Bassist Scott Thunes first started with Frank Zappa’s band when he was 21 years old.
The idiosyncratic musician has gone from Zappa to the classroom, even though he says “I can’t write a bass line to save my life.”
I was surprised, intrigued, and thrilled to encounter some rather audacious bass playing at an outdoor school benefit show I played this past fall in Lagunitas, California. I was nowhere near the stage (instead, I was waiting in line for my benefit show compensation—a free meal), but I could still hear the emergence of busy, angular lines and unusual chords rumbling across the hillside venue. When I started setting up for my band’s set and the earlier band was packing up, I spotted the responsible bassist, and it all made sense.
It was Scott Thunes, the low-end raconteur who started playing with Frank Zappa at age 21. He spent the better part of the ’80s in Zappa’s band, appearing on numerous live albums and a couple of studio recordings, including the bandleader’s 1982 Top 40 single, “Valley Girl.” His career resume includes stints with Steve Vai, Mike Keneally, the Waterboys, the Mother Hips, and Fear, among others.
In recent years, Thunes (pronounced “too-ness”) has toured with the re-formed Zappa Band, Banned from Utopia, which plays a few times a year at the venerable Los Angeles venue the Baked Potato. Catch one of these shows and you’ll see how Scott’s tremendous facility on his instrument and unusual creative approach add a level of complexity to Zappa’s famously challenging music.
“I can’t write a bass line to save my life,” he claims, striking a tone that seems less like a reluctant confession and more like a bold stylistic declaration. “For 99 percent of bass players, the job is to be the intermediary between the drums and the guitar—to be both harmonic and rhythmic. And a lot of bass parts have that really great element. That’s wonderful, but people who know my playing don’t hire me to do that,” he says.
“I’m not big on laying down a bass part and then just sitting on it. I’m not a groove monster, and I never have been. That’s not why Frank hired me. I need to have space to express myself, and unfortunately that makes me fall very drastically into the overplaying bass player type. I have absolutely no problem with that because Frank didn’t have a problem with that.”
Thunes describes his “mindful overplaying” as something he’s not always been happy with. “I’ve been fired from more bands than I’ve been hired by,” he deadpans, before allowing a slight, sly grin.
Then there’s the Ramones. Thunes is a teaching artist for the rock band program at Marin School of the Arts at Novato High School in Novato, California. On the day we spoke, his six teenage bands performed medleys of the pioneering American punk band’s material as part of a final exam.
“I was really not expecting them to do well with the Ramones,” he reveals, “especially the more advanced kids, who think the Ramones are too simple. But they pulled it off. I’m very happy about it. The energy was really high, the percentage of downstrokes was up at around 85 or 90 percent, and they got tired—they’re supposed to. It was a great experience for me today, to have my kids not piss all over one of the greatest bands of all time.”
As for his own approach to playing music. Scott says he doesn’t really think of himself as a bass player. “I think of myself as Scott Thunes, who has chosen the bass as the area in which I express myself,” he says. “Now, I may not be able to write a melody or a bass line, but I can find my way through the intricacies of a harmonic system and ply my trade. That’s really all I wanna do. I just want to find a space to put my stuff in.”
For a more in-depth perspective on Scott Thunes, check out two books by Thomas Wictor: In Cold Sweat: Interviews with Really Scary Musicians and Ghosts and Ballyhoo: Memoirs of a Failed L.A. Music Journalist.
Left to right: Joe Lally. Brandan Canty, and Anthony Pirog
The bassist, now with the Messthetics, has had a long learning journey. Thanks to the online-lesson boom, you can study directly from Lally.
Although it’s been years since the beginning of the pandemic, many monumental things can still be explained in a single phrase: It all started because of Covid. One of those is that you can take online bass lessons from Joe Lally, bassist and co-founder of Fugazi, the unyieldingly indie post-hardcore band that raged out of Washington, DC’s ever-vibrant punk scene. From 1987 to 2003, over the band’s six studio albums, assorted EPs, and hundreds of live shows, Lally demonstrated his utter mastery of intense, full-throttle bass playing and writing.
So you might be surprised to learn that such an accomplished low-ender didn’t always feel confident about his own musical knowledge. “I spent all that time in Fugazi not formally being able to articulate about music very well with the other people in the band,” Joe says. “It was very frustrating at times. There were times I wanted to leave the band because it felt like I couldn’t even talk about what I wanted to do.”
It was only after Fugazi went on indefinite hiatus that, realizing he wanted to keep making music, Joe decided to get some education. “I took a few lessons at Flea’s school in L.A., the Silverlake Conservatory. I studied with Tree, the dean of the school, who showed me some things about songwriting on piano. I was looking at it like I was getting piano lessons, but really he was showing me the sound of major, the sound of minor, and the sound of the dominant 7 chord. Those three chords are the basic beginnings of learning music theory.”
As Joe learned it, the major sound was “Here, There, and Everywhere" by the Beatles, the minor was Santana’s “Evil Ways,” and the dominant 7 was “I Feel Good” by James Brown. “I learned to play those chord changes on piano, and came to understand more about songs and completing my own song ideas.”
Joe mainly learned by asking questions. “To a degree, that’s what I want people to get from the lessons I give,” he continues. “There’s so much you can go into theory-wise, but you don’t really need to to be able to write music, play music, and figure out other people’s music.”
Joe went on to write and release three solo albums, as well as two with Ataxia, his project with Red Hot Chili Pepper guitarists John Frusciante and Josh Klinghoffer. In 2016, he formed instrumental jazz-punk fusion trio the Messthetics with Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty and genre-spanning guitar virtuoso Anthony Pirog. They’ve since toured heavily and released three full lengths. He also joined Ian Mackaye—Fugazi’s and the Evens’s singer-guitarist—along with Evens drummer Amy Farina to form Coriky.
Lally’s humble online flyer.
“I foolishly never picked up a book because I thought it would ruin what I did know. When I told a friend I was teaching theory, he asked, ‘Has it ruined your playing yet?’”
When off the road, Joe worked different jobs in DC’s independent music scene to pay the bills. But when the pandemic lockdown came, he decided to start giving online lessons. He made flyers and posted them on social media.
“I’m not teaching formal theory, which I think is weird and abstract and doesn’t show people everything,” says Joe. “It takes years of learning formally to see how everything is connected to see how this thing is part of that other thing we learned years ago. Most of my students are adults who have been playing but now want to know more about what they’ve been doing.”
But music theory is something we all operate within, says Joe, whether we’re knowledgeable about it or not. “We are engaged in theory. We just may not know it. When you’re playing or writing a song, you might think ‘that note sounds right’ or ‘that note sounds wrong.’ It's because we are relating it to something in theory that we’ve picked up from all the music we’ve listened to.”
Joe recognizes that some people are apprehensive about learning music theory, and he admits that when he was in Fugazi, he was, too. “I foolishly never picked up a book because I thought it would ruin what I did know. When I told a friend I was teaching theory, he asked, ‘Has it ruined your playing yet?’
“But formal study should use your thinking mind, and when you play, you’re outside of thinking. Creativity is outside of thought. You hear about jazz players who practice scales over and over, and what they’re really practicing is the sounds of these things that they want to hear. But when they play, they let go of all of that. So I realized my playing is never going to change. I’m always going to write the way I wrote.”
To immerse yourself in Joe’s creative world, check out the Messthetics’s 2024 album, The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, which adds saxophonist Lewis to the trio, bringing together Fugazi’s powerful rhythm section with two players from the creative improv world.
To inquire about bass lessons with Joe Lally, contact him on Instagram at @joelally898.
Within this low E lies a world of expression.
As bass players, let’s slow down for a moment and think about what makes every note so special.
As bass players, we spend most of our time building lines and phrases one note at a time, each one followed by the next—or by strategically placed silence. The notes we play don’t live in a vacuum, though; they define the shifting harmony in the context of the other instruments, establish the rhythmic pulse with the drummer, and work together with other notes to create the emotional heft and physical feel of the music.
Breaking things down is often a useful thought exercise, whether it’s further subdividing the beat to better understand the groove, or analyzing how a classic walking bass part follows a chord progression. So let’s break it all the way down. Let’s consider a single note.
We don’t often think of a note on its own. Instead, we play songs and practice scales and phrases; we create bass lines and grooves and countermelodies. All of these are about how multiple notes fit together to form a musical statement. So what about a single note? What is it, really? Here are a few ways of looking at it.
A note is an indivisible sonic morsel, an audible event that occurs at a specific point in time.
A note is a molecule of music, the smallest fundamental unit that can take part in the chemical reaction that is musical creation and performance. It’s made up of such atomic elements as pitch, timbre, duration, and dynamic shape. Its precise placement in time is an essential attribute.
A note is a vibration, set off by fingers striking strings, or a pick stroke, thumb thump, or finger pluck. Multiplied by infinite dynamic and expressive variations, these different approaches to initiating vibration comprise a palette of artistic choices used to paint a musical moment. That moment becomes more meaningful in the context of the other events occuring in that particular slice of time—the vertical view—as well as what comes before and after—the horizontal view.
“Fortunately, our brains are well equipped for both processing tremendous amounts of data and using it to make countless, practically instantaneous decisions.”
The attack is just the beginning; a note also has a middle and an end. The shape of the note over time is the middle—short or long, loud or soft, perhaps pitch bend or vibrato. And where you place the end of the note can also be a crucial groove maneuver. Does the note sustain and eventually fade? Is it right up against the next note in a connected phrase? Do you stop it right when the snare drum hits on 2 and 4, creating an audible yet transient void that helps unify the bass and drum rhythms?
For each note we play, we make a range of decisions: Where to start and when to stop it, what pitch and in which register, which scale degree or chord tone of the currently happening harmony, where we’re coming from and where we’re going. Then there’s where on the instrument we attack the strings and how that affects the tone, from an articulate bridge sound, to a rounder, tubbier tone moving toward the neck.
The multitude of choices embodied in each note all affect what’s going on in the larger musical environment. Fortunately, our brains are well equipped for both processing tremendous amounts of data and using it to make countless, practically instantaneous decisions. We may not think about one note at a time; we might, for example, think about the dynamic shape of a phrase rather than each individual note. But behind the scenes, our brain is doing it all at both the macro and micro level.
That’s one reason playing music is such a good brain workout. Years of practice, knowledge, and experience are coded into our synapses, along with motor memory, a refined and sensitive ear, and an understanding of harmony.
And that’s why the most important ingredient in creating and expressing a note is you. You’re the one making those split-second choices about which pitch to play at each instant, and with what kind of attack, dynamics, and feel. Your entire life bears on these choices, from all the music that has influenced you, to how you’ve chosen to practice, to your relationship with the material you’re playing today. Even your personality or how you feel are a part of it. Are you feeling solid and confident or timid and tentative? Are you generous and supportive of others onstage and off? Do you have something to prove? There are many factors you could consider. Most of them are specific to you.
You get to decide how the music comes through you. You are the one choosing the properties of each musical molecule in the chemical compound. It is you and your interactions with your musical partners that catalyze these reactions to create something new, unique, and beautiful. And that is something worth taking note of.