So yours truly got into Husker Du in a big way, but I would be remiss in not talking about The Bass Playing Thing.

Please take that image in because that, my friends, is what the first bass I owned looked like.  The Kramer Striker bass is all its glory.  Got it by washing dishes at a restaurant when I was 17.  That was a shit gig, but I got the bass and it was really the first thing I had ever wanted enough to go through a completely degrading experience to get it.

Notwithstanding my total love of Husker Du, I was immediately more interested in the big kahuna of the South.  In 1986, that was R.E.M.  It’s pretty difficult to impress upon people why they were so important to folks who lived in the southeast region of the U.S.

To begin with, they were from Georgia.  I mean, Georgia, for god’s sake.  Prior to the 1980’s, that was Allman Brothers territory and the land of Jimmy Carter. You couldn’t expect anything relevant from there. But there they were. And for me, Mike Mills was one of the most profound current influences  I had.  They way he made R.E.M. sound, especially on those early records, cannot be overstated.  They were tons of others who influenced me (and I’ll try and talk about them in later posts), but he was in a cool band that existed when I was 16 and I wanted to do more as a bass player than be Dee Dee Ramone.

Now, I never thought I would be in a band like R.E.M because they had impossible mystique in the 80’s.  Once again, I felt like brown Hush Puppies on a black suit.  They just seemed to have that certain je ne crois and I felt painfully awkward despite being inappropriately ambitious.

So, what did I do with that super cool Kramer bass?  Practiced over and over again.  That was the first thing I really loved that was completely mine to do with what I wanted.