BV: Where was I born? Eugene.
GC: So you’re local.
BV: Local, yeah. Most of my life.
GC: And have you lived other places, though?
BV: I was born in 1941 in Eugene, and lived down in Douglas County, in Drain, Oregon, for a while, where my grandfather lives. And then moved to Cottage Grove, went to high school in Cottage Grove, moved to Eugene, got married, moved to Junction City, moved to Philomath area.
GC: Wow, you are an
BV: Yeah.
GC: What brought you to Corvallis?
BV: Work. I taught school for awhile, so I came up to this area. I taught music.
GC: That’s great. Man of the people I’ve talked to have taught music. That’s great to hear. If music wasn’t your primary concern, what types of things would you do?
BV: I can’t imagine. Music would be the thing.
GC: So as you’ve traveled along, you’re always involved?
BV: Yeah.
GC: Do you sing?
BV: Uh, I can sing Tequila.
GC: (laughs) I know the song. What instruments do you play?
BV: Well, I started out playing trumpet, many years ago. And then evolved into bass and I can tell you how that happened later on.
GC: Okay. How would you describe the music that you play—what type of audience do you generally get, what type of music do you bring to them?
BV: Well, all kinds of audiences, because I’ve played all kinds of music, I have. There are very few types of music I haven’t played through the years.
GC: Tell me the groups you’re playing for now?
BV: Umm, right now I’m playing—I gotta think of my rehearsal schedule. On Mondays I play with, we rehearse with Ed Dee’s Friends (see Ed Dee on this site's home page), and that’s kind of a jazz fusion rock group. And Wednesdays I play with the Hilltop Big Band, which is music from the 40s up into some present tunes also. And I started with them twenty, twenty-five years ago, and only played briefly with them on trumpet for maybe one season, and then stopped playing with them and came back to it a couple of years ago on bass. And then I play with Webster Chicago, it’s a
Yeah. And then I play church music—I accompany the choir, play bass behind the choir at my church. And that’s really it right now.
GC: Sounds great! Your first experience of music—do you have any recollection?
BV: Oh yeah. I grew up around—there was music all around me. My grandfather was a banjo player; my dad played violin, mandolin; my mother played accordion.
GC: Couldn’t escape it, could you?
BV: No. My mother’s mother was a piano teacher, and my grandfather—my dad’s dad—had attended a
GC: That is great. Do you remember any particular song that struck you as a child? Or just too many?
BV: Too many. It just goes on and on. There were all kinds of music, though. I know my dad’s favorite band was Red Nichols and His Five Pennies, kind of a Dixieland band. And his favorite singer was Lena Horne, back in the day.
GC: Do you remember what the first song was you ever had to play in front of an audience?
BV: Oh, jeez. This would have been something in grade school with a little melodic, I think. I remember playing in some kind of a talent show—Friday afternoon talent show, and standing up and playing some little tune, I can’t tell you what it was. It could’ve been Jingle Bells or something like that for all I know. It was some little simple tune. But then I got the applause and I thought, wow, this is pretty good. (laughs)
GC: Did you win any awards? Or talent shows?
BV: No, I don’t recall that.
GC: So you’ve been playing for an audience for many years.
BV: Many, many years. Yeah. Well, like I said, I was born in ’41. And so through the ‘40s, those were the WWII years, there was lots of music around in those days. It was on the radio and on the 78 records.
GC: How long have you considered yourself a professional?
BV: Probably since about 1959. I joined a musicians’ union, and from then on I was getting paid to play music.
GC: Do you remember your first paid gig?
BV: I played for a Mormon church function. Some kind of—that wasn’t my church, but it was some kind of youth thing, youth dance or something. And I played with a little band of people we pulled together from high school. In fact my first band, which I led, was a high school group and it was called the Original Dixie Cat Jazz Band. And we played—I don’t know if you’re familiar, but they used to publish books that were called Combo Orks—combo orchestrations.
GC: No.
BV: And they would be published—there would be three books, a C book, a B flat book, and an E flat book. Well, that covered all the band instruments. And each book had parts, that were three parts: a solo part, a second part, and a third part. And so you could mix any combination of instruments together if you had the right three books for this same tune. You could have background, harmony parts, and you could have lead parts—and everyone could have a lead part and switch back and forth. Well, I gathered together a bunch of those books and took it on the road, played all over the place.
GC: What a great idea.
BV: Yeah.
GC: Did you go through the starving artist type of phase?
BV: That didn’t happen till later.
GC: What brought that on? What was the obstacle, or just—?
BV: Well, that was later on. When I had a family and had kids and decided I needed some more money. So had to—I sorta gave up music for a while and went corporate and joined HP—Hewlett Packard—and made money, and put music on the side for awhile.
GC: Who’s been your greatest supporter since—I guess sounds like you just grew up in it—everybody.
BV: Yeah, family. Family. Of course, once I got married, my wife was probably the biggest supporter I’ve ever had. She goes to most of my jobs, to most of my gigs.
GC: Is she musical?
BV: She played clarinet in middle school, but I made the mistake of correcting her armature one time and she put the horn way and never played it again. So I have to be careful about things like that.
GC: Other than music, do you have any other creative outlets?
BV: No, no, I read a lot. I read books. I’ve always liked the outdoors. I had both my boys in scouting, and then also they were in sports, so I was trucking them back and forth to sports things all the time. So when the kids were home, everything kinda circulated around whatever their activities were.
GC: You said earlier that your kids—one of your children was in a band. How about the other one?
BV: They’re both musicians.
GC: Both musicians? Where are they playing?
BV: The oldest boy is in Brazil, and he’s a recording artist down there. He plays keyboard for Nando Reis. He had to leave the country to make money, you know. And the younger boy’s in the Bay area, and he plays in a band down there, a couple of bands. Well, from one band to another. He played in a group called—what was the name of that group? I can’t recall now. I’ll have to think about that. The Beat Down? No, not the Beat Down. It’ll come back—I can get you that name.
GC: Yeah, I’d love to put that as a link.
BV: And he’s with another group now, and theirs is an odd name too, and I can’t remember it now. No, the first band was the Get Down. The Get Down. G-E-T Down, D-O-W-N. And then that band fell apart; actually they were mostly college kids, and when they got a little bit older, they started spinning off into their careers, and the band folded pretty quickly. And now he’s playing with the Seething Brunswicks—I think that’s what it’s called.
GC: I’ll check the website.
BV: Yeah. They’ve got a website. And that’s in Berkeley, in that area where he works. He’s—he considers himself a musician, but he’s smart enough to have a day job. Whereas my older son, his day job is his music—that’s what he does.
GC: How do you—how do you relax? Does music relax you, or just reading, or—?
BV: Eh. We watch television, that sort of thing. The normal things. I do have a guitar set up right next to the couch where I watch the television so if something interesting comes on, I’ll grab it up—it’s a bass—I’ll grab it up and play along with whatever’s going on the television. And that’s relaxing for me.
GC: Does anyone in particular influence your music now?
BV: My wife would say that my music—she says, if he asks you what you listen to, what music you listen to, you’ll have to tell them you listen to your own music. And that’s true. I listen to the bands I’m playing with. There was a time, though, early on, when I listened to a lot of—oh, the Charles Mingus band, some of that stuff. Who were my influences back then?
Ray Brown, a bass player; but I listened to the Adderley Brothers, Cannonball Adderley and his brother, not the trumpet player—I listened to Cannonball play saxophone, so I listened to the saxophone player. Yeah, a lot of jazz. I listened mostly to jazz in the early days. Lately I've been listening to a lot of Brazilian musicians from my connection through my son in Rio de Janeiro.
GC: Anything that you can remember in terms of—you played so many years and so many songs, are there some that just keep coming back through the door again, play them over and over again?
BV: No, not really. In fact, I am pretty comfortable at faking music, you know. Because I used to—
GC: Could you explain that?
BV: Well, people tell me—when I’m in a band, they ask, Well, do you know such-and-such number. And I really don’t try to explain anymore that I don’t really know that number, but let’s play it. It’s really—I say yeah, I know that number. What key do you want to play it in? And then I just play it. My ear’s good enough I can do that. And that’s developed over time. So the answer now is, Do you know that number, and I say yes, whether I do or not. Let’s play it.
GC: That brings up another subject—you said about your hearing, about the ability to do that. Do you feel like you were born with that, or grew into that? Is it learned or is it environmental, or—?
BV: A little of all of that, a little of all of that. I’m sure that there’s some of it that’s inborn from my family, because there’s always been musicians in the family. But I’ve always been around music, it’s always been going on, so to me that’s almost a second language—or maybe even a first language. I’ve listened a lot. And I went ahead—I went to college and studied music; I have a degree in it. But I was also fortunate—I mentioned earlier that I was born in ’41, and that was at the beginning of WWII, and right after WWII—well, during the war, a lot of bands went into the service, to serve their country. A lot of really fine bands. And they played—they got together in the service with other musicians and it was a good mixing place for musicians. And out of that, those guys after the war, the ones who survived, came back and on the GI Bill went to college and studied music and became teachers. Well, by the time I got into high school, in the ’50s, a lot of those guys who were professional musicians first, then got their credentials through the GI Bill and became music teachers—those were the teachers I got to work with. And so I had a really good background.
GC: What an experience!
BV: I had teachers who taught theory right from the beginning, of how you do things, not just how to play your instrument. But—what was the sense of music, how did it work, what were all the parts? So I learned how to listen through them, though their help. And—and I can remember the names of my music teachers more than any other teachers. They were the ones who made the biggest mark on me.
GC: Are any of them still around?
BV: My high school—the band teacher that was in my senior year of high school, Caleb Standafer, he’s retired from music now, but after college and after time in the service I came back and actually played music with him in a band—he had a big band—and that was a great experience, because it was also a band that was full of his peers—fine musicians all around me, so I couldn’t help but improve, being with guys like that.
GC: What a great experience.
BV: Yeah. Bucky Steel was my band director my first three years in high school. He went from Cottage Grove to—I think he taught at University of Arizona, Tucson, in their music department. I went down to visit him after I got out of high school and spent some time with him, and he was still putting out good music down there, teaching people.
GC: It’s a shame the way music departments are going these days, getting them cut, along with physical education, and the liberal arts.
BV: Yeah. Well, I taught school myself, for about six years. And towards the end of that it was getting to be just really difficult, with budget cuts and squeezing down—asking to take on more classes—and not really getting the improvement in pay because they were fighting the contracts all the time. So I eventually got out of that; just because it didn’t fit me well, so I worked at a music store, managed a music store, did that for a few years. And by then I had, like I said, I had kids coming on, family was growing, and I needed someplace where I could make better money. So that’s why I went to the corporate world. And the interesting thing about that is—when I interviewed for my first job, I remember—at Hewlett Packard—they looked at my resume, and they jokingly said, Well, if we ever start a band, we’ll give you a call, because that’s what my resume was—entirely music. But eventually I did get in, worked hard for a few years, then got into management, didn’t have to work anymore, just made money.
GC: (laughs) I’d like that job.
BV: Yeah. Then another thing, I was in an Air Force band with the military, and had another opportunity to have really fine musicians all around me. By that time—I went into the Air Force as a trumpet player in a band, but I got the job as a trumpet player because I played bass—I mean I got the job in the band, in the military—it was an audition, and I passed the audition, went through basic training, went straight to the base that I auditioned for. Had papers for that. They used me as a trumpet player, but I got the job on the strength of my bass playing ability. They had tuba players, but they didn’t have any string basses at that time. But they had an awful lot of combo work, where they needed bass players. Because we would play for officers’ clubs and NCO clubs, any visiting dignitaries, you do the marching band thing to welcome them onto the base, but then there’d be a function in the evening and they’d bring the combo in. So I was working all the time, while I was in the service too.
GC: That’s gotta be great experience.
BV: The last two years of my military—I was only in for four years—actually three and a half years, but I got an early out because I was overseas—but I spent the last two years in Japan. And I was working on a bases, in a band, in a military band, an Air Force band, but I was also gigging at all the clubs around the area, around Tokyo. And I was playing with Japanese musicians on the side, and I was making more money at that time playing music than the top sergeant of our band, who was a career person. Because I was just pulling it in from every which way. It was great—great musicians.
GC: You started talking about the trumpet and the bass, do you have preferences? Or are they all your babies, so to speak?
BV: Well, I’m traditionally trained on trumpet. Went through all of the taking the lessons, and that was my main instrument through high school, and when I went into college I went in as a trumpet player, but there was a time right at the end of high school, when I had that little—the Dixieland band, and we had a summer job replacing a band called the Mellow D’s, that were playing at—I believe it was the Moose Club. Well, the band took the summer off, and we moved in with my kids’ band. And I was playing trumpet at the time. And we had—I had two drummers, one of whom played bass, and he played bass most of the time. Well, the two drummers were in competition with each other all the time, and they got into a fight. See, we were all underage, so when we took a break, we would have to leave the room where all the alcohol was, go into the other room, which was a game room with pool tables. And those guys got into a fight in there for some reason and the band split—we lost the job for a couple of weeks because we had a fight. (laughs) And the band split, and half the band went with one drummer and the other half went with me. Well, it turns out the drummer who stayed with me was not the bass player. So we put the band back together, minus the bass player, and it just did not work. So I talked to my dad about it, and he solved the problem and went to town and went to a pawn shop, and found an old string bass, and we bought that string bass—it was an old German bass, probably a hundred years old at the time, really fine instrument, but we got it for not very much money. And the old joke about “teach a bass player three chords and you can get a gig”? It’s true. It’s basically true. I learned how to play a blues scale, which is three chords, and started working right away with the band. Well, I started out playing trumpet and bass both with the band, but every time I laid the bass down to play trumpet, the band would fall apart. So it didn’t take too long to find out that I really needed to stay on bass. So from that time on, bass was primary, trumpet was secondary. And I still occasionally get it out and play it for Easter services at church, and that kind of thing, but I still really consider myself a bass player now, not a trumpet player.
GC: (laughs) That’s—that’s a long way around.
BV: Yeah. So, self-taught on bass, traditionally taught on trumpet. But I had the advantage of being able to read music, because I learned that on trumpet, so I transferred that knowledge to bass, taught myself how to do it, and then I had the good fortune—because I knew how to read music—I got a lot of gigs with older musicians. These guys that had returned from the military and were playing out on the field. So I was playing with guys 20 years older than me, playing at Elks Clubs all around the valley. We played Salem, we played Lebanon, we played Albany, we played Corvallis, we played Eugene, Springfield, Cottage Grove, Sutherlin. It was just—you could make money playing music back in those days.
GC: That’s pretty amazing. That’s great to hear. From what I understand, it seems to be coming back a little bit, in terms of—not the way it was?
BV: Well. (laughs) Not like it was then. ‘Cause I was—we were making, in the ’60s, we were making $50 a man. In the ’60s. I had a 1963 Volkswagen that I paid less than $2,000 for, brand new. Now, that car is $25,000, something like that. I was making $50 a night playing music then. Now, we’re lucky to get $50 for the band. At least in the circles that I’m able to play in now. So we’ve got a long ways to go before we get back to where it was then.
GC: What is your preference—upright string bass guitar, is there a preference? Is one better, or not better?
BV: Well, right now the preference is electric bass guitar, for me. There are fine bass players who play upright string bass. What I found was, when I came back from the military, came back from Japan in the middle ’60s, late ’60s, the transition had already begun in popular music, country, western—everything was moving over to the electric bass. So I got the electric bass and took that instrument up.
The difference between the two—there’s a sound difference: the acoustic bass, the string bass, has a warm sound, but because it’s not electrified, there’s a lot of tone decay. So you pull a string, you plunk the string, and immediately the sound begins to die rather rapidly compared to what an electric bass is. But an electric bass you pull the string and it’ll—the sound will continue for a long time before it dies out. Much longer. Eventually it will die out, but that tone decay is the biggest difference, plus the fact that you can amplify it and make it as loud as you want. So I was having trouble—not only was had the scene changed, and electric bass was preferenced, partly because everyone else was playing electric instruments, or the horn players were playing through sound systems, the sound was just much bigger, from the early ’70s on. So there was a difference, but I was finding that I could not hear the bass as well in that situation—the string bass. I had to stand it a certain way next the wall so it would echo off it and I could hear it, and if I was too close to the cymbals on the drum that would kill my ears—and you know, it got to be a fight. I had no problem switching over to the electric bass guitar.
GC: Of course they now have stand-up electric basses.
BV: Yeah. But I’ve already become comfortable with the bass guitar. And you might have noticed, I’m now playing a fretless bass guitar. And that’s much like the old string bass, without the frets.
GC: Interesting. Do you keep up with the technology, other than what you just were talking about, in terms of CDs, do you have a website, that type of thing?
BV: I don’t have one of my own. Some of the bands that I play on have, Ed Dee (see Ed Dee on this site) does, he has a website, so some of my music will begin showing up on there.
GC: Rolling Stone Magazine said that 2011 digital sales outstripped physical sales of CDs for the first time ever. And so that’s kind of a landmark. Do you have any thoughts on file sharing, how people can pull things off the internet?
BV: Well, based on what my oldest son—both my sons—what they tell me is that the whole idea of having a record is not where the money is anymore. That’s just a way of advertising. And the money comes from playing the shows, and tours, being on tour. And it’s already swung away from—the goal used to be to get a recording contract with a big company. That’s turned out to not be a very good way to go, because the recording companies get the biggest part of the money that comes out of your recording, and you’re basically plugged into what they want you to do, so you don’t have the freedom to make your own music. You have to make it to a pattern that the companies think will sell. So the whole recording industry has changed. Actually, people—I was talking to a guy just the other day that has single recordings on the net that you can buy for 99 cents a shot, just for one tune. And comparing the money you can make off one tune if you sell a thousand of those, you make a lot more money than if you were to sell an album. An album would cost more, but you’re not going to get as many customers to buy it. And as far as the file sharing, there’s some problems there, but it depends on where the musician is in the process. If they're just trying to get their name out there, then it’s to their advantage to have those things shared. If they’re trying to make a living off what they sell, then that needs to be protected. So there’s kind of a double-edged sword there. You need to have the exposure, which means free access to your music, but at the same time you need to have some kind of money flow coming back from your work.
GC: If you could perform with anyone living or dead, is there anybody—?
BV: Bonamassa, guitar player. Joe Bonamassa. He’s outstanding. I’d like to play with him. I’d like to play with The Roots on, what is that? Jimmy Fallon. That band is awesome. Lately I’ve been watching Dancing with the Stars, more than the Talent or the Voice or those things, because they’re doing all cover stuff. But Dancing with the Stars, they have good, live music with their bands, and it’s different every time. And I find myself, when that’s on, grabbing the bass and playing with those guys. If I were to be doing studio work, I would like to be doing studio work with something like that. That would be awesome.
GC: What do you feel distinguishes an artist from an outstanding musical technician?
BV: I made a point earlier about my advantage of having some outstanding music teachers who were professionals before they were educators. I think one of the problems right now in music in public schools, which is where people get their training, most of the time, is that a lot of the teachers are educators first and professionals later. So they don’t have a good—I don’t think they have a good understanding of the artistry part, the creating part of music that they can pass on to students. So consequently, the young students now who are coming out of music programs, they’re good technicians, they can play their instrument well, but as far as plugging that into a musical, artistic endeavor, it’s very difficult for a lot of them to do that.
Yeah. So the artists have the ability to make music, no matter what the circumstances are, with other musicians. They can make it work. An example would be, like in sports, when you have—if you’re in a high school team and they’re putting a team together, they will pick the best players, but most of the time they will plug those players into a preconceived idea of how the sport should be played. A smarter thing would be to take the players that you have who have special skills, and figure out how to use those skills and make your team from that. Same thing in music. If you have five musicians and they all have individual skills, you figure out what those skills could—how they could best be utilized in a musical, artistic endeavor. And if you’ve got the right mix of musicians, you can go it that way. But if you say I want the build a funk band, and I’ve got this country musician and this folk musician and try to plug those guys in, and say, I want you to play funk, it’s going to be very difficult to come out with anything artistic, even though those individuals may be very good technicians, they may not be able to put that into an artistically great sound. Because they don’t have the skills to go that direction. They do have skills; you need to figure out what those skills are and then let that grow. One of the problems I have with cover bands, in fact, is that’s the thing—you’re trying to fit musicians into a cover sound, and that’s very difficult to do. It would make more sense, if you want to cover music, somebody’s music, is to play that music but make it your own. Make it fit the group of musicians that you have playing. And that’s not very well accepted to the listening musicians, because when they hear a cover song, they want it to sound like the original artist. And that’s just very uncomfortable for me to do that.
GC: Do you write a lot of your own?
BV: No, I don’t, I don’t. I have a few ideas that come up from time to time and I will collaborate with the musicians around me and put my ideas into their work—in that sense, yeah. But original stuff I don’t really have very much. That’s just not what I do. My job is to make other musicians sound better.
GC: It does seem that the bass man is always in the back.
BV: Yeah.
GC: That’s not the glamour role of the band.
BV: No, that’s not the normal place for the lead person to be.
GC: Music is . . . ?
BV: Um. Life.
GC: Music makes me feel . . .?
BV: Like I am a part of something bigger.
GC: Support music because . . .—why?
BV: Because that—the artist’s function in the world is to provide new visions, new ideas, a new approach to something. And if we don’t support those people—those artists or musicians or whatever kind of art they’re doing—if we don’t support them, then we lose that new perspective, and you get a really stagnant, static society.
GC: Wonderful.
