The Legend of The Reverend Alabacious T Bartholomew

Journal: Thursday, January 28, 2010. 10:24 AM Highland, California.

Tomorrow I turn 45 (yesterday from when this blog posted). This means I’m halfway to a right angle, but somehow I’m already obtuse!

This month closes after a lot of travel (non-music) and the posting of my first performance video (music). The video is not a polished final effort. It is more of a dip of my toe in the water. I had no intention of doing anything more with it until I had a better, more complete version recorded.

The response was so enthusiastic that I decided to post it other places. In the past week it’s had nearly 300 views. More important than the numbers is that I’ve had a lot of encouraging feedback from friends and strangers alike!

It’s a far cry from going viral, even among musicians--which is my hope--but it’s a start. It’s out there now. You can help accomplish this by emailing the link (below) to friends who you think will enjoy it and encouraging them to pass it on.

Here is a link if you haven’t seen it yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKo2i9evhrE

My goal now is to get another song on video that shows a different music style a different playing technique and shows me singing. I want to quickly dispel the notion that I might be a one-trick pony indulging in the musical equivalent of 'wanking'. 

I think I know just what song to use: "Rain Don't Follow the Plow"

Journal Update: Friday, January 29, 5:26PM: Today (my birthday) I set out to record  a video of 'Rain' but soon found that I need a great deal more rehearsal on the tune in question.

That will be my focus this over the next couple weeks, to get that song ready, recorded on video on posted. My goal is to post it two weeks from today.

---------

On to the blog...

The Legend of The Reverend Alabacious T Bartholomew, Part I

I’ve often been asked who my influences are, playing bass the way I do. Early on, Geddy Lee of “Rush” Chris Squire of “Yes” and Tony Levin of everybody taught me with their playing that you can color outside the lines, do unconventional things on bass and still make great music.

Later, a bass teacher of mine turned me on to the more-schooled jazz phenoms: Jaco Pastorious, Stanley Clark and several other. When I first heard Les Claypool of “Primus” I had another big clue as to how I wanted to sound and felt more even comfortable making bass guitar the forefront and focus of an ensemble.

There have been scores of bass players I have admired and influenced by but there is one influence I have had that it has shaped my playing more than any other.

It is likely no one alive has ever heard of him: The Reverend Alabacious T Bartholomew.

The Reverend was the inventor of what some wrongly credit me with: Pyscho-gizmobass guitar. After extensive and largely creative research, I have been able to formulate a brief biography of this fascinating character and the pioneer of my playing style.

And I swear, this is all as true as it is!

Born in 1897 in Tupton, Iowa, Alabacious didn’t start out as a musician as such. He worked the pump organ pedals as a child for his mother who at four foot five could not reach them.

Buellettia Bartholomew was a proud, but tyrannical and delusional woman who believed she was of full normal height. This was in-part because all those she knew sat or kneeled when she was nearby. Whenever someone mistakenly came into her presence at their full stature she would accuse them of witchcraft or, more often, of wearing stilts. The ‘stilts’ were dealt with by repeatedly kicking them out from under their wearer. In reality it was their chins she was striking with her boots until the unlucky person fell to their knees in great pain. The reports of how she dealt with those she accused of witchcraft have been sketchy and inconsistent. Some accounts suggest use of fire or boiling water.

Naturally, out of fear of her reaction, it was kept from her that she needed assistance pumping the organ. When she played for the family every Saturday night. As the third youngest, it was the young Alabacious' duty to sneek under the bench and operate the pedals. While she unknowingly ‘pumped’ on little Al’s head he did the actual work with his hands.

After her performances, when he and his aching cranium had snuck from under the organ bench and reentered the room, he would apologize for having, once again. missed her concert.

He would then have to endure more blows as she would often beat him about the head for his absence, deliberately and with the family bible this time.

Despite the beatings and the chronic drooling that resulted, Alabacious enjoyed his mother’s organ playing and especially loved the lower tones of the organ from his point blank perspective under the bench.

Religion was very important in his family and community, but Al seemed to take things even farther than those around him felt necessary.

In the one-room school house he attended he accused the teacher of witchcraft and attempted to set her on fire when she introduced algebra. He was nearly asked to leave school altogether repeated attempts to exercise demons from a fellow classmate behind the outhouse. He claimed the demons in question were located beneath her dress.

Two years later, upon her graduation, he married Gertrudena Lathum, the girl whose undergarments he had attempted to exercise.

Albascious became a preacher and for years led a small congregation in North Central Iowa while tending a small farm of his own with the help of Gertrudena and eventually their seven children, Robert, Robertena, Bob, Berta, Bobby, Bobby Jr. and Ruthette.

Preaching and service to the Lord was his life. However, it would be a faulty tractor transmission and alcohol that would usher his unexpected, and ultimately tragic, journey into music.

Though Reverend Bartholomew was a staunch and vocal supporter of prohibition, he engaged in “medical” use of spirits regularly himself and for his wife. They even, it is said, found the bottle to be effective in aiding his children to sleep every night.

One day while plowing, the Reverend discovered something that would change his life from that moment on.

The few recorded interviews with the Reverend vary greatly in his account of his life-changing musical discovery. It may, or may not have been the influence of his ‘medicine’, an attempt to clear drool from his chin and/or a faulty transmission that jammed his tractor into reverse and backed it suddenly into a fence post.

Where his story is clear is in his immediate intrigue with the seditious tone the taught barbed wire made upon impact. It so fascinated him that he pulled the tractor forward and deliberately hit the fence post to recreate the effect. He repeated this until the fence post broke in two and fell to the ground. He then moved his tractor one fence post down and continued striking them and until a half a mile of fence was down and his herd of dairy cows, startled by the surly vibrations, were running loose over much of Tipton Township.

Gertrudena and several of their children had to round up the herd for miles while Alabacious retired to the barn with many yards of barbed wire in tow behind the tractor. There, he began his obsessive work reproducing the sound he had heard in the fields.

Using a thresher as an amplifier, he stretched barbed wire across the beams of the barn and struck them with scythes, sledge hammers, wagon wheels and partially emptied bottles of spirits to reproduce the disturbing and haunting tones. In time, he had developed the jury rig into an instrument that would have many names and claim several lives.

It has been called: the psycho gizmobass, the psycho gizmobass guitar, the chaotiphonium, Bob, the cacophone, the bass barb fencifyer, “that damned thing you keep in the barn” and, as Alabacious referred to it in private, “Satan’s little helper”.

Not only did Alabacious invent psycho gizmobass guitar, according to some non-tenure musicologists, he also stumbled on to the concept of looping years before Pierre Schaeffer’s “Musique Concrete”.

His six-year-old daughter Ruthette incessantly mimicked the instrument’s every sound while the prairie preacher composed for his new instrument in the barn. At first this practice was punished, later encouraged and ultimately enforced with the same beatings he had used to deter her.

Ruthette would later in life become the Psycho-gizmobass’s first of many casualties, throwing herself into the thresher/amplifier during one of her father’s concerts.

The Reverend’s church congregation would soon have to contend with his invention themselves. It would change both the church and Alabacious T. Bartholomew forever.

To Be Continued…