender because of that retainer on the headstock to hold the G and the D string down. The Yamaha’s headstock is angled back, so it doesn’t need it.”

In the end, though, it’s down to the playing. “Bass is one of the easiest instruments in the world to just get by on,” Billy Sheehan says, “but it’s one of the hardest instruments to get ahead on. So few people have done it that you’re blazing a trail by yourself. With guitars, you’ve got Hendrix and Clapton and every band in the world with a decent guitarist to cop from. Most bass players are background people. There aren’t a lot of examples being set to follow. But then, that’s why I like it the bass. It’s wide-open and anything goes.”