Enlightening Facts: A bass player didn’t show up for a session at Capitol Records, and someone pointed at a Fender Precision leaning against the wall and asked Carol Kaye if she could play it. She had never touched a bass guitar in her life. She said sure, picked it up, figured out the tuning in about thirty seconds, read the chart, and nailed the take. Within months she was the most in-demand session bassist in Los Angeles. That is how it happened — not through ambition or a carefully laid plan, but through availability, competence, and the particular willingness to say yes to something she had never done before.
Carol had started playing music at thirteen because her family was broke. Her mother, a pianist, was raising her alone after a divorce in a Los Angeles housing project. At nine, Carol had cleaned apartments to help with the rent. At thirteen her mother gave her a steel guitar and she taught herself to play it, started working jazz clubs in her late teens, not because she loved performing but because musicians got paid. In 1957 a producer asked her to play guitar on a Sam Cooke recording session. She made more money in three hours than she made in a week playing clubs. Session work became her job — steadier, better-paying, more predictable than live performance. Then in 1963 the bass player didn’t show up, and everything changed.
For the next decade she played on roughly ten thousand recordings. Not a thousand. Ten thousand. Three sessions a day, six days a week, for more than a decade. The work was industrial — three albums before lunch, stale coffee in paper cups, arrangement sheets arriving minutes before the tape rolled. If you could not sight-read and nail it in two takes, you did not get called back. Carol could do it in one.
The Beach Boys. Sonny and Cher. Nancy Sinatra. The Monkees. Glen Campbell. The Righteous Brothers. Ray Charles. Frank Zappa. Quincy Jones. If it was recorded in Los Angeles in the 1960s and had a bass line, there is a reasonable chance it was Carol. The bass line on Good Vibrations — Carol. The drive underneath These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ — Carol. The Beat Goes On, where she invented the syncopated bass line that made the song a hit — Carol.
The descending riff on the Mission: Impossible theme, that iconic groove in 5/4 time that builds tension through the entire opening — Carol. The Batman television theme — Carol. Film soundtracks with Quincy Jones and Lalo Schifrin throughout the late 1960s — Carol.
Almost none of the records said her name. Session musicians were not credited. That was standard practice. The band’s name went on the album. The players who actually recorded the music were invisible. When the Beach Boys appeared on television miming to Good Vibrations, nobody knew they were lip-syncing to Carol’s bass. When the Monkees performed, they were performing. Carol had played the actual instruments in the studio.
She was not just reading charts either. She was solving problems. The bass sound of early 1960s recordings was often muddy on AM radio — too much low end, lost in the mix. Carol taped a piece of felt over the strings near the bridge and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The sound cut through static sharply and precisely. For twenty-five cents of felt, she said later, you could get the best sound in town. Bass players spent years trying to reverse-engineer what they were hearing on Beach Boys records — what bass, what amp, what strings. They were studying the wrong people. Carol was playing. She was also making arrangement decisions. During one session a producer handed her a chart and she looked at it, picked up a pencil, corrected it, and told him it sounded like a dying dog. They kept her version.
She received fifty-five dollars per song. No royalties. No residuals. No credit when the songs kept selling for decades. When You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ hit number one, Carol was already in another studio recording a commercial. The bands got the fame. She got a paycheck and drove to the next session.
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She is ninety-one years old now and still teaching, still playing occasionally, still correcting people who get the history wrong. . . .
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Go here to read more of Carol’s bio:
https://www.facebook.com/enlighteningfacts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Kaye (Born Carol Kaye Smith)
Photo: Carol Kaye
