Bill Laswell Interview – Public Image Limited (PIL) Album, Fretless Bass and More
Article by Eric Larson, copyright 2019 all rights reserved
A while back I started a conversation with Bill Laswell curious to find out more about his bass playing and also an album he did with Public Image Limited, aka PIL. The album titled simply ALBUM is a favorite of mine and features some amazing fretless bass. In addition, this album also features Sex Pistols lead singer and PIL founder John Lydon, veteran drummers Tony Williams and Ginger Baker, legendary guitarist Steve Vai, and some other amazing musicians and technicians. We spoke on the phone and discussed how this album came together, his basses, and the overall experience of the project. The call was just what I hoped for and more, as he brought his first hand perspective and memories to life with some incredible stories from the project. Listen to the audio of the call or read the full text below.
FretlessBass.com: I run FretlessBass.com and so I’m constantly reaching out to different bass players and different musicians trying to piece some stories together. I was recently discussing that PIL (Public Image Limited) album “Album” and I thought it would be fun to ask you a few questions about that project and just get your perspective. My site is based around fretless bass and there are a few songs on there that have some really nice fretless so I thought it would be good to talk to you about the process and who played what on that and how it came together. Tell me a little bit about that project.
Bill Laswell: I pretty much played the whole album. I think Jonas (Hellborg) plays a solo somewhere. I know he played something and Malachi Favors plays acoustic bass. So he plays a simple line somewhere. Otherwise I cut all the tracks with the drummers. Most of the tracks were done before John Lyden even arrived in New York. I use the fretless bass now on everything. I have a Fender that’s a kind of bizarre custom-made bass, and I can’t even recall who made it. It was in storage and I pulled it out and really like the tone of it. So I’ve been using that for long time. The bass on PIL I believe is a Wal bass which was made in England. When they’re in good condition and maintained they have a kind of interesting tone.
FretlessBass.com: Did you play fretless on all of the tracks?
Bill Laswell: I think it’s the same bass on all of them. And once I started using fretless I lately – well actually going pretty far back – there’s been a lot of experience playing with musicians from other cultures that play what you’d call non-tempered instruments, so the tuning is never precise. So if you play with somebody in Morocco and they’re playing gimbri or sintir, this bass instrument, if you play live the tuning changes so with the fretless bass you can always kind of follow the tunings. So if anybody’s playing these non-tempered instruments you couldn’t really do it with fretted bass. That’s where fretless for me really makes a big difference.
FretlessBass.com: Do you play fretless primarily?
Bill Laswell: It’s mainly this one fender bass now. And lately I’ve been using an 8-string and that’s for more like improve music and louder things. 90% is the Fender fretless bass. I believe it’s a ’76 but it’s had a lot of work done on it and it’s a mutant. And if I didn’t own it would probably be worth nothing. I think it goes back to a guy called Ken Parker. He made the Parker Fly. He was doing a lot of work. At that time I used to get him to invent things and help fix things. He made me a fretless sitar bass. It resonates like a sitar but it’s a 4-string fretless which I still have. And I used that a lot when I was working with Indian music and in India, not lately. But I believe he might be one of the people that helped put this fretless together. I used to have a lot of instruments and they were just in storage and when we pulled that one out I didn’t really remember the origin but it sounded great. So I started using it on everything. But this bass has markers so if you respect the markers it doesn’t have to sound exactly like a fretless bass.
FretlessBass.com: Right, you can have pretty much perfect intonation on it.
Bill Laswell: Yeah, and if you use a little, a slight vibrato against the marker you can get sort of like a chorus almost, like an acoustic chorus effect, a phasing thing. It’s real subtle.
FretlessBass.com: The bass sounds on that album are great. I actually like the slide work that you do especially in a song like “Rise”.
Bill Laswell: I wanted to bring that out because “Rise” is kind of – it’s a hybrid. It’s based on South African music. And in South African music, the record that I sort of emulated, was totally out of tune and again dealing with not only non-temperred instruments, but sometimes you’re trying to kind of emulate something that’s badly made like a guitar that has bad intonation, a bass that doesn’t stay in tune, and it’s all this kind of I guess ethnic sound. So “Rise” is a hybrid of that South African sound and a little bit of Irish influence and then referencing the early PIL first two records.
FretlessBass.com: Did John Lydon have demos of these songs?
Bill Laswell: What happened was we talked and we had worked together before. I knew him before and we agreed to make a record. So he’s in California and he has two or three musicians, I think maybe two guitars, they were kids they were like twenty years old. But a week before they arrived I cut three tracks that I just sort of wrote and made up. I cut them live with a guitarist named Nicky Skopelitis and the drummer was Tony Williams and we cut them in one take. And we sat on it and we thought “Ok this was the beginning of the record”. And then when John arrived with these musicians we realized we couldn’t really use his musicians, and I would play on the rest of them with Ginger Baker. I think it was four songs he did. After that there were these foundations. And then from there I started to just build on to what was there, the foundations. So adding a guitar here and they’re, adding violin, keyboard, whatever, but doing it kind of spontaneous and in a sense improvise. It was almost like hip-hop where you start with the beat, and you decorate the beat, and then you put the vocal. So once the songs became songs, built out of this intuitive improve, then he came in and did the lyrics. He had a notebook full of words and we would just experiment with the different sections of words on the different pieces of music. Who’s gonna play guitar? I said we’ll be fine, I’ve got this guy who’s kind of up-and-coming his name is Steve Vai and I think it’ll be fine. When it was time to do the vocal he came in and once that was done we mixed it and that was that. It’s a classic creation the way it was done, it’s totally crazy. At the end of the day there’s a kind of camaraderie, a sensibility that works between the musicians and we did develop the sound based on these references. And it put together a lot of unique musicians, some from the past and some that were getting ready to be really big. L. Shankar, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bernie Worrell, Ginger Baker, Tony Williams, Steve Vai – it’s crazy.
FretlessBass.com: So Steve Vai, would you say he was just coming up at that time?
Bill Laswell: You know the name but it was mostly a buzz amongst guitarists. Nobody really knew who he was, but guitar players knew. You know the ones that were trying to go in that direction. He did an EP of his own, I think he had played with Zappa, he had had a brief moment in the band called Alcatraz and I think that was about it. Maybe he was getting ready to do something that was going to blow up around that time.
FretlessBass.com: How did you meet Steve Vai?
Bill Laswell: Through guitarists. I kept hearing his name and everybody’s saying “You should hear this guy” and I said “When he’s in New York just tell him to call and maybe there’s a session”. And that happened that he was in town around that time.
FretlessBass.com: One of my favorite solos is Steve Via’s solo on “Ease”.
Bill Laswell: Yeah that’s a one-take solo no edits. That was in Electric Lady upstairs. That was the last overdub of the music before we were ready to look forward to the vocal recording. So that night was the last recording and that solo was probably the last thing we recorded on the record. And I remember it’s a long solo and halfway through he threw his guitar up in the air kind of and it came back down and there’s kind of a sliding sound that you can hear if you listen to the solo. And right when he threw the guitar in the air the door opened and it was John who had figured out what studio we were in. And then they both kind of made eye contact and Steve kept soloing. And then you know John was drunk and he was dancing around and he was loving it, but Steve just continued and he finished the song. So we wrapped it up, and I believe that was the last music recording before we went to the vocal.
FretlessBass.com: Wow that’s a great story, great story, I mean that solo is, it’s incredible.
Bill Laswell: It’s hilarious. But you know with Steve, you know he would talk a lot about different guitarists and things and right before he would take a solo I would get headphones and like a cassette, I believe in those days it was a cassette machine. And I would play him like, North African music or trance music from India and I would just say “Listen to this for a minute”. And he would say “Yeah this is cool, I’m totally into it”. And I’d say “ok take off the headphones and now play the solo”. So his references weren’t what they would have been. He wasn’t thinking of metal or whoever he liked in rock, or Jimi Hendrix or whatever. He was kind of lost in this other world of sound and music.
FretlessBass.com: That’s amazing , I love to hear stories like that.
Bill Laswell: And you know to this day that’s one of his favorite intuitive kind of off-the-wall crazy solos. He’s always mentioned that since that time, it’s been a long time.
FretlessBass.com: So this is what 1985? 1986?
Bill Laswell: A little later, I think 1986.
FretlessBass.com: When you put down the bass tracks did you piece these things together or did you have a small group of musicians in there?
Bill Laswell: I think I recorded a guitar line and then I recorded the bass with a click track. And then we set up the drums at the Power Station but we put them in the elevator shaft instead of the recording room. It was in where like a thing that brings cars up to the parking lot on the roof. And we would shut down the roof and put Tony Williams and the drums in an elevator shaft. And that’s why that big sound is there. And then I played the guitar and the click track and muted the original bass. And then I kept the bass live with Tony and we did first takes on every piece I believe. And on Rise Tony dropped a beat and I hear also a half-step wrong note. And when we came back in we said “you know we messed up these two parts but we can fix the drums”. So we just took a sampler which in those days we had a Fairlight that I used to sample the drum and drop it on the hole, the one beat he dropped out, and that’s fine the drums are done. And then I looked at the bass which was a half step out and I said “You know what it’s a first take, this was classic so we’re going to keep it”. So everybody that overdubbed I would always say “Now when you get to this part it’s a little different”. I didn’t want to do it because it’s a first take. It’s totally stupid, it has nothing to do with composition or music. It was more to do with not touching it.
FretlessBass.com: You’re capturing the moment literally
Bill Laswell: Yeah well it’s one note, it would have been easy to fix but for some reason I just decided “Lets let that go, it’s gonna be great”.
FretlessBass.com: So you re-did most of the bass lines with the drummer and kept those, is that what you’re saying?
Bill Laswell: Yeah I kept everything that I played and didn’t even go back and ever listen to the original guides, because I wanted it to be with the drums not necessarily just playing in-time, but something that would bounce a little bit with the drums.
FretlessBass.com: Ginger Baker and Tony Williams – are they sort of half and half on the album?
Bill Laswell: Tony did three songs, the first three that we did, and Ginger I believe did four.
FretlessBass.com: Where did you record ginger Baker?
Bill Laswell: The same studio. In those days it was Power Station on the West Side. You know Power Station was the famous studio at that time. The engineer was Jason Corsaro and Jason was really famous for doing drum recording. He’s the guy who did the big drums of the 80s, you know the Power Station band, and anytime you hear those big gated drums in the 80s that was Jason. Ginger we tried him in the parking lot but it was too big and we decided to use him in the open room which is a great room anyway.
FretlessBass.com: It’s classic recording that I feel like doesn’t happen all that often anymore.
Bill Laswell: No not at all, not like that.
FretlessBass.com: Experimenting with physical spaces today it seems like it doesn’t happen. Do you still do that kind of thing when you’re recording?
Bill Laswell: Yes definitely. I do and I still work with Jason, you know sometimes whenever I can. He has a great group room in Jersey. There’s a studio in London called The Townhouse, a small room, all brick, very high ceilings and that’s where you hear like the record of Phil Collins that has the classic tom fill you know.
FretlessBass.com: “In the Air Tonight”.
Bill Laswell: That’s right. But that drum sound is from Townhouse, and Jason’s room in Jersey is very similar to The Townhouse. Occasionally we go out and use that room for drums.
FretlessBass.com: When you were recording the bass on this particular album for PIL, when you did those lines, were you using an amp or where we are going direct in?
Bill Laswell: I believe there was an AMPEG SVT, not even a vintage one, it was relatively new. There was a head and there was a cabinet which had 10s in it I think. And of course there was a DI. And knowing them it’s probably a really special DI, probably a tube DI or something. And then you have two channels and then you just get a balance that you like and that’s the sound.
FretlessBass.com: Did you treat the bass with the effects at all?
Bill Laswell: Not on that record.
FretlessBass.com: Compression after the fact, stuff like that?
Bill Laswell: With Jason there’s always compression on everything but is subtle. You wouldn’t see it as compression. It kind of just evens things out. And of course they have really good compressors so it’s not the cheap stuff. Cheap compressors you can hear right away, it squeezes the life out everything. With something really good and with someone who knows what they’re doing it’s subtle and it just smooths things out. It depends on how you play too. If you’re pretty consistent in terms of pressure you almost don’t ever need compression.
FretlessBass.com: So that album was done fairly quickly within a few weeks?
Bill Laswell: I would say the drum and bass things were done in probably three days. The music overdubs probably in about ten days, and the vocals probably in about five days, and the mixing about a week. We didn’t rush on anything and we didn’t waste any time and we didn’t lose any time.
FretlessBass.com: Are there any other projects that your fretless bass playing stands out to you or that you find most interesting?
Bill Laswell: There is probably a lot. I did a solo record using one of those Warwick, it’s a fretless acoustic bass, and I only use that bass on the whole record. It’s just that and nothing else, no instruments just bass and a few harmonic overdubs, from the same bass. It’s called Means of Deliverance. That should be available somewhere online. In fact if you go to our websites, MOD Technology, facebook and websites, it’ll show and mention all of these projects and there’s fretless bass on all kinds of stuff.
FretlessBass.com: Do you take any time off?
Bill Laswell: Well it’s all time off really if you think about it.
FretlessBass.com: I guess that’s true, if you’re loving what you do you’re right.
Bill Laswell: The only danger is when I’m not working, I feel like I should be working, because that’s all I’ve really done. I get a little guilty if I’m not actually manifesting something. So if I’m not working I try to invent some idea that creates some project that’s gonna come up soon.
FretlessBass.com: Well I’ll let you go for now. I really appreciate you talking with me here last minute like this at such short notice.
Bill Laswell: Oh no problem, thank you.
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