Herbie Flowers

Deserves his own thread in the wake of his passing. Would make a claim he might as well be the sound of the Seventies as much as anyone else.

https://bestclassicbands.com/herbie-flowers-bassist-obituary-9-7-24/

RIP

Doo do doo, doo do doo, doo do doo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBXUP5GqYJs

^ the Walk On The Wildside bassline explained - worth a watch if you've never seen it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGS1UARM7o8

^haven't listened myself though

Nor this but it seems like it might be better;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlJRMU1CHng

https://www.guitarworld.com/features/listen-to-herbie-flowers-on-david-bowies-space-oddity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfHmKqZJ8aY

Hah, in a classic session man move, he only had the one 1960 Fender Jazz Bass since the beginning that he never ever swapped out any parts on. Didn't mention how often he changed the strings.

Tony VIsconti seems maybe to have forgotten that he assigned the "Space Oddity" session to Gus Dudgeon.

How did I never know all he did:

Flowers was always in demand as a bass player and created one of the best known of all hooks for Walk on the Wild Side. It has a brilliant, instantly recognisable ascending and descending twang, but Flowers was modest about it.

“People have often suggested that I should have got writer’s credits, but I just helped put an arrangement together,” he said in an interview. “Lou had the chords written out on a piece of paper and my job was to come up with the bass line.”

In another interview, he said: “You do the job and get your arse away. You take a £12 fee; you can’t play a load of bollocks.” The fee was actually, it has been said, the grand sum of £17, which was more than the reported £9 he got for a three-hour session on Bowie’s Space Oddity in 1969.

Flowers is said to have recorded more than 20,000 sessions, including for Dusty Springfield, George Harrison, Serge Gainsbourg and David Essex.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/sep/08/herbie-flowers-bassist-lou-reed-walk-on-the-wild-side-dies-aged-86

I always wonder about exactly which Gainsbourg recordings were his since I some I thought were by him were actually Brian Odgers.

Ha, or could be neither: https://www.talkbass.com/threads/serge-gainsbourg-that-je-taime-bass-sound-again.1373990/

Most thorough career survey I've seen, incl. standing up to/leading a band revolt vs. notorious cheapskate Bowie:
https://variety.com/2024/music/news/herbie-flowers-bassist-walk-on-the-wild-side-dead-1236137298/
Bowie didn't learn his lesson, or maybe forgot--cocaine is a helluva drug---and right before the Let's Dance tour, rising star Stevie Ray Vaughn discovered that he would only be getting union scale: couldn't get a raise, so he bailed. Said he could do a lot better than that even w/o leaving Texas

That SRV story isn't exactly true. They'd worked out a pretty sweet deal where Vaughan could bring his band along on Bowie's dime and do their own gigs in Europe between Bowie's stadium shows, but then at the 11th hour Vaughan's then-manager asked for a substantial pay raise (and who supposedly actually uttered the line about more $$ in Texas as a negotiation tactic) and Bowie's management balked without consulting Bowie (who claimed he would have payed up), so SRV & Co. got stranded at DFW airport & Earl Slick got the call.

Drummer friend of mine told me Earl Slick is his cousin, I think, and that he heard a lot of complaints about teh cheapness firsthand

I believe it's herbie on johnny harris's gorgeous "footprints on the moon", playing a similar groove to the one he plays on "the old man's back again".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIDs109Pjx8