Together with his younger brother, drummer Carlton “Carly” Barrett, Fams created and established much of the hypnotic pulse and infectious vibe that characterizes reggae rhythms.
It’s hard to think of any player who embodied this idea of bass as connection more than Aston “Family Man” Barrett. Though (like most bass players) he’s not exactly a household name, he truly should be: As the long-time bassist, arranger, and coproducer of Bob Marley and the Wailers, his musical innovations and memorable lines are exceedingly familiar to anyone who has ever heard reggae music. “Fams,” as he was known, died in February of this year at 77, leaving a long legacy of reggae mastery.
Indeed, as Family Man was one of reggae’s original creators, he helped birth the bass-heavy Jamaican genre into existence from its stylistic precursors, ska and rocksteady. Together with his younger brother, drummer Carlton “Carly” Barrett, Fams created and established much of the hypnotic pulse and infectious vibe that characterizes reggae rhythms. Family Man’s feel was firm yet relaxed, his tone deep, dark, and plush. It was with these bottom-heavy colors, coaxed from a Höfner “Beatle” bass in his early years, then from his flatwound-strung Fender Jazz bass, that Aston Barrett crafted snaky, syncopated hooks and short melodic phrases that bolstered the vocal melodies while playing against the bouncing backbeats of the rhythm guitar and organ.
Before building his first bass from plywood and a length of 2“x4”, Barrett’s first musical love was singing along to American soul artists on Jamaican radio. “When I’m playing the bass, it’s like I’m singing,” Fams told music journalist Bill Murphy in a 2007 Bass Player magazine interview. “I compose a melodic line and see myself like I’m singing baritone.” You can hear his vocal-like bass stylings in songs like “Is This Love” and “Waiting in Vain.” These and many other Barrett bass lines serve as countermelodies, animated motifs that play against each song’s main vocal melody. Family Man’s parts are often easy to sing along to, so it’s easy to imagine Fams singing them in his head.
“Fams not only kept that intragroup connection strong, but he also went beyond the bass, creating and composing many of the intricate, interconnecting parts you can hear in any Bob Marley and the Wailers recording.”
The Barrett brothers played in several early reggae bands before joining the Wailers full-time in 1972, including famed producer Lee “Scratch” Perry’s house band, the Upsetters. In 1969, when the original Upsetters lineup couldn’t make a U.K. tour due to a scheduling conflict, Aston and Carlton’s band the Hippy Boys became the new Upsetters. In this group, they backed a pantheon of early reggae artists, including the Wailers, a vocal trio with Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer. The Upsetters eventually became the core of the Wailers’ rhythm section. Tosh and Bunny Wailer left the band in 1974.
It was years before, though, well before he had children (and he had a lot of children) that Aston Barrett began calling himself “Family Man.” This reflected how he saw it as his role to keep the band together. As the Wailers’ bandleader, arranger, and co-producer, Fams not only kept that intragroup connection strong, but he also went beyond the bass, creating and composing many of the intricate, interconnecting parts you can hear in any Bob Marley and the Wailers recording. But his primary musical connection was with his brother, Carly. Among other reggae conventions, the Barrett brothers pioneered the “one drop” rhythmic style, in which the bass and drums skip the downbeat—dropping the one—as you can hear in the bass and drum parts of songs like “Trenchtown Rock” and “One Drop.”
I met Family Man at the photo shoot for that 2007 Bass Player cover story, and again in 2012 when Phil Chen and I interviewed him onstage during the weekend he received his Bass Player Lifetime Achievement Award. During the photo shoot, we also shot a short video interview, which you can find on YouTube, where he demonstrates the “One Drop” bass line, plucking with his thumb between the end of the neck and the neck pickup. Even barely amplified, you can feel the depth that comes from Family Man’s bass approach. In the Marley years, that huge “earth sound” came from two Acoustic 18" speaker cabinets and two 4x15 cabinets. “You need them that big to get that sound,” Barrett told Murphy, “because reggae music is the heartbeat of the people. It’s the universal language what carry that heavy message of roots, culture, and reality. So the bass have to be heavy and the drums have to be steady.”Aston "Family Man" Barrett, Bob Marley & the Wailers bassist - 2007 Bass Player mag. interview 1/2
Here's the first part of Bill Leigh’s 2007 interview with Bob Marley & the Wailers' bassist Aston "Family Man" Barrett.
Some vintage gear carries the patina of both age and history. That’s the case with this month’s featured amp: a 1964 Marshall JTM45 4x10 combo that was owned and played by Peter Green during his years with Fleetwood Mac, and potentially with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.
It is a beast! This amp looks beautifully stage-worn and breaks up quickly, offering a throaty growl that sounds nicked from the studio tracks for “Rattlesnake Shake.” Output is 30 to 35 watts, but trust me, I was sitting in front of it when the sound sample you can hear online was recorded, and it bellows like a bull elephant.
The JTM45 was Jim Marshall’s first amp design, inspired by Leo Fender’s Bassman, and the model was just a year old when serial number 7217 was built as a combo with four Celestion 10" alnico speakers, now aided in their gnarly tone by decades of play. Marshall used RS De Luxe transformers, and the two preamp tubes in the ’45 are 12AX7s/ECC83s, with a third as a phase splitter, verses 12AY7s in the Bassman. That combination of preamp tube and transformer give the JTM45 it’s un-Bassman-like snarl. The amp was also built around KT66 output tubes and a GZ34 rectifier tube, with yellow-brown capacitors—so-called mustard caps—in an aluminum chassis. The control array is tremolo speed and intensity, presence, bass, middle, and treble, plus loudness for each channel. There are two channels—treble and normal—with four inputs, so they can be jumped with a short cable to add hair. And number 7217’s original channel switcher box is intact.
Photo by Max Raymond
Green’s amp was recently acquired by Eliot Michael, the owner of Rumble Seat Music—one of the holy trinity of world-class guitar shops along Nashville’s 8th Avenue. It sits along one of the store’s walls, with two certificates of authenticity above its head. I asked Michael what he’d tell a potential buyer making a query about the amp. He replied, “The person I purchased it from runs Ronnie Lane’s old studio. This was used in that studio. The Who used it, the Rolling Stones used it, and it was purchased from Fleetwood Mac when Peter Green was in the band. From what I was told, Peter didn’t have the money to pay for a certain thing, so the amp was left to them as payment.”
Photo by Max Raymond
“Them,” in this case, appears to be Fleetwood Mac’s accountant, David Simmons, who provided one of the certificates. According to Simmons, he took the amp with him to work with JAD Records and Bob Marley, and it was used for several Marley sessions. Simmons gave the amp to Mark St. John, and it began service in a variety of studios St. John partnered in, including London’s Freerange, the Basement Studio, 145 Wardour Street, and the Smokehouse, as well as Ibiza’s Studio Mediterraneo. It was also used for projects done via Ronnie Lane’s Mobile Studio. St. John’s certificate adds that other artists and groups who used this amp include David Gilmour, the Police, Arthur Brown, and Eddie Grant. “The amplifier is pretty much entirely original and has not been restored or altered, with only simple maintenance being applied to keep it operating correctly,” he wrote.