In Defense of…Larry Graham By Jim Miller
I
once had the pleasure of meeting bass giant Larry Graham backstage during an outdoor music festival in the mid-90s. As a big fan of Sly and the Family Stone, a band that took the James Brown version of funk and gave it a semi-psychedelic spin, it was a dream come true. But in one unexpected, fractured fragment of time, it was dream that would nearly turn nightmarish. Picture it: meeting one of your musical heroes and being shocked to find that same legend treating you like you were the superstar. Envision watching from a backstage, behind-the-scenes viewpoint as your hero’s band performs in front of thousands of eager fans at a popular outdoor venue. Now, imagine the confusion and instant dread you feel when the venue’s crew suddenly and inexplicably shuts off the power to the stage halfway into the band’s last song of the night — leaving every audience member and the musicians themselves in stunned silence. No sound. No lights. No music. Cutting through the din of confused murmurs, you hear the scream of the venue’s head crewman, his hand still on the lever to one of the power boxes beyond the other side of the stage. “YOU’RE DONE!” All of this happened the night I met Larry Graham. And what took place onstage in the uncertain moments that followed would forever redefine my perception of what music is and can be. But, before I go any further, let’s go back to where it started…. Ahead of Graham’s days with Sly and the Family Stone and long before Graham became the leader of his own band, Graham Central Station. In the early ‘60s, as a lean-and-lanky teenager, Graham learned to play music with his family at church in Beaumont, Texas. He grew into a gifted multi-instrumentalist who could play guitar, sing, and operate the bass pedals of the church organ all at the same time.
The adage that necessity is the mother of invention proved true when Graham’s mother fired the drummer in her gospel trio. Musically, Graham filled the void by learning to mimic the drum tones on an electric bass: “slapping” the strings with this thumb to mimic the kick drum and “popping” them with this index finger for a snare effect. Graham would call his manner of playing “thumpin’ and pluckin’;” in the music world it became known as the “slap-bass technique.” It was an innovation that would revolutionize musical genres of funk, jazz, and disco — as did his primally hypnotic bassline for the Sly and the Family Stone’s No. 1 hit, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again).” “That [technique] became a huge template for every bass player to start using,” said Average White Band bassist Alan Gorrie in a 2014 BBC documentary called The Story of Funk. Indeed, Graham’s “Thank You” bassline would become so synonymous with the concept of funk music, it would be sampled 20 years later on the title track of Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, an album that would go on to sell more than 12 million copies worldwide. Graham’s technique no doubt helped define the sound of Sly of the Family Stone. “We all had our own musical backgrounds and experiences that we were allowed to contribute to the band,” said Graham in The Story of Funk. “So everybody brought something to the table.” That melting-pot spirit of collaboration may have contributed to the band’s significance and notoriety — they were our country’s first truly integrated band, in color, culture and sexual orientation — but that fact didn’t prevent friction and strife from wreaking havoc. The summer of 1969 would see the band playing at its best, and the fall would usher in the elements that would inevitably lead to its downfall. Recent years have seen an overdue show of appreciation for the band’s performances during that summer. On Record Store Day in 2019, Epic/Legacy released a double-vinyl set of the band’s performance at Woodstock. ► JUNE 2021
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