Favorite albums: Paul's Boutique (Beastie Boys)

When this first came out in the summer of 1989, it absolutely blew me and all of my friends away. It was as pungent as our weed and as dense as the way we became after we smoked it. We would drive around in the car like fools, singing every word, and loving every stolen sample and crazy lyrical reference. This album must have been released before you needed to clear the usage of samples with the original artist, because they were like Bernie Madoff with other people's music! It re-contextualized all of these elements and made them new though, much the way the Beatles did in their work. As a matter of fact, it is very Abbey Road-ish in the fact that the record even ends with like a 9 song medley. They even overtly sample the Beatle's "The End" from Abbey Road on "The Sounds of Science". When you hear that, you realize how damn funky the Beatles are!

The cover art was mind blowing too. My brother bought the vinyl version and if I remember correctly, it had like three or four folds instead of two. And when you wrapped it around to let the left and right side touch, it was a 360 degree view of some street corner in Brooklyn with a store whose sign reads, "Paul's Boutique". Here is the cover:


But back to the music. "Shake Your Rump", "Hey Ladies", "Shadrach", and "A Year and a Day" are just a few examples of the ridiculously grooving beats and insane layering going on with this album. "A Year and a Day" had that crazy "That Lady" (Isley Brothers) guitar wailing away over an obnoxious hard-hitting beat, topped off by stream-of-conscious, nonsensical and heavily distorted raps that became just another rhythm element, instead of something to be comprehended. It was a total noise fest and I loved all 48 seconds of it.

We loved their first album, which was simple frat boy lyrics over the sparest of beats. Talk about changing direction! They sure didn't hit the sophomore slump with this one, although I don't think it was nearly the commercial success that the first was. They've never topped this in my opinion, and really, not many other rap records come close to this, regardless of the artist. I'm sure this is on many people's list of guilty musical pleasures, but if you've never heard it, give it a listen. You'll be glad you did. And "Ask for Janice"!

Bass Instruction: Slap/Pop with 16th note triplets

I really like this particular rhythm and try to slip it in occasionally when I am soloing. Here is my over using it like crazy for the purpose of illustration. When you are landing it right, it sounds nice and bouncy. In the video, I am mostly using this flavor:

It is fun to play and hopefully this will be fun for you to listen to and watch.
I do it slow at around 1:12, and then speed it back up.






Here is an example of it in action for real in the solo I do during a song we cover called Boogie Oogie Oogie. The first one shows up 9 seconds into the video.



Remeber to get your 16th note triplets on when you want to be funky - and what bass player doesn't want to be funky?

How we spent Saturday night

On Saturday night we switched gears from totally raucous club band to high society. This is a little montage of the night, before we started playing. It was great to catch up with some folks whose party we played at a couple of years ago also.

These people really knew how to rock, although the persistent requests for Neil Young from one party-goer were kind of puzzling! Does it seem like Neil Young is even remotely where our band is coming from? Some people just need a course in gig etiquette. Hopefully you can't see yourself in any of those descriptions!

Last Night

We just played last night with a band called 88 Keys Salute at the Lodge and it was a really fun time. Especially since they played so many awesome songs. Also, everyone in the band was down to earth, nice and could really play. The sound man, Nate, also does an awesome job.

Now it is back to contracts, commission checks and a set list for tonight's performance!

Bass Instruction: Groove from C to F

Hopefully some of you fellow bass players find this video interesting. I've been wanting to do some instructional type bass segments for a long time and finally did one. I'll try to do some more and also talk about the players that I like and who influenced me. This is an obvious tilt of the hat to one of my all-time favorites, James Jamerson.

Sorry I didn't get more dressed up for the occasion!

Welcome to the Hooked On Sonics Blog

Hi everyone,
This is Nick from Hooked On Sonics.  My band has been around for a long time and we used to have a "Blog" on our old site.  It was basically a list of where we've played and who came out.  I thought it would be fun to be able to post other thoughts as they occur to me and maybe even coax Gary and Rich into contributing some articles.  We'll see how far we get with this.  Hopefully farther than this one article!


I'll type at you later!