Let's Meditate On Art With Matt Freeman From Rancid (Not An Interview)
"If you wanna get the feeling and you wanna get it right / then the music's got to be loud" - Rancid, "Radio"
2024 is an album release year for Lazy & Entitled. Brendan and I are hard at work on at least two Shipwrecked Sailor records—one faster and more punk-influenced than this one and one a little more like these, but evolved. B & The Nothingness songs are being written, but I don’t want to commit Brendan to rushing to finish anything just by writing a blog. Point is, the two of us are making music. Since this blog is at least partially a record of my thought processes while these projects gestate, I want to talk about someone I’ve rediscovered as a hero in the last year: Rancid and Operation Ivy bassist Matt Freeman.
Here’s a delightful short interview he did with Fender. Let’s unpack some of it.
“You hear it and you just become enthralled with it. I just wanna be a bass player.”
Hell yeah dude. If you have the kind of ear that allows you to appreciate bass, if you have the musical sophistication enough to listen to what’s happening under the solo, congratulations! Life is that much richer for you. You are not a person swept away by flashiness, you are not overly wowed by shiny objects. You are a person who feels music, and your sensory perception of the world is a blessing.
Personally, I have almost no sense of smell. I light candles all the time and sort of notice them. My tasting is fine, and I notice when, say, Mal is baking focaccia. But I can’t smell, and am aware that my life is lesser for it.
If you listen to music but don’t pay attention to the bass, try it out. Put on a record you love and listen beneath the lead parts—vocals, guitars, horns, strings, keys, whatever. Especially try it with jazz—Coltrane’s Giant Steps or Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um are good ones. Coltrane’s because his sax playing is so dominant that listening to the bass allows you to understand the music as more than noodly sax. Mingus’s because, well, he’s the jazz bass player.
“I’ve been told that my left handed technique is kind of terrible.”
Hey, Matt Freeman, my fingers are tiny, too. I can barely reach six frets if I strain. My technique? Eh, it’s passable.
“One for me, one for them” is an eternal push-pull for artists. You can think of it as George Clooney doing the Oceans movies so he can finance Good Night and Good Luck, but it can get even more micro. Not every bass line can be “Journey To The End Of East Bay.” Sometimes you gotta play the roots, maybe a fifth here and there.
This applies to technique, in my view. My parents and brother are classical musicians, which means they play extraordinarily difficult music that demands precision on fretless instruments that are unforgiving to anything but precision. I’m not not a classical musician, but my main genres are punk and jazz—punk being one of the sloppier genres, jazz being the genre famous for no wrong notes. My point is, there’s more to music than technique: there’s emotion in hauling off and rake-slapping all six strings on your guitar even when you’re playing a two-note chord. There’s a spirit that gets summoned when you bend into a note while also closing your eyes. It’s cool in a way that I shouldn’t have to explain when your half-note trill is slightly out of tune because you’re holding your guitar three feet off your body and giving the audience Satan horns with your right hand.
You think Hendrix played with his teeth to audition for Amadeus?
Watch Matt rip this “Maxwell Murder” solo in Japan. That part when he drops his left hand and just motors the open G while wiping his face with that “y’all get ready” look on his face? Doesn’t matter that he’s only playing one note, the solo gets cooler, you know? And yeah, his left hand technique is not what you’d teach. So?
“What the hell does that mean? Who knows, but it looks cool and it’s fun.”
This is an important and underrated aspect of evaluating art. Are you having fun? Do you look cool? Sometimes you’re not having fun—I love Beloved or City of God or Saving Private Ryan, but those aren’t exactly water-skiing on Center Hill Lake. Sometimes I’ll see a poet perform a poem and go absolutely wild for the performance, for the special interior miracles that happen at every good poetry reading, but also think “I wonder if I’d like that poem if I only read it on the page.” Feels like answering my own question, though. A poem should sing on the page and in performance—but to love a performance is still to love a poem.
And yeah, sometimes you don’t know what it means. Here’s my favorite piece of piano music, sound off in the comments if you know what it means (yes, I can translate the title).
“I always played it the way I thought I heard it…that’s how you get your technique or your style or whatever.”
You are never going to be exactly your heroes, and no one wants you to be (would you want Jaco Pastorius in Rancid?) There’s a difference between “you can tell Zachary Schomburg read a lot of James Tate” and “Kobe just straight-up copied MJ.” Too much copying and people notice/are put off, plus you’re setting yourself up for endless mental anguish.
Every single riff I write, I always think “not as good as Mario and Erick.” True or not, if I let those thoughts hang around too long, I’d never release any music. I don’t know about you, but when I don’t finish a project, it languishes in my brain, atrophying and rotting and tugging at me. It’s better to finish stuff than not.
“if that floats your boat, fuck yeah, then I’m down…there’s other people…that just wanna play…and that’s cool too I mean it’s art you know? You should just do what the fuck you wanna do and make music and just, you know, play as much as you can.”
Here we have Matt extolling the virtues of a lot of people making as much music as they can. I’m not gonna disagree.
I will tell a slightly personal story: as a young 2000s punk who got to Rancid by way of NOFX and got to NOFX by way of Blink 182, I ran into my share of glued-haired, spike-jacketed, and strap-pantsed punks who would draw “real” and “fake” distinctions between bands like Rancid, Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, etc., and bands like Blink 182 or New Found Glory. The merits of this debate are silly, its usefulness dubious. But I was intimidated by those I felt knew more than me (I’m intimidated by just about everyone), so it’s nice to see Matt Freeman’s kicker be “hey just go play some bass dude.” Go play some bass, dudes.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris