Re: Fender Bass Changes the World?
Posted: 26 Jul 2020, 10:41
GoldenStreet wrote:For years I tended to confuse Precision and Telecaster basses, due as much to the Telecaster-style headstock featured on the original Precision of 1951-52. Do we know when the familiar Stratocaster-style design was introduced, maybe following the introduction of the Strat itself in 1954?
Bill
1957. But there have been (rarely) examples of the earlier style basses dated as 1957 - I'm sure @JimN would be able to tell us which NAMM the update was issued.
I always wondered whether, with the Telecaster bass of the late 60s, and particularly after the added humbucker at the neck, Fender were somehow trying to compete with the Gibson EB3. The British players had become very influential through Jack Bruce - Andy Fraser from Free also had a very distinctive style - highly innovative and also used an EB3. Billy Cox, with the Hendrix Band of Gipsys used a white Telecaster bass (famously at Woodstock). Suzy Quattro, in the video for her first single was required to play Micky Most's white Telecaster bass on TOTP because it looked better than her actual bass, an original 57 P bass (she still has her sunburst, adonised pg original 57 P
- can be seen on lockdown internet posts).
Though the Fender bass changed the world (in the US) it did it with very slow sales in the 50s, and for various reasons, as many of the British Invasion groups were seen with Epiphone Rivoli basses etc as Precisions (if not more) - apart from The Shadows there were comparatively few British groups using Precisions. The Shadows were first and foremost wanting to look like their heroes like Buddy Holly and the Crickets, therefore the Fenders - but in the 60s the idea of a bass guitar was to make a double bass sound more prominent - the semi hollow Rivoli, Hofner and EB2 probably did a better job in the studio for British producers of achieving that. The British groups, from starting out trying to emulate US music, actually created something subtly different which was eminently saleable back to the US!!
In the US studios players mostly used the Precision. Interesting to hear Carol Kaye talk of the sessions in LA, where the bass sound was created by a string bass (upright), Fender bass (Precision) and Dano bass (Danelectro for that clicky sound) in unison! She played Dano on some tracks and P bass on others. The Duck Dunn, James Jamerson and Bob Babbitt all on P bass (though Motown used an interface (outboard pre amp), a reissue of which can now be bought!