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G1: You mentioning Sly and the early days of your career, those were really innovative times musically do you look back and look at exactly what it is you’ve done and how you changed the sound of things? Videos weren’t as popular as they are now, television appearances weren’t as many as you can have now, but eventually people did see us on things like The Ed Sullivan Show, and others… and seeing us in concert, other bass players became aware of how I was doing this thumping and plucking and then they started doing it to cover our songs and incorporating it into their own music and that made the style even more popular. Other bass players at first didn’t know what I was doing. It was through that music that my style of thumping and plucking, my bass playing, became popular through songs like “ Dance To The Music“, “ Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and others. She was so persistent ’til one evening he did come to hear what I was doing, liked it, and approached me about joining this new band he was going to be starting and that band turned out to be Sly & the Family Stone. She found out that he was going to be starting a band and took it upon herself to start calling the station telling him “you gotta go hear this bass player and what he’s doing”. There was a lady that used to come into this club in San Francisco, it was called Relax With Yvonne, almost right there on the corner of Haight and Ashbury…I didn’t know this story at the time, but she used to frequent the club and was a big fan of my mother and I, she was also a fan of Sly Stone who was on the radio at KSOL at the time. Out of necessity I would do this thumping and plucking I wasn’t concerned with what other people thought, I gotta get my job done. I wasn’t trying to play the so-called correct overhand style of playing ’cause I didn’t listen to bass players, I listened to guitar players ’cause that was my main love at the time. So now we didn’t have drums, so to make up for not having the bass drum I would thump the strings, and we didn’t have the backbeat of the snare drum so I would pluck the strings, kind of playing drums on bass with that rhythm thing. After a short while my mother decided we were going to lose the drummer and just be a duo, piano and bass. As it turned out the organ could not be repaired so I was stuck on the bass. George bass temporarily until the organ could be repaired. We didn’t have that bottom we’d started to get used to, so I went to Music Unlimited (music store) over in San Leandro and I rented a St. We got used to that, then the organ broke down now it sounded empty. We worked at this club that had an organ that had bass pedals at the bottom, and I learned to play the bass pedals along with the guitar and singing. So, my mother decided to start a trio, the Del Graham trio: me on guitar and vocals, her on piano and vocals, and my drummer who was also on vocals. My mother, Dell Graham, was a pianist and vocalist and when I was 15 I was playing other instruments including guitar, which I considered my main instrument. Larry Graham: Well, it actually started in the Bay Area.
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You have totally changed the way bass is played once you picked it up and started doing your thing with it. G1: Anybody who knows the history of Funk knows the name Larry Graham. I was fortunate enough to share a moment of time and conversation with Larry and it went a little something like this… From his success as a member of the groundbreaking group SLY & the FAMILY STONE, to leading his pioneering Funk group GRAHAM CENTRAL STATION, to his successful solo career Larry Graham has continued to amaze audiences around the world. His innovative style of bass playing impacted not only his contemporaries, but has had major effect on every electric bassist to follow. Since his introduction in 1966 with Sly & the Family Stone, bassist Larry Graham has become one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century.