MonoNeon, aka Dywane Thomas Jr., came up learning the bass from his father in Memphis, Tennessee, but for some reason, he decided to flip his dad’s 4-string bass around and play it with the string order inverted—E string closest to the ground and the G on top. That’s how MonoNeon still plays today, coming up through a rich, inspiring gauntlet of family and community traditions. “I guess my whole style came from just being around my grandma at an early age,” says Thomas.His path has led him to collaborate with dozens of artists, including Nas, Ne-Yo, Mac Miller, and even Prince, and MonoNeon’s solo output is dizzying—trying to count up his solo releases isn’t an easy feat. Premier Guitar’s Chris Kies caught up with the bassist before his show at Nashville’s Exit/In, where he got the scoop on his signature 5-string, Ampeg rig, and simple stomp layout, as well as some choice stories about influences, his brain-melting playing style, and how Prince changed his rig.
Brought to you by D’Addario.
Orange You Glad to See Me?
This Fender MonoNeon Jazz Bass V was created after a rep messaged Thomas on Instagram to set up the signature model, over which Thomas had complete creative control. Naturally, the bass is finished in neon yellow urethane with a neon orange headstock and pickguard, and the roasted maple neck has a 10"–14" compound radius. It’s loaded with custom-wound Fireball 5-string Bass humbuckers and an active, 18V preamp complete with 3-band EQ controls. Thomas’ own has been spruced up with some custom tape jobs, too. All of MonoNeon's connections are handled by Sorry Cables.
Fade to Black
MonoNeon’s Ampeg SVT stack isn’t a choice of passion. “That’s what they had for me, so I just plugged in,” he says. “That’s what I have on my rider. As long as it has good headroom and the cones don’t break up, I’m cool.”
Box Art
MonoNeon’s bass isn’t the only piece of kit treated to custom color jobs. Almost all of his stomps have been zhuzhed up with his eye-popping palette.
Thomas had used a pitch-shifting DigiTech Whammy for a while, but after working with Paisley Park royalty, the pedal became a bigger part of his playing. “When I started playing with Prince, he put the Whammy on my pedalboard,” Thomas explains. “After he passed, I realized how special that moment was.”
Alongside the Whammy, MonoNeon runs a Fairfield Circuitry Randy’s Revenge (for any time he wants to “feel weird”), a literal Fart Pedal (in case the ring mod isn’t weird enough, we guess), and a JAM Pedals Red Muck covers fuzz and dirt needs. A CIOKS SOL powers the whole affair.
John Bohlinger, Andrés Segovia would like to have a word with you.
Back in their day, recordings of music were a way to promote sheet music. Labels released recordings only after sheet-music sales slowed down on a particular song. That means that until recently, a large section of society not only knew how to read music well, but they did it often—not as often as we stare at our phones, but it was a primary part of home entertainment. By today’s standards, written music feels like a dead language. Music is probably the most common language on Earth, yet I bet it has the highest illiteracy rate.
As a lifelong professional musician, it’s surprising—and, frankly, a relief—how infrequently I read staff music. Though I read chord or Nashville number charts often, staff rarely comes up, usually only in sessions where a producer/writer/artist has a particular melody or gang riff. I feel a deep shame when I have to read music; I do it about as well as an out-of-shape guy with no training runs a marathon: slowly, painfully, maybe not making it to the finish line.
I learned everything I know about reading through junior high school orchestra, where I was a crappy violinist. So, you can chalk one up to the Montana public school system. Although at times I’m ashamed of my poor music-reading skills, it’s not that big of a deal. When I’m faced with a written staff full of sharps and flats and weird time, I just ask the keyboard player to play the tricky parts slowly. If there’s one player in the band that can read well, it’s usually keys; they mostly grew up with formal lessons. If I hear piano play the part while I read along, the dots and squiggles on the staff start to make sense.
“By today’s standards, written music feels like a dead language.”
I bet most guitar players feel conflicted about reading music. We all want to learn as much as we can about guitar, and obviously some of that information is going to escape us if we can’t read it, even with tabs and guitar-nerd videos just a few clicks away. But maybe our lack of formal training is the source of our superpower. I suspect that the reason guitar has been the driving force behind most popular music for the past 65 years is because the instrument invites exploration. The more you mess with it, the more you discover. That’s the addictive quality of guitar. That’s probably why most guitar players would rather make stuff up than read what somebody else wants them to play. When you have that many people experimenting and creating, art takes a big step forward.
By contrast, classical musicians are not about innovation or taking chances. They are more about interpretation, virtuosity, and a reverence for tradition. The majority of classical music played today was composed in 1600 to 1875. New, experimental classical music is a hard sell. People want to hear the classics, like Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.
It’s a strange dichotomy: classical players tune by ear but almost never play by ear. Ask a seasoned orchestra player to improvise and most of them will get a little panicky.
Guitarist: Let’s jam in E.
Orchestra Nerd: What do you mean?
Guitarist: I’ll play something, you play with it. Just make up a melody.
Orchestra Nerd: What melody?
Guitarist: Just make one up?
Orchestra Nerd: What do you mean?
It goes on like that until they nervously decline.
Guitarists are, for the most part, fearless about exploration. Just look at the instrument itself. Most violins built anywhere in the world today look pretty much like the ones built in the 16th century in Italy. By contrast, guitar designs are as varied as car designs—maybe more so. Go into a big music store and you can play a gut-string, flattop, archtop, Les Paul, Tele, Strat, Jaguars, PRS, Flying V, Explorer … and that’s not even getting into the weird ones. Eddie Van Halen could not find a guitar that could produce the music in his head, so he built it. The point is, guitar is an instrument of improvisation—no rules in how you play it or how you build it.
Maybe this is just a way of justifying my shortcomings or making the most of my laziness or lack of brainpower, but I think there’s an upside to being musically illiterate. As the mighty EVH said: “You only have 12 notes, do what you want with them.”
When he’s on the West Coast, Jim Campilongo feels something like a stranger in his own home. His latest record pays tribute to the city he misses when he’s there, and the one where he built most of his career.
He did this largely in his adopted home of New York City, where, for most of the 2000s, he was a mainstay—and, for music fans in the know, a must-see—of the downtown arts scene, with long-running and celebrated residencies at Lower East Side venues like Rockwood Music Hall and the now-defunct Living Room.
Campilongo left the East Coast to return West roughly two years ago. But his newest record, She Loved the Coney Island Freak Show, is very much a New York album—maybe his most New York one of all. It is also very much a rock album—maybe his most rock one of all. There are reasons for this. The roots of the record stretch back to the dark days of Covid, when words like “quarantine” and “distancing” were too much a part of the common vernacular. Life was weirder, quieter and, truth be told, often drearier. Campilongo found escape where he could, which manifested in daily 5 a.m. walks around his Brooklyn neighborhood. His companion was an old iPod playlist of classic-rock songs. “I’d go out, it’d be pitch black, there’d be no one around—it was like a science-fiction movie,” he recalls. “I had these old-school Vic Firth headphones, and an iPod that had a playlist of maybe 300 classic-rock tunes that I made back when iPods were the latest thing. And I would walk the streets listening to it over and over.”
The 4TET, from left to right: drummer Dan Rieser, Campilongo, bassist Andy Hess, and guitarist Luca Benedetti.
Some of the songs that, quite literally, got into Campilongo’s head? “It was ‘Mississippi Queen’ kind of stuff,” he says. “‘Hush’ by Deep Purple. Elvin Bishop’s ‘Travelin’ Shoes,’ which is an amazingly eventful track. There’s background vocals, there’s a little breakdown, there’s a melodic solo. There’s harmonies, a great rhythm.... I became obsessed with it.”
These songs, and the 297 or so others on Campilongo’s playlist, informed several of the tracks on She Loved the Coney Island Freak Show. One, a greasy, growly workout titled “This Is a Quiet Street,” was influenced by Grand Funk Railroad’s live version of the Animals’ 1966 single, “Inside Looking Out”—“a song I’ve been listening to since high school, and that I’ve been trying to write for 20 years,” Campilongo says. “This is about the closest I’ve gotten.” Another track, “Do Not Disturb,” he continues, “is like my interpretation of a ZZ Top tune.”
“I’d go out, it’d be pitch black, there’d be no one around—it was like a science-fiction movie.... And I would walk the streets listening to it over and over.”
But She Loves the Coney Island Freak Show is not all rock-influenced. Leadoff track “Dragon Stamp,” a dark, deep-in-the-pocket jam that Campilongo introduces by sounding a detuned open low string, and then hitting a harmonic and raising the pitch by bending the string behind the nut (something of a JC trademark move), came to Campilongo after repeated playings of “Step to Me,” a 1991 song from deceased New York hardcore rapper Tim Dog, on his early morning walks. “I think I listened to that 50 times in a row, numerous times,” Campilongo says. “I couldn’t get enough of it.” The emotive “Sunset Park,” meanwhile, in which Campilongo unspools languid, vocal guitar lines in a manner that is nothing short of a master class in the subtle art of touch, tone and phrasing, was influenced by a Maria Callas aria. Another track, “Sal’s Waltz,” by Frédéric Chopin. “Whether it’s successful or not, who knows?” Campilongo says self-effacingly.
Sunset Park
While many of the She Loved the Coney Island Freak Show songs have their origins in Campilongo’s early-morning walks and his iPod-provided soundtrack, bringing them into existence was in some ways a more immediate affair. To record the album, Campilongo got together with guitarist and longtime collaborator Luca Benedetti, bassist Andy Hess, and drummer Dan Rieser in a combo they dubbed the 4TET, and laid down the tracks live in the studio—two studios, to be exact. “We did two days recording at Bunker [in Williamsburg, Brooklyn], and then another two days at a different studio [Atomic Sound, in Red Hook, Brooklyn],” he says. “It was pure joy to play with those guys.”
“I always figured I could get all the sounds I want from the volume and tone knobs on the guitar, or from where I pick, and how hard; all those little variations.”
Campilongo, as is his way, kept his gear setup minimal: his trusty 1959 Fender Telecaster with a top-loader bridge, plugged straight into a 1970 silver-panel Fender Princeton Reverb fitted with a Celestion G10 speaker—no pedals required. “It’s so uninteresting for me to talk about gear, because it’s basically the same answer every time,” he says with a laugh. As for why he mostly eschews effects? “I always figured I could get all the sounds I want from the volume and tone knobs on the guitar—and on a Tele, those knobs are really dramatic—or from where I pick, and how hard; all those little variations,” he reasons. Another benefit of going sans pedals? “You kind of just accept the hand you’re dealt, and you can get down to playing music quicker.”
When it came to the playing, Campilongo stuck to another tried-and-true aspect of his guitar style—improvisation. “None of what I’m doing on the album was worked out beforehand,” he says of his solos on She Loved the Coney Island Freak Show. In his opinion, this makes for not only a better playing experience, but a better listening one, too. “If I play a perfect solo and it’s worked out, I generally don’t like listening to it, because it’s not a time capsule of that moment,” he says. “It’s like going out on a first date and having a script of what to talk about, instead of it just being a natural conversation. I want to hear the real talk, warts and all.”
Jim Campilongo's Gear
Campilongo performing at Rockwood Music Hall Stage 3, the same Lower East Side venue where he previously held a long-running residency.
Photo by Manish Gosalia
Guitars
- 1959 Fender Telecaster
- Lumiere Jim Campilongo Signature T- Model
- Fender Custom Shop Jim Campilongo Signature Telecaster
Amps
Effects
- Crazy Tube Circuits Splash Reverb
- Crazy Tube Circuits Stardust Overdrive
- JAM Pedals Wahcko
- Universal Audio OX Amp Top Box
- Boomerang Phrase Sampler
Strings, Picks, & Accessories
- D’Addario EXL120 Nickel Wound Super Light (.009–.042)
- V-Picks Fusion
- Klotz Titanium guitar cable
- Souldier guitar straps
Campilongo’s commitment to balancing on that creative knife edge informs every aspect of the album, and also his music in general. “I don’t want to ever put out the same record twice in a row,” he says. To that end, he is already plotting future challenges, including a “pseudo-jazz record where I’m playing standards in the way I would present them, which would be a little scary.”
For all his musical adventurism, one aspect of Campilongo’s artistic makeup that remains steadfast is his connection to the city that helped birth She Loved the Coney Island Freak Show. “Even though I’m back in California, in many ways I feel like a transplanted New Yorker,” Campilongo says. “It’s in my DNA,” he laughs. “It’s not like I’m returning home to the West Coast and, you know, I can’t wait to go surfing.”
YouTube It
For years, Jim Campilongo held court at New York City’s Rockwood Music Hall. Here, Jim and the 4TET tear through a She Loved the Coney Island Freak Show highlight: the Southern-rock-inflected, ZZ Top-inspired “Do Not Disturb.”