[ larry graham ]

Imagine: you're seventeen years old, and you're in a band with your mother -- The Dell Graham Trio. You're playing in small clubs around California's Bay Area during the early 1960s, and your repertoire consists of cheesy pop ballads. And then . . .

'One club we played at had an old organ sitting onstage. I found a way to pump the bass footpedals, while playing the guitar and singing at the same time. This gave us a full sound.

When Dell Graham decided that the band would be just Larry and herself, Larry worked on incorporating the drum parts on the bass. The rhythm of his plucking replaced the beats that a snare drum would normally play.

'It was the only way I could get that rhythmic sound. Over time, I got it down pretty good, but I wasn't thinking in terms of creating anything new. I was just trying to do my job -- to provide as much of a foundation as I could.'

Fast forward to 1998. In an overcrowded New York club some 2000 people have gathered to witness a concert by 'New Power Soul'. It's unclear who or what they can expect until showtime, which isn't until very late -- it's long after midnight when the band finally gets up on stage. Among them are three of Black music's greatest artists: Chaka Khan, Larry Graham and The Artist. They start jamming and don't stop until it's early morning, in the meantime joined by two other pioneers --

Paisley Park albums was marginal, his contribution to Larry Graham's album is likely to have been far greater, although certainly not as ubiquitous as it has been with nearly every other associate album. This time round the words 'collaboration' and 'co-written' are being used.

"GCS 2000" could turn out to be an interesting excursion: throughout his career The Artist has rarely played 'straight' funk, even if he intended it..

popular music during the 1970s, and was standard practice by the early 1980s. Today it is a major component in musical genres as diverse as rock, dance, R&B and jazz fusion. Larry himself remains modest about it: 'The thing is, I never saw myself as revolutionary. All I was doing was what sounded good to me. But it has become an accepted way of playing the bass, to the point where people take it for granted. Most of the young kids you see doing thump-and-pluck don't even know who I am!

But when a caller to his radio show kept insisting he check out Larry Graham, he changed his mind after seeing him perform. The rest is history, as they say. Before 1968 was out, Sly And The Family Stone broke through internationally with "Dance To The Music", the song that introduced Larry's revolutionary bass playing to the world with the words 'I'm gonna add some bottom, so that the dancers just won't hide'. They went from success to success: their liquid funk topped the American pop and

Bay Area club band. 'I was going to be their producer and songwriter. One night we played at a club in San Francisco. The place was packed, and on the last song, I sat in. Something clicked, and the whole place went nuts. It was obvious that I had to be in this band.' Graham's breakaway band, Graham Central Station, was hot property, and even became Warner Bros' first R&B signing! Later the band would also give the company its first gold album by a Black group, as well as its first R&B No. 1.

and arranged by Larry Graham, as would be his practice on the group's six subsequent albums. Interestingly, the album features cameos by several Family Stone members using pseudonyms -- Sly didn't condone session work.

1974's "Release Yourself" was the first of many albums to be inspired by Larry (and several members of his band) becoming a Jehovah's Witness. While their conversion generated some great music,

This change in musical direction surprised many of his fans, even though Graham wasn't new to the genre. After all, he had performed ballads when playing with his mother's trio, and his first contribution to Sly And The Family Stone had been his treatment of "Let Me Hear It From You" on their first album. 'I got into ballads when my mother and I were working together. She would always make me sing ballads. She passed on a couple of years ago, and when she died in my arms,

final one -- "Fired Up" (1985) -- was released only in Japan.
In the meantime Larry had become a respected songwriter and session musician, playing on albums by people as diverse as Bette Davis, Aretha Franklin, Stanley Clarke, Tyka Nelson (The Artist's sister!), El DeBarge, George Benson, Santana and Eddie Murphy. But the general public forgot about Larry, much like they did about other pioneering musicians -- such as

People started noticing Graham again and his resurrected Graham Central Station -- now including several of the original members from The Family Stone -- started a world tour. They played to mixed crowds, always bringing the house down. It was perhaps not so surprising then that Graham and The Artist eventually shared a stage.

Says Larry Graham: 'Graham Central Station was on a US tour with Sinbad, Earth Wind

well as his own band, if not better. He attends "every" GCS soundcheck and has invited Larry onstage during his set a few times now.' During some concerts The Artist even handled mixing duties for the band! Inevitably, The Artist (then 39) and Larry (51) ended up in the studio together.

This northern summer we will see the release of their joint efforts on Graham Central Station's "GCS 2000"

Then one night, the organ broke down. And without its bass, everything sounded kind of empty, so I decided to temporarily switch to bass guitar, to fill in the bottom end.'

'I definitely didn't want to keep on playing the bass . . . I never took the time to learn to play it properly, because I didn't see myself as a bass player. I just plucked the strings with my thumb and fingers, like on a guitar. I never bothered to learn the normal right-hand technique, with two fingers over the top.' .

I was just trying to do my job -- to provide as much of a foundation as I could.',

This is how funk bass was invented. This is the story of Larry Graham.

Bootsy Collins: 'Everybody kinda tried to take the credit, but no, it was Larry Graham. It was definitely Larry Graham. He was doing with the bass what, at that particular time, nobody else was even thinking about.'

George Benson and Doug E. Fresh.

While The Artist's reputation has received some severe blows in the past couple of years, one thing you gotta credit him for: he takes care of his musical godfathers. For instance: when George Clinton was down on his luck (and pursued by the B.I.R.S.) The Artist offered him a lucrative record deal on his Paisley Park Records label that paid for his tax debt. But while The Artist's involvement in George Clinton's two

His music was always a mixture of influences and somehow even his most straightforward songs include surprising sidesteps. For the first time in his career, The Artist seems to be taking a trip down memory lane to the music that influenced him while growing up.

Larry Graham of course did not solely influence The Artist -- his unique percussive plucking and thumping approach to playing bass changed music forever. The technique became commonplace in funk, permeated

I never intended to revolutionise the way to play bass. This kind of thing always happens because circumstances force you to improvise on the spot.'

Interestingly, Larry's 'revolution' could just as easily have never reached our ears. When Sly Stone was putting together his next band, The Stoners (who would later be renamed to the far superior Sly And The Family Stone) he didn't intend to hire a bass player: he was going to play that instrument.

R&B charts three times each over a five-year period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and gave them four million-selling singles and five gold-certified albums. Their Woodstock appearance is legendary.

But by 1972 Sly And The Family Stone were falling apart at the seams. By the year's end he and Sly had a falling out and Larry left. While he didn't leave with plans of starting his own band, he ended up doing just that. He started producing Hot Chocolate, a

Musically, Graham Central Station emulated the mix of soul and rhythmic funk of Sly And The Family Stone. But Graham was ahead of his time again, pioneering the use of drum machines at a time most other musicians considered them mere toys. The band had a fabulous live reputation and were one of the era's flashiest live attractions.

They started off with the excellent "Graham Central Station" (1973). The majority of the material on the album was composed

it was also a drawback for GCS as a major live attraction, because it wasn't able to capitalise on its in-concert popularity. More importantly, it lost touch with a large section of its audience, mainly due to Graham's increasingly religious lyrics.

Larry Graham disbanded his group in 1980 to embark on a solo career . . . as a sultry romantic bass-baritone crooner in the style of Isaac Hayes, Barry White or Teddy Pendergrass.

I was singing ["One In A Million You"] to her. It was very touching. To her, it was kind of like, It was very touching. To her, it was kind of like, "I told you, I told you to sing those ballads". That's what the record was to her. My grandmother, though, she kinda liked the funky stuff!' Both his first two solo efforts -- "One In A Million You" (1980) and "Just Be My Lady" (1981) -- featured Top 10 hits, but after 1981, the hits were few and far between. Three more solo albums followed, but there was so little interest in them that the

keyboardist Billy Preston, guitarist Jimmy Nolen or drummer Clive Stubblefield. As one journalist once put it: 'Graham may be the most influential bassist nobody knows.'

When The Artist started putting more emphasis on his bass playing capacities in 1994-95, he re-discovered his roots along the line and started playing several of Graham's songs in concert: "The Jam", "Hair", "I Believe In You", "Tell Me What It Is" (Though strangely never "It Ain't Nothing But A Warner Bros. Party"!)

And Fire, and Tina Marie when I met up with The Artist in Tennessee. We were at the amphitheatre and he was at a larger venue. He invited us to come and jam with them at the after party at a club in town. We did and that was the beginning.' This jam prompted The Artist to ask Graham to be the support act on his 1997 tour. But the collaboration went even further.

Jon Dakss maintainer of The Official Graham Central Station Web Site, wrote in his newsletter that 'all members of the group have told me that The Artist treats them as

(NPG Records). It will be Larry's first album featuring new material in a decade. Let's hope this extraordinary meeting of two funk giants will be well worth the wait.

Sources: all of the quotes in this article come from a wide range of articles. For a full listing, check this page on my website.

Photography copyright of Andre Zimmerman, azi_planetfunk@msn.com