Carol Kaye

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Carol Kaye (b. 1935, Everett, Washington) is noted as a prolific American electric bass player and renowned Los Angeles session musician who performed on many hit records during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. Kaye worked on several Phil Spector and Brian Wilson productions, was the bassist for The Zodiac, played guitar on Ritchie Valens' La Bamba and is credited with the bass tracks on several Simon and Garfunkel hits. Among her most often cited work was anchoring the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds.

1 Life and career
2 Motown controversy
3 Zappa
4 Selected discography
- 4.1 Electric bass credits
- 4.2 Guitar credits
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Life and career

Born in Everett, Washington to Clyde and Dot Smith who were both professional musicians, she grew up in poverty near the Port of Los Angeles and from the age of 14 in 1949 Kaye performed and taught guitar professionally. She played bebop jazz guitar in dozens of nightclubs around Los Angeles with many top bands including Bob Neal's jazz group, Jack Sheldon backing Lenny Bruce, Teddy Edwards and Billy Higgins. She got into lucrative studio work in late 1957 with Sam Cooke. A few years later, when a bass player failed to show for a session at Capitol Records in Hollywood, she was asked to fill in on what was then called the Fender bass, beginning many years and thousands of recording dates as one of the most sought after session bass guitarists in the United States. Popular music historians often cite her as a member of the so-called Wrecking Crew, but this term wasn't coined by "Drummer Man" Hal Blaine until the early 1990s.

Throughout the 1960s she played bass on a significant percentage of records appearing on the Billboard Hot 100, although she was almost wholly unknown to the general public at the time. She is noted as having played bass on many of the Beach Boys hit recordings, including Good Vibrations, Help Me, Rhonda, Sloop John B and California Girls. She also worked on Brian Wilson's ill-fated but legendary Smile project (and was present at the "Fire" session in late November 1966 when Wilson reportedly asked the studio musicians to wear toy fire hats). Kaye's work also appears extensively on well-known television and film soundtracks from the 1960s and early 1970s.

She worked under most of the leading producers and musical directors in Los Angeles during that era, including Michel Legrand, Phil Spector, Quincy Jones, Brian Wilson, Elmer Bernstein, Lalo Schifrin, David Rose, David Grusin, Ernie Freeman, Hugo Montenegro, Leonard Rosenman, John Williams, Alfred and Lionel Newman. Kaye was also responsible for the bass tracks on several Monkees hits and did soundtrack work (including sound effects on bass guitar) for a young Steven Spielberg.

Beginning in 1969 she wrote How To Play The Electric Bass, the first of many bass tutoring books, effectively changing the popular term for the instrument from Fender Bass to Electric Bass and taught hundreds of students, many of whom later became famous. Kaye later suffered from arthritis and this, combined with the arrival of synthesisers during the mid and late 1970s, effectively ended her career as a session player. In 2006 Kaye was still active as a teacher and jazz guitarist.

She gave birth to three children and was reportedly married and divorced three times. During interviews given in the early 2000s, Kaye said she saw her role as "helping people make hit records" and was motivated mostly by a desire to support her children as a single mother: The "doctors' pay" of session work was far superior to what she could make on the road (away from her children) playing jazz, which she maintained has always been her first interest. She has also commented on her disapproval of drug use in the studio (which she says she first began seeing in the late 1960s), the cult of celebrity and her opinion that there was more sexism in the music business during the 2000s than forty years earlier in the 1960s. In 2003 Kaye also said that the recording industry in Los Angeles was a "ghost" and advised aspiring female musicians to promote themselves through the Internet and self-produced CDs.

[edit] Motown controversy

There is some controversy as to exactly which hit tracks Kaye recorded for Motown records. Some recordings she claims to have made for Motown are also credited to James Jamerson. Some of the confusion may have arisen because Kaye played bass on both demos and finished tracks for Motown in Los Angeles, while most Motown recordings were done in Detroit with Jamerson and the Funk Brothers studio band. Sloppy and incomplete record keeping by Motown has also been cited.

[edit] Zappa

Kaye played 12-string guitar on Frank Zappa's groundbreaking Freak Out!. She had small children at the time and when she was called to work on his next album Kaye played on a few songs but declined to continue, saying she found some of the lyrics offensive. She later said Zappa was very good-natured and understanding about her qualms and they remained on friendly terms.