Bass Player Interview with Matt Malley

Oct. 94 Bass Player magazine about Matt if you want to put it up. COUNTING CROWS' MATT MALLEY Charity before Chops "I come up with my best bass parts when there isn't a bass in sight," admits Matt Malley. "I have to call on what fits the song, instead of what my hands are used to doing." Malley's intuition and butter smooth technique lend a casual beauty to Counting Crows' wildly succesfull Geffen debut, August and Everything After, a record that flies in the face of much of today's slop- rock.

"When this band started," the 31-year old recounts, "I made a conscious decision to 'be a bass player'-to play a song on the bass rather than just play bass. I have chops," he boasts, laughing. "I can play a million notes a second at Guitar Center and get a little harem of gaping employees, but with this band I decided to play what fits. It's easy to draw attention to yourself on your instrument; instead, I thought, 'How can I enhance the song?" Such thinking paid off-August is full of Malley's charitable enhancements. Dig the stone-simple major thirds that drive the verse in "Rain King," or the gurgling fretless figures that percolate beneath the surface of songs as disparate as "Ghost Train" and "Murder of One."

Coming up with such varied parts is, according to Malley, a matter of not trying the tried and true. "You can train monkeys to mimic the kick drum," he grins. "I hate the words 'locked' and 'rhythm section' in the same sentence. There's nothing musical about that; that kind of technique is all conditioning. It's like, you know a certain lick or pattern, and suddenly you find out you have versions of it in all your songs. It's not spontaneous at all."

Though he grew up jammin' to Yes records on his trusty Rickenbacker 4001 and spent the late '80's slappin' Steinbergers, Malley has settled on the fretless Music Man basses for most of his work with Counting Crows. His cherry- sunburst '60's Hofner shows up, too, growling through a miked SWR Redhead, on several August cuts and occasionally onstage as well. But most of the time Malley opts to go fretless. "I prefer it. You can wring more out of it than you can a fretted bass. But you need to crank up the mids a little when you're playing in a band situation, because you need them for intonation. If it's all bottom and high end, you can't really hear the pitch." Malley has recently "come back home," as he puts it, to an Ampeg SVT classic head and matching 8X10 cabinet.

For the past nine months, Counting Crows has been taking their sparsely arranged pop majesty on tour, moving from opener to headliner in the process. (This summer, they'll be opener again-for the Rolling Stones.) And while horror stories of the road are beginning to pile up-like the one about the dingbat stagehand who roasted Matt's prized Hofner with a misplaced light-most of it seems, to Malley, as if it couldn't have come at a better time. "I'd built up all this musical kindling," he explains, "and right when I had pretty much given up, it ignited. I'm just so excited to be a musician right now."

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