Jerry scheff autobiography range

Insightful review of Jerry Scheff's autobiography, Way Down: Playing Bass with Elvis, Dylan, the Doors, and More.
Way down: playing bass with Elvis, Dylan, the Doors & more: the autobiography of.
This is a tale of a man who has truly grown a career from a genuine love of music and of his instrument, proving how following that gift can.

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Review : Jerry Scheff : Way Down: Playing Bass with Elvis, Dylan, the Doors, and More

Way Down: Playing Bass with Elvis, Dylan, the Doors by Jerry Scheff

Jerry Scheff has been a sought-after bass player for over 45 years, playing on albums and touring with many of the greats, including Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, John Denver and Elvis Costello.

Way Down: Playing Bass with Elvis, Dylan, the Doors, and More is the story of his life in music, beginning as a teenage white boy playing black clubs in California in the '50s, through his career as a musician in the Navy, then making a name for himself in the clubs and ending up with Elvis Presley in Las Vegas. There are many interesting stories here about playing pranks on each other during Elvis' Vegas shows and what it was like to travel on Elvis' private jet, The Lisa Marie, about being on tour with Dylan, and behind-the-scenes tales from many events where Jerry played.

But if you are looking for 'dirt' or deep insights into the famous musicians he hung around with, you won't find too much here although one good&

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Popdose at Kirkus Reviews: 2012 Round-Up!

In any given year, more books cross my path than I could ever possibly read, let alone review. As this particular year winds down, I want to devote a column to the books that land on my desk and never leave; I never get around to writing about them, but I hang onto them just the same — sometimes for personal enjoyment, sometimes with horrified fascination. So here, a highly selective list of the best — and the weirdest — of the orphans, cast-offs and also-rans that lit up my 2012 while you weren’t looking.

Biggest Boat Missed: Jerry Scheff’s memoir Way Down. Scheff was the longtime bass player for Elvis Presley’s TCB Band, and logged hundreds of studio sessions for a Who’s Who of pop artists: Johnny Mathis, the Doors, Elvis Costello, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, and the proverbial many more. Way Down blends autobiography, road stories, and a deep musicality in a wry, wise voice, for one of the most purely enjoyable celebrity books I’ve ever read. The issue was timeliness. Much as I liked the book, I simply couldn’t find a way to tie it

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I’ll be teaching a course on the Doors for the first time at the end of this month, and spent a lot of time preparing the material over the last few months. I’ve been a big Doors fan for more than forty years, but of course as I got my class together, I’ve thought a lot more about the group recently than I have for a while.

There’s been an enormous amount written about the Doors. It’s hard to believe there was a time, before the best-selling Jim Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive came out in 1980, that there was no substantial book about them. Still, there are a few aspects of their work that aren’t discussed much. I’ll be going over a half dozen of them here.

1. The bass player(s). Even many casual rock fans know the Doors were unusual in not, with few exceptions, using a bass player onstage. Keyboardist Ray Manzarek is particularly noted for playing the bass parts on a Fender Rhodes Piano bass, simultaneously playing the upper register melodies on a Vox Continental organ.

Doug Lubahn’s book about the Doors, which includes a section specifically detailing