ilovefuzz.com

chronologically:

Pete Townshend
Neil Young and Stephen Stills
Jerry Garcia
John Cipollina
Jorma Kaukonen
Albert King
Muddy Waters
Duane Allman and Dickey Betts
Steve Marriott and Peter Frampton in Humble Pie
Carlos Santana
Keith Richards and Mick Taylor
Joni Mitchell
Leo Kottke
David Lindley
John Fahey
Richard Thompson
Robert Fripp
Brian Eno
Roger Miller of Mission of Burma
Glenn Branca
The Edge
Peter Buck
Bob Mould
Neil Halstead and Christian Saville in Slowdive
Kevin Shields
post-rock and ambient music generally, but particularly early Labradford, Landing, and Boards of Canada

Santana for sure. Abraxas was a life changer.

first wave:

mick ronson, the edge, carlos alomar

second wave:

robert fripp, adrian belew, reeves gabrels, john maclaughlin, sugizo, inoran, hisashi, takuro

third wave:

jonsi, daniel kessler, paul banks, kevin shields

i left out Mick Ronson. and Jonsi. and Daevid Allen of Gong, who was the first to do the screwdriver-bowing-the-strings thing that everyone from Fred Frith to the gybe! guys used since.

Violin:

Warren Ellis
Zoe Keating
Miles Davis
Alim Quasimov
John Frusciante
Kristoffer Rygg

and on guitar:

John Frusciante (again)
Aaron Turner
Erik Mongrain
Jeff Lang
Adam Jones
Steve Von Till

x

Bass: Steve Harris, Roger Patterson, Brian Ritchie, Ron Royce, Jaco.
Guitar: John Haughm, Mark Kozelek, Jason Martin, Ken Andrews, dudes from Candlemass (even though Leif probably wrote the riffs), Billy Corgan pre-1995/reunion/religious shift/conspiracy obsessions/transphobia.

Greg Ginn (Black Flag)
Thurston Moore/Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth)
Nick Blinko (Rudimentary Peni)
Kevin Shields (MBV)
Dave Chandler(St Vitus)
Jus Oborn (Electric Wizard)
Norman Westberg (Swans)
Bubba Dupree (Void)
Dylan Carlson (Earth)
William Reid (JAMC)
Ron Asheton (Stooges)

Jimi Hendrix in terms of style
David Gilmour in terms of tone
Frank Zappa in terms of creativity (I also look alot like him, just a smaller mustache)
and
Al Di Meola cuz, he's got chops, which I want, so it inspires me to practice.

Yah, those are the guys if you think of all of teh reasons I listed and put those qualities together that's kinda what my music sounds like. But seriously, I look like Frank Zappa.

The Usual: Cobain, Zappa, Hendrix, Iommi, White, Page.

The Not As Usual: Mike Sullivan, Dave Sampson (The Hunters), Paul Banks/Daniel Kessler, Andy Hull, Scott Unseen, The members of GY!BE, members of NIN, Dallas Green, Dan Auerbach.

ian williams
spencer seim
sam zurick

dubkitty wrote:i left out Mick Ronson. and Jonsi. and Daevid Allen of Gong, who was the first to do the screwdriver-bowing-the-strings thing that everyone from Fred Frith to the gybe! guys used since.

Huh. I always thought of Keith Rowe as the progenitor of that sort of thing.

Television
The album Imaginational Anthem
GY!BE
George Harrison
Matthew Bellamy (fuck twilight)

Those have probably been the most influential on my playing

i'd have to research when Rowe started doing it. Daevid was doing it by 1966.

i didn't even talk about bass players. probably because i don't have that many bass-playing influences, and don't really think of myself as a BASSIST despite the fact that i find bass-playing much more fun than guitaring.

Jack Casady of the Jefferson Airplane was the whole reason i wanted to play a stringed instrument in the first place. having grown up on R&B i was very bass-oriented, and the the way he used the bass as he roared, blasted, and generally marched through the rhythm section of the Airplane like a squadron of Panzers enthralled me. i still enjoy winding up some distortion and booming out some octave 8/8 runs and 12/8 pain over a 4/4 beat to loosen some bowels, but nobody will ever thicken the air the way Jack did back in the early 70s when he had banks of 15" JBLs tall as two-story apartment buildings that acoustically coupled when you stacked them.

i've been very influenced by the way Phil Lesh played in the Grateful Dead, which is really a jazz-based extension of Paul McCartney's playing in the Beatles: counter-melodies, passing tones, thirds, fifth, and sevenths in the bass against chords in the ensemble, two- and three- note chords, and classical counterpoint, all floated over the drums so the bass fills in between the drums and the guitars.

conversely, i was very influenced by Tim Drummond and Billy Talbot's playing with Neil Young, which is the polar opposite of Casady and Lesh; play the tonic on the beat, maybe a fifth if it's apropos, a third if you're going to walk up to a note for the chorus, all with the bass knob on your Precision Bass (and it MUST be a Precision Bass) turned down to about two, tucked in with the drummer as if you were twin babies off for a nap. sometimes you have to be the bottom brick in the foundation, or the capstone that holds the arch together, and your position is utterly critical and must remain absolutely stationary. it's not unusual for me to stand with my foot actually on the front rim of the bass drum when i'm playing bass with a band so i can stay that tight to the drums.

i wound up picking up a certain amount of ideas and riffs unintentionally in the 1980s from Rick Danko of The Band and from John Kahn, the bassist in the Jerry Garcia Band. i wasn't particularly a fan of either player, particularly Kahn, who i found really annoying, but since i listened to a lot of Band and JGB in those years their playing got into my ears by osmosis. i still have a couple of John's locks that i'm stuck with.

Greg Norton's playing in Husker Du is also an adaptation, in its own way, of the McCartney approach to punk. he uses thirds in the bass a LOT, and his general approach to reharmonizing the songs by avoiding the tonic is very subtle and highly underrated, and IMO a little-noted precursor to MBV.

since i really learned to play on fretless, i have a certain amount of jazz influence. like anybody who plays fretless, there's a bit of Jaco. i never cared for his exhibitionistic side much, but i really love his lyrical playing, e.g. on the Joni Mitchell records, and you'll occasionally hear a bit of that in high, drawn out notes in the upper register. my major jazz influence, though, is Charlie Haden, who played on just about every post-Miles/pre Dave Holland acoustic jazz recording i truly love.

for modern influences, i aspire to be more like Mani from the Stone Roses and Primal Scream. his combination of relentless drive and warm Afro-reggae feel is irresistable to me.

with prepared guitar and extended guitar techniques, there's going to be some trouble establishing firsts...it's like the "first solidbody guitar" question. then there's the question of whether Rowe did a prepared-guitar with screwdriver under/between the strings like the Sonic Youth guys, or the kind of perpendicular bowing of the string Daevid does which you can see in the "Glissando Guitar" videos from the Gong Unconvention in A'dam 2006 on YouTube or in tons of Gong videos/clips over the years, and which the gybe! guy does in that beautiful bit on the end of the ...Skinny Fists album.