I’d be riding in the car with my dad, a Chevy, and the bass just seemed to be the thing coming out of that one mono speaker. And Motown was happening even before The Beatles. RB: Well, growing up in the mid ’60s, radio was definitely the thing. So there’d be three of us in the room wanting to play guitar, and inevitably they had me on bass.įBPO: It sounds like you were equally proficient on the bass and the guitar. Then, during my senior year in high school, I was living with a guy who was a jazz guitarist and we’d often invite another friend who was an excellent jazz guitarist over. My brother had started playing bass at that point, but eventually, he went to college and took my bass along with him, so I was without a bass for a while. And I said, “Hey, one of us ought to play bass.” So in ’67, I went out and bought myself a Japanese hollow body bass. So I started teaching him and he got good pretty quick. My brother had a great record collection, but he didn’t play. I was picking out single notes and really simple chords. My first memory of hearing the Beatles was reaching for my guitar, which barely played at that point. I wanted an electric guitar, but my brother talked me into buying an acoustic guitar in ’63. My older brother was into folk music, and I was into Chuck Berry and all of the pre-Beatles rock and roll. We didn’t have a drum set, but he bought a snare drum and a hi-hat, and I worked out on that for a little bit. My father was never a professional musician, but I think in his youth he had really wanted to be a big band drummer. His debut solo album Walk On was released in 2005. Beyond his work as a bass player, Beck is also a composer and producer. Over the years, he’s also worked with the likes of the Dixie Chicks, Jennifer Warnes, Darden Smith, Oz Noy and the Toshiko Akiyoshi/Lew Tabackin Big Band. Beck would also meet Robben Ford, with whom he would collaborate frequently during the 1980s and beyond. They would go on to play on Cohen’s 1979 album, Recent Songs, and began touring with him in ’79. Beck later relocated with the group to Los Angeles, where they hit it off with Leonard Cohen. The New York native originally made a name for himself in the Austin scene of the 1970s, playing alongside the Eric Johnson and the Vaughan brothers, and winning acclaim with his jazz fusion band, Passenger. It’s hard to describe Roscoe Beck’s career as anything short of remarkable. The band received a Grammy nomination for their 1993 album Mystic Mile.Esteemed bassist talks about his Austin days, working with Leonard Cohen, and current projectsĮxclusive interview with FBPO’s Jon Liebman He also played bass and served as musical director for Leonard Cohen's 2008–20–2013 world tours.īeck played with Robben Ford through the 1980s, which in 1992 resulted in the release of the debut album of Robben Ford & The Blue Line, with Tom Brechtlein on drums. The experience led him to start working as a record producer, and in 1986 he produced Jennifer Warnes' Grammy-nominated album Famous Blue Raincoat. After having shuffled between Austin and Los Angeles for a year, Beck was asked to play on Leonard Cohen's album Recent Songs. Later in the 1970s he formed an R&B-fusion band called "Passenger" which in 1979 played a gig in Los Angeles where Robben Ford was present and asked them to be the opening act on his tour. Roscoe Beck is from Poughkeepsie, NY, and he moved in 1971 to Austin, where he met and played with Eric Johnson and brothers Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimmie Vaughan.
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