Book excerpts

From Music:

Just as a child ﬁrst learns the basic vowel and consonant sounds, so it is a musician plays his ﬁrst notes. The child then learns to form words (chords or scales), then paragraphs and stories (songs). The more words we know, the greater our vocabulary. Musical vocabulary is no different and it grows as one practices and applies what is learned. The learning in both instances is cumulative and can be constantly expanded. I know people who have larger vocabularies and who use language in a more poetic and articulate fashion than others. It is the same with musicians. I know people who speak English, French, or Italian with equal ease, just as I know musicians—like Victor, for instance—who play jazz, bluegrass, funk, or R&B. With any language, the more we know, the better we can express ourselves. It is the same with music.

"Music is a language, as it works the same way," began Victor. "Just as words are a description of what is inside of us, music can reﬂect our feelings in much the same manner. We do have to remember that words are not the actual thought, but only description of thought. It is the same with music."

"I learned to play the bass by application. By the time I was ﬁve years old, I was gigging [performing professionally]. I learned really fast. I believe you get good by doing something rather than by practicing something. It is like learning French. You can get a book, go to classes, study hard, but the way to learn the language fast is to go to France and live there. With music, you surround yourself with what you want to learn. Play it in your sleep. If it is written notation, keep it around where you can see it; just surround yourself with the music in every aspect of your life and you will learn. It is like sitting at home trying to learn French by yourself or learning scales by yourself. You can’t do that. You have to get out amongst French people, interact with other musicians to learn. To me, music is a language and if you treat it that way, it makes it much easier to understand."

"The best way to learn music is the same way you learn a language, by totally immersing yourself in it. If you wanted to speak English as a kid, did you go to a teacher? No. You surrounded yourself with people who spoke English and you just picked it up, even at a young age. Music is the same. If you surround children with music, if you are always playing around them, instruments are lying around, you take them to shows and listen to music with them, then music will become a part of their lives. The children begin to pick it up, just as I did being around my brothers. Just as Adam is doing now and just as Kaila (Victor’s children) is acting and singing and dancing; no one is teaching it to her. It is around her, so she has picked it up, just as she did English."

"Many times, whatever question you might ask musically, if you turn that into an English question, the answer will be obvious. People are always asking me, ‘What are you thinking when you solo? Are you thinking about what key you are in? What mode you are playing? What scale? Are you thinking of the chords as they go by?’ I answer them by asking if they thought about that question just as they asked it; did they think of nouns or pronouns? Which verb to use, which adjective? No. There is no way to think like that and still get the words out. The process is more spontaneous. The thing is that we know our language so well that it comes out without our thinking about it. If you think about anything when you are speaking, it is just about the feeling you are trying to get across. Better yet, you are not thinking about any of it; it is just happening. It is the same with music."

"People often ask if they should learn to read music, as they feel they can get by with playing by ear." Victor shrugged. "I turn that into an English language question: should you learn to read English? Of course, you should. Can you get by without it? Of course, you can. Yet you have to consider the advantages of being able to read, of being able to construct a sentence properly using nouns and pronouns and adjectives. Writing is important to both languages: English and music. If you are writing a story and you ﬁnd yourself using the same adjectives over and over, you know how to go into a thesaurus and ﬁnd other words. Musical theory is the same. The more you use the tools, the more proﬁcient you become with them."

"There are only twelve letters in the musical alphabet," Vic pointed out, "so it should be much easier than English, which has twice as many. It should not be so hard to learn. If, by the time we are one, we can speak English, why is it so hard to believe we can play music? I was just fortunate to grow up in a household where I could learn music the same way I learned English and where I had the ability to apply what I learned to what I was doing every day. That was the key."

Book Two: Five Rings

From Bass and Nature:

Bassist Dave Welsch, besides being an in-demand New York state bassist and Victor’s webmaster, is also an instructor at camp and deeply involved with organizing and bringing the whole project together year after year. Dave has been instrumental to the camp from its conception. "Every bass camp," said Dave "still has the same moving effect on me that the ﬁrst camp did. Now, I am not only moved by the concept of the camp, but what we are—or what we are trying and I hope we are doing—for the people who come to camp. It is sort of like watching a kid open a present on Christmas day. To watch the campers get it—to watch their transition and how their attitudes change over the six days—is just incredibly moving to me. That is what really gets me now. It is hard to explain. You almost have to be there to get it and you really need to be there for the entire six days. Bass camp is just not something you can easily explain to anyone. It must be experienced to be understood fully. It is sort of like trying to explain Victor, Victor Wooten the person, to someone. I have just given up trying. It can’t be done with words. It must be experienced."

"At Bass Camp," concluded Victor, "we provide an environment which allows the students to learn in the very best way; they discover things themselves. What you discover yourself, you won’t forget. What you are told, you might forget. It is a pretty amazing experience for a lot of people. Many of the things we don’t really talk about or teach. We suggest the way, perhaps demonstrate, and then allow students to discover on their own. They remember and the next time they talk about it or the next time they speak with their instruments, it comes out different. That is what Bass Camp is all about."

"I have been thinking for a long time about something. It is, perhaps, more appropriately termed a feeling than a thought that keeps hitting me stronger and stronger. I have spoken about this with a few friends of mine from time to time. Some of the camp instructors and I talk about this every time we see each other. I think they’re in the same place I am in their own way. The feeling, essentially, is this: I feel that all the years of practicing music, all the years of playing in bands, all the years of touring, all have to be leading me somewhere. There has to be more than that, more to me and more to music, than just touring around playing. It seems to me that these things are all just a warm up for something bigger. It is as if the spirit of music is pulling me in a new direction, a direction that could only be found after many, many years of playing."

"I am just now starting to understand what all this seems to be trying to tell me. Now, I don’t exactly know what I’m talking about, but I’m starting to put some of it together. I know that all of the spirit is connected and that it is connecting to me through the music. I’m not totally sure to what end all this is leading me. Actually, I don’t think that there is an end—I hope there’s not because the journey is so much fun. It’s always hard to talk about or to try to describe a feeling, you know? I just feel something is happening and I am going with it. There’s a change in the air. The one thing I do know is this: for me, Bass/Nature Camp is the next step in this evolution. The change involves camp. That is all I can say for certain."

From The Martial Arts:

"What I have learned from all my martial arts training," concluded Victor, "is that I have to get better. Now, I would have to hurt my opponent as my skills don’t allow me the control which Sifu has, for instance. When I think about being in a real ﬁght, I realize that I would really have to hurt a person to stop him. I would have to break a knee or something like that. I mean life-changing injury. I have come to understand that the better I get, the less chance I am going to hurt someone. That appeals to me and really makes me want to continue to practice and learn."

Just as Musashi was more than a swordsman, Victor Wooten is more than a martial artist, more than a bass player, more than a musician. The result of his art is greater than the sum of its parts and all parts inﬂuence the whole. This chapter has perhaps come as a shock to many people who have read Victor’s writings or song lyrics or heard him speak of promoting peace, love, and understanding. Many might wonder how such an apparently nonviolent man could possess, as Steve Bailey put it, "enough martial arts training to kill people." Ultimately, it is a balance, like nearly everything about Victor—yin/yang.

To an experienced martial artist, it might not be such a shock that Victor is an accomplished ﬁghter. If one were to observe the way the man moves, smooth, catlike, notice the v-shape to his back, the thick forearms and wrists, or the sure, conﬁdent motion within nearly every action he performs, a trained eye might suspect his capabilities. As a martial artist myself, I can tell you that a smart person would never push him enough to ﬁnd out. Judging a book by its cover, in this case, could be a very painful experience if one were unlucky enough to doubt my words. Someone once asked me why Victor does not have a big body guard contingent. Now you know.

Just how good is Victor as a martial artist? As a bass player and as a musician? I will conclude this chapter with a ﬁnal statement from the late Bruce Lee that has become sort of a joke between Victor and me, as similar questions are often asked of Vic. While researching this book, I ran across the quote contained on the most recently released DVD, Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey. I heard it long ago but had forgotten. When I watched Bruce reply, full of the conﬁdence, charm and poise which he exhibited so strongly in his prime, I knew that it had to be included here, as an ending for this chapter.

In response to a question by the interviewer, the talented martial artist, actor, writer, and philosopher looked directly into the camera and stated: "All the time people come up to me and they say, ‘Bruce, are you really that good?’ I say, ‘Well, if I tell you I am that good, probably you would say I am boasting, but," Bruce Lee smiled in his familiar way and sort of shrugged, "if I tell you I am no good, you would know I am lying.’"

From Chapter Five:

I grew up a child of the age of television and cinema and was greatly inﬂuenced by what I saw on the tube. One of the most prominent hero ﬁgures of our times was the gunslinger, the fastest gun. When we were children, I feel certain many of us envisioned ourselves in such roles as we played with our peers or ventured into adventures within our minds. I often ﬁnd parallels to childhood antics within our adult lives and this one seems more prominent than most.

One of the most obvious comparisons to the gunslinger of old is the hot lead guitarist of today and yesteryear. There have been many vying to ﬁll the void at the top through the decades. Players such as Robert Johnson, Duane Allman, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and Eddie Van Halen have been both on top of their craft and the target of those coming up to dethrone them. To play better, innovate more, or play faster than these stars has always been a desire of anyone who takes his instrument seriously. There will always be those with a need to prove themselves, hoping to carve another notch on their "Fender Suspenders." As the electric bass has evolved in its short lifetime, there have been many gunslingers of the bass as well, people such as Charles Mingus, Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, and Jaco Pastorius, just to name a few.

While Victor was working at Busch Gardens, a major bass competition was held in Virginia. The competition received a lot of attention and drew contestants from around the area, all looking to be the next "fast gun."

"Two of my great friends," Victor said, "John Billings and Keith Horne, were both in that competition. Both were friends of mine from Virginia who live in Nashville now. Keith also used to be in a band with Carter Beauford. Carter is another friend of mine and the drummer for Dave Matthews. Keith was a left-handed bass player and was all over it, let me tell you. We were all three in this bass competition in which we had three minutes to play. Each person in the competition was sent a tape and a song track, and everyone had to play to the same track. What I discovered during the competition is that I may have been one of the few who actually worked out something in advance. Roy and Regi both helped me put it together. I sort of worked out what I was going to do versus most people who sort of improvised. I utilized thumb patterns and two-hand tapping and slung the bass around and that was the ﬁrst time I did the back handspring with a bass."

Indeed, hearing Victor Wooten play is a wonderful thing; seeing him play is a whole different animal. It remains the most difﬁcult thing for me to describe in this manuscript. The on-stage acrobatics must be seen to be believed.

"Coming up to the competition," Victor added, "I knew I wanted to do something different. Having always been involved with gymnastics, I got the idea to do a ﬂip with the bass. I thought initially I would have to use some kind of special strap. I called my friend ‘Pake’ and told him what I had in mind."

James "Pake" Pajela said, "I was home and Victor called me and said he had a problem and needed my help. So I went right over and he explained that he wanted to be able to ﬂip with the bass. We sat around for a time trying to ﬁgure how to do it. His idea was to ﬂip with the bass while holding it with both hands. I suggested we do a back handspring with one hand while holding the bass with the other. I held a broom stick like a bass and did the back handspring with one hand."

"I was amazed," Victor said. "I went in and got my Univox, which is a very light bass, and he strapped that on and did it with that. So then I did it, but Pake actually did it ﬁrst."

I asked, "Did you nail it right away?"

Vic laughed and answered, "You have to nail it. There is no other way. There is no almost. You either land it, or you don’t, and not landing it could be ugly. After seeing him do it, I knew I could do it. I did it for the ﬁrst time as a ﬁnale during that bass competition. People just went crazy. I won that competition and I won a big stack, a Marshall double stack amp. Keith ﬁnished second and won a bass. I can’t remember what John won, but he ﬁnished third."

"We had to draw numbers to go, and I remember I was number eleven. It was at that point that I knew I was going to win because eleven has always been a good number for me. My birthday is on the eleventh and that number seems to show up a lot as a good number for me. I didn’t say anything out loud but, inside, it was just a very good feeling. Keith Horne was number ten and I had to go on right after Keith. Keith Horne is an amazing, unbelievable bass player. I forget what number John Billings was but we ﬁnished one, two, and three. When Keith’s turn came, he just tore it to pieces. At that point I remember people saying things like, ‘This competition is over.’"

Not concerned with what the people were saying, Victor took the stage for his three minutes and played his way into the top "gunslinger" spot. The crowd was amazed as were the other bassists in attendance.

"I would say," Vic added, "that probably the reason I won that day was the stage antics, slinging the bass and the back handspring, as no one had ever done those things before."

Regardless of how, or why, the message was clear: there was a new gunslinger in town, and he was a good guy, and he was fast, very fast. Word spread from there like wildﬁre and other gunslingers, far and wide, took note.

That competition was only the beginning.

Book one: The Path

From Chapter One:

Along about this time in our tale, one "player" of the time, Curtis Mayﬁeld, happened to take an interest in the Wooten Brothers. As a result, the ﬁve youngsters were enlisted to open for him. Regi said, "We were playing at what, Consumnus River College? One of Curtis Mayﬁeld’s producers, a guy named Wally Cox, saw us and thought we were really good. He thought Curtis would be interested in us. He took a tape and a picture to Curtis Mayﬁeld and we got that tour from that. We were playing at that college when he found us. I think Vic was about ﬁve at the time. He turned six on the road."

The short period touring with Mayﬁeld brought about some interesting situations for the youngsters. Many lessons were learned from the master musician. His ability to control his audience was not something easily forgotten. Vic regards Mayﬁeld as perhaps the only musician who could play a complete concert in a near whisper and have fans on the edge of their seats the entire time, begging for more at the end. His talent remains legendary and Curtis had a strong inﬂuence on the boys. Yet not all lessons were musical in nature. In one instance, they were to open two shows for the headliner, the last date of a tour, in their then hometown of Stockton at a club called Mr. D’s. The ﬁrst went ﬁne. The second, well…not so well.

Victor recalled it this way: "One time, Curtis was to do two shows, did one, took the money and skipped, leaving a packed house waiting. Things started to get really heavy with armed security guards as uneasy as we were. I remember we were all downstairs and I lay in my mom’s lap as the rest of the family walked around and waited to ﬁnd a way out. It was not a good situation."

"This man came up to me," Mr. Wooten said, "after we ﬁnished that ﬁrst show and said, ‘Mister, if I were you, I would get your kids and get out of here. Curtis and his manager have gone. There is not going to be a second show.’ I had actually seen Curtis and his manager leaving by the alleyway but didn’t think anything about it until this man said they were gone."

Mrs. Wooten, up until then in the hospital after severely injuring her elbow in a fall, said, "I made all their costumes for that tour but was hospitalized before I got to see them. When they played back in Sacramento, I talked them into letting me out of the hospital to go to the show." Mrs. Wooten laughed heartily before continuing, "Big mistake, big, big mistake. But I went."

Regi added, "There were a lot of people…a lot of mad people. You know the second show is always bigger than the ﬁrst. Everybody was there trying to get in, wondering what to do."

Joseph commented about the matter, "When I look back on that now, though, I see that it could have been bad planning. Now, after playing on my own, playing with Steve [Miller], I have seen the effects of bad promoter planning. What happened was the ﬁrst show started late, and the second show didn’t really have much time to turn over. The people for the second show were already there and angry because they couldn’t get in. Curtis and his band, rather than sticking it out, just thought…we’ll go. You know the headliner always gets paid before he plays, so.…"

Dorothy said, "The club owner told Pete, ‘Things might get kind of ugly and it might be a good idea to take your family and go.’" She laughed and added, "Yes, that was their ﬁrst taste of ‘stardom,’ I guess you would say."

As the situation grew worse, the family looked for advice. Now, decades later, the words that impressed them the most came from one of Mayﬁeld’s road crew who spoke to the nervous family and suggested; "Why don’t you guys get out of show business while you are still young?" Fortunately for us all, they did not heed his advice, but they have never forgotten that night and those words.

Author’s Note

From Chapter Seven:
"I remember this one night," said Bela, "when Victor slung his bass around and hit himself in the head with it so hard he was seeing stars and was about to black out. In fact, he did black out and, as he was falling, he came to and sort of made a roll out of the incident, somehow coming to his feet and making it part of the show. Howard asked me, ‘Did you see that? Victor clocked himself!’ I said, ‘I don’t think so. I think he was just trying a cool new thing.’ Afterwards, Victor admitted that he almost blacked out and had to catch himself."

Victor was rapidly becoming known as the "king of improvisation" on stage. He refused to come out of his "cool" stage persona and when something did go wrong, he would ﬁnd a way to incorporate it into his performance. He still does so today. He is a master of showmanship and can completely control a crowd with what seems only casual effort. During one show, Victor wore snap-apart pants popular of late with basketball players, and while swinging his bass around, ripped them completely off. Fortunately, according to Victor, "I was wearing shorts underneath that night" and he continued playing the set wearing just those gym shorts, as if the whole thing was part of the act.

"Another show," Bela continued, "we were playing a big performing arts center somewhere and it had an orchestra pit in front of the stage with about a twenty foot drop. Victor spun his bass and the strap broke and the bass skidded across the stage. It ended up on the very edge of the stage, tipping and rocking. A small gust of wind would have sent it over the edge and into the pit. Victor just stood there as if he meant to do it. Whenever anything goes wrong, he just acts cool, totally cool. It always seems to work out. I remember, Howard actually left his keyboard and literally tiptoed across the stage and picked up the bass just before it fell. He handed it back to Victor who just started playing again as if it were planned. Now, he has an industrial strength strap that screws into the bass itself."

When you get right down to it, words, in the end, are only puffs of air. There are no correct ones, or wrong ones, or one true way to string them together to make them magical. Words can get close, sure, but they have limitations. They can never do justice, complete, emotion-stirring justice, to actual events. Life must be lived, experienced, felt, touched, smelled, heard for us to truly understand, for us to "know" anything totally, more importantly to believe in the magic of something special.

When an event or a person is so totally unique it threatens belief, words fail us. If something inspires genuine wonder in our spirit, and a funny feeling in our stomachs, we often don’t even try to relate it to those around us for fear of their skepticism. When our ability to compare something is not there, when one amazing talent or event deﬁes ready description, our ability to relate it to others is limited, ineffective, and trivial. The mystical and the rare have always deﬁed adequate portrayal. Here lies the core of my problem.

No matter how many or how meaningful the words I use to express the reasons why you must come to know of Victor Lemonte Wooten, they will not do complete justice to the subject. Never. The task is too immense, words too fragile and weak, my talent perhaps lacking. The subject of this biography literally and frequently walks outside the walls of logic and belief. How can such attributes be related properly with meager sentences and paragraphs?

The story of Victor Lemonte Wooten will never be adequately portrayed with mere puffs of air, no matter how eloquently I string them together, but I surely am going to try. I have my rationale, which I will share in a minute (after I get down from my soapbox). All I can hope for herein is to fashion this narrative in such a way to stir your interest, push you to search out the source—to see Victor Wooten, be it on TV or DVD, to listen to his music, or more desirably to see him perform live. If I can inspire that, my task was worthwhile. Victor will do the rest. He is more than qualiﬁed to take it from there.

This is a different kind of biography about a different kind of musician. Book One is entitled The Path and is basically your traditional type biography (exclusive of the subject, of course, which is far from traditional) and contains twelve chapters. Each chapter of this work begins with a quotation taken from someone within the chapter. If you miss one, there are a couple of pages in the back of the book listing who said what, appropriately titled What Did He Say?

In order to keep as near to the real personality of the people interviewed for this book, for the most part, every quote is exactly what was said, precisely how it was said. I did very little in the way of editing the interviews. I presented them as live as possible. Fundamentally, in musical terms, it was done with few overdubs. While this is more difﬁcult for both the subject of the interview and the writer, it contributes certain realism to the random puffs of air between these pages. Thankfully, I was very fortunate to have extremely articulate subjects who were anxious to assist in telling the story of Victor Wooten.

The second portion, Book Two, is called Five Rings and covers many aspects of Victor’s life which inﬂuence him in some fashion or another. There are separate chapters about the martial arts, tracking, and Victor’s Bass/Nature Camp. There is a chapter about Vic’s four brothers, Regi, Roy, Rudy and Joseph, along with a section devoted to the bass guitar. The biography concludes with Music, a chapter dedicated entirely to music and Victor Wooten’s music in particular. Five interlocking chapters, ﬁve facets, ﬁve siblings, Five Rings.

After that, a special segment answers the most frequently asked questions posed to Victor, appropriately titled Twenty Questions. An extensive discography and a complete resource listing with suggested links and books which may be of further interest follow. Lastly, there is an afterward written by Victor Wooten himself, which the reader will ﬁnd of particular interest.

These things said, it’s time now for you to read. Please proceed cautiously with a couple of thoughts in mind. Your existing views about music and musicians could be altered forever; perhaps a few thoughts you possess about life may be challenged. Just remember, what is thought provoking can be good for your soul.

One last thing: often, you must have the courage to look within yourself to understand the true meaning behind puffs of air. To paraphrase Vic, you have to open up your heart to ﬁnd what is real.

Please enjoy the path within the pages.

You may begin.

Paul R. Hargett
Summer 2004