what is the deal with the fisherman with the bass guitar?
a long time ago in Ann Arbor Michigan I had a friend who was an awesome guitarist, who was a bit younger than me. His first name was Mike and I don’t remember his last name but I’m sure he’s done great things with his music because he was just a wonderful guitar player. Another great young musician discovered by RonRico Morris, as I recall. Anyway, one time Mike showed up with this book he’d bought for me and doctored up. (Mike if yer out there, please say hey! I will probably recall your last name one of these days.)
[ OK I remember his last name when I went back to Ann Arbor and talked to my friends, the know him also, his name is Michael Josephs and how ironic I would forget his last name because he is now an amazingly successful composer, having penned the theme for America’s Most Wanted TV show in the 90s and done countless other things for movies and the Discovery channel. Check him out here http://www.michaeljosephs.com -Hugh 8/6/09 ]
It was a book called “Advanced Bass Fishing” and it was not about music as you can guess! It was about fishing for bass, that wonderful freshwater species prevalent all over the united states. So Mike had seen this book in a bookstore, interpreted it in the musical sense, and, figuring I’d get a kick out of it, he’d cut the image of a Music Man bass (which happened to be my bass guitar at the time) out of the cover of an issue of Bass Player magazine and glued it onto the front of this book and gave it to me as a gift.
Later, when I was working with Norma Jean Bell, somehow it got worked into the act, about halfway through the show they would bring me out and I would then perform a “Fishin’ Musician” country and western tune in which I would first brandish this book and say some inanities and then sing Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen’s “Lost in the Ozone Again”, and I would do this schtick where I would pretend my bass was a tuba and blow on the fins while hammering-on some notes. Really ridiculous trick I learned from watching a Vegas band that played in the Renaissance Center one time when we had a gig there. At any rate they all liked it when I did it, even in the downtown urban Detroit atmosphere. So the Fishin’ Musician prevailed with Advanced Bass Fishing and Lost in the Ozone Again.
In fact I had even forgotten about this book until Randall Jacobs, the guitarist from that gig (and also the guitarist for Dave Koz, Was Not Was, and writer of the song “Walk the Dinosaur”) reminded me of it on MySpace. So I resurrected the book. Big Hey to Randy, wassup man!!!
