With their killer hooks, hip vocal harmonies, and genre-hopping prowess, piano-based threesome Ben Folds Five provided a fresh sound during the grunge-dominated mid ’90s.
Over the course of a stop–start 17-year-long association, the group from Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Folds on piano and vocals, drummer Darren Jessee, and bassist Robert Sledge) produced four studio albums that bristled with alt-rock gems.
Sledge came to the bass guitar at 11, via viola and guitar. A self-proclaimed “prog-rock and fusion kid,” he shedded songs by Yes, Rush, Genesis, Allan Holdsworth, and the Dixie Dregs, and he cites Paul McCartney, Jack Bruce, and Joe Osborn among his low-end influences.
After playing in a succession of cover bands, Sledge fronted local thrash-funk unit Toxic Popsickle.
“That band was great preparation for playing with Ben,” Sledge told Bass Player. “I was pushing myself to play like Les Claypool, and I was really inspired by Tommy the Cat and the way Les could sing and play. In the end, I was able to sing and play anything Ben threw at me.”
Uncle Walter is a standout track from the self-titled debut album of Ben Folds Five.
Using a Dunlop Tortex pick (.73) on a Gibson Explorer-shaped Hamer Blitz bass strung with D’Addario roundwounds (.045–.100), Sledge ran his signal through an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff into a solid-state Fender BXR 300 head with a 4x12 Fender guitar cabinet miked with a Shure SM57.
Following a short drum pickup, Sledge announces the song’s main theme: a fuzz-heavy, chord-tone-based line played high up the neck. Note how he uses the major 6th as a colour tone on beat two of the first two bars of the theme, before stepping down to the 5th of the A and G chords.
“Ben actually wrote that main bassline. Compositionally it was just right, so I wasn’t going to mess with it.”
The texture changes for the first verse, with the piano dropping out and Sledge kicking off his Big Muff to rock a clean octave-based line, laced with funky 16th ghost-notes.
“I’d been experimenting with fuzz since I was a kid. If I wanted a scene change and a lot of intensity, I’d always turn it on.
“The Big Muff is like an extension of my hands. You can get a lot of sounds out of it, and it’s got a lot of dynamics.”
The bridge section leads to a seven-bar-long chorus, where the piano and bass bang out strong A7 – D chords and redeploy the rising chromatic idea from the intro and verse, further consolidating the song’s structure. Note the tight lock between Sledge’s bass and Jessee’s kick drum in this section.
Sledge feeds off Folds’ laid-back vibe during the middle section at 01:39, playing bossa-flavored root-5th lines. A piano solo precedes a third bridge section and chorus, followed by a second piano break, which morphs into the bass solo.
“That was punched – the rest of the song was done in one take. We were actually just trying to get the feedback to happen at the right time. The guys were like, ‘Just go for something crazy, and make it crazier,’ so that’s what I did. They just couldn’t stop me, man. I was too excited!”
Sledge twice uses the song’s main hook as a springboard to launch into his niftily picked lines, fashioned primarily from the D major scale. Regarding the sassy bends that occur, Sledge told Bass Player, “They’re a very Southern kind of bend, very country. I was copying an Andy West solo from a Dixie Dregs song.”
“I hadn’t listened to Uncle Walter in a couple of years, and I couldn’t believe it. The solo sounded like this explosion of music. I thought it was messier than it was.
“I didn’t play it that way most of the time; I played it a lot more cleanly live. It was nice to hear that it sounded chaotic and insane, but like it had a point, too.”
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