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Robert Trujillo: Into the Groove with Jaco Pastorius

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In a world of immense musical diversity, the low end is universal. For proof of that, look no further than Jaco, the documentary bio of Jaco Pastorius. The bass icon, who died in 1987 at the age of 35, gained renown in jazz, particularly with fusion pioneers Weather Report. But he honed his unique harmonic sense and monster chops with an R&B show band (Wayne Cochran and the C.C. Riders); lent them to records by the likes of Joni Mitchell and ex-Mott the Hoople frontman Ian Hunter; and was a root influence on players as seemingly disparate as Sting, Flea, Geddy Lee, Bootsy Collins, and Robert Trujillo of Metallica, who spent six years shepherding Jaco’s story to the screen. In his last years, battling the bottle and mental illness, he even recorded instructional videos with session bass ace Jerry Jemmott.

Produced by Trujillo, a longtime friend of Pastorius’s kids, Jaco is a true labor of love that fits well within the enticingly broadminded Music on Film selection the 29th Leeds International Film Festival, which opens tonight (and of which MusicFilmWeb is a media partner). The Metallica bassist, formerly of punk/thrash band Suicidal Tendencies and the funk-inflected Infectious Grooves, counts seeing Pastorius live as a teenager as a formative musical experience and now owns the customized fretless bass that was for many years Jaco’s main axe. How he came by the infamous “Bass of Doom,” and performed with it in a scene that climaxes the film, were among the numerous aspects of his abiding Jaco love that Trujillo covered in a recent conversation with writer, musician, and friend of MFW Steve Karras. The Q&A below is edited for length and clarity (and is distinct from the audio interview Steve did with Trujillo in April, which we posted back then). Look out next week for an interview with the doc’s co-director, Paul Marchand.

Tell me about the bass that belonged to Jaco that you have.

That’s a long, long story but I’ll try to make it quick. Basically, I’ve been friends with the family; I’ve known Johnny Pastorius, Jaco’s eldest son, for about 18 years, maybe even going on longer. I met him in 1996 through a mutual friend who was a bartender.

Does Johnny Pastorius play?

John plays a little bit of drums, but Felix and his brother Julius – Felix is an amazing bass player and Julius is a drummer. They’re twins from a different marriage, from Jaco’s second wife, Ingrid. But Johnny, he’s the guy I became friends with and I’m still friends with, and he’s one of the producers on the film. Going back to the bass: the bass had been missing for over 20 years, and there’s a lot of various rumors as to what happened. Somebody said Jaco fell asleep in [Central] Park and somebody saw the bass and took it. Other people say Jaco sold it to somebody. No one really knows the true story. But regardless, the bass was gone. About five years ago somebody brought the instrument to a collector in New York City. That collector knew what he had – apparently the other person didn’t – and he purchased the instrument. The family didn’t know anything about this transaction.

At a certain point it got held up in a legal dispute, because obviously this person who had the instrument and felt it was rightfully his, and then you have the family and the estate are saying hold on a minute, that’s our father’s instrument. I sponsored the money to get the instrument back, but we had to be careful how we did it. The whole idea was just to get the instrument back so it could be in the inner circle. Right now Felix Pastorius has the bass in New York, he has his father’s bass and he’s playing it, and there are times when I have the bass. I’m the legal owner because I sponsored the money, but I’m not a collector. At the time I felt it needed to happen because it seemed like a very critical situation, the family was very concerned. And that’s the story. But there’s a lot more history to that instrument. Those kids grew up with it, John and [his sister] Mary. Johnny tells a story about seeing it on the carpet like a cat or a pet – never in a case, always there like a relative or something [laughs].

Robert Trujillo playing Jaco Pastorius's infamous "Bass of Doom" at a 2011 Metallica show at Yankee Stadium. Photo/Jeff Yeager

Having swum in this ocean of Jaco so closely, how has it affected your bass playing?

Going back to the early years, I had a band, the Infectious Grooves – I was the main writer of the music, instrumentally, and that was 100 percent inspired by Jaco. My goal was to incorporate his influence and have this wild recipe that included him, but also Slayer, or James Brown, or Sex Pistols. It was a potpourri, a mixture, an experiment in a lot of ways, but he was the main influence on that band. That’s the other side to this, taking a page out of his book. His whole theory was, music is for everybody. Rock is cool, country is cool, funk – it’s not all about just jazz. That was the attitude I took when I was in the Infectious Grooves. I didn’t necessarily learn Jaco’s solos note for note when I was younger – I’ve done more of that now. I started playing fretless a lot more, just for fun, and learning “Portrait of Tracy” and “Teen Town” and all that. I didn’t learn all that back in the day; I was more or less creating from the influence and the technique and the feel of him.

Not to mention his enthusiasm. I was watching the Joni Mitchell show from Santa Barbara [a 1979 performance with Pastorius on bass captured in the concert film Shadows and Light]. Even when he was playing in the pocket, he was so into it. And when I watched clips of you with the Bass of Doom, I was feeling the spirit.

Yeah, that was a special moment because we were in New York City, where the bass had been stolen. I felt, you know what, we’re at Yankee Stadium, it’s New York City, it was around the [date] of his death. All that was happening. The family was there, even Tracy, his first wife. I asked Johnny, “Should I play the bass tonight?” I don’t like to – I’m not out there trying to flaunt anything, that’s not what this is about at all. I said, “OK, I’m gonna do it.” The spirit of the event was very powerful. We were playing with Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeth, it was the Big 4 show. I just thought, when is this ever gonna happen? And it was great.

In the first few cuts it wasn’t actually in the film. And then at a certain point it’s like, well, wait a minute, whether it’s the Chili Peppers, or Rush, or Sting, or Robert Trujillo from Metallica, the influence is a part of what we do. The attitude and the edge that we saw when we saw Jaco perform – when I saw him for the first time in 1979, I came away from it being blown away by the performance. The performance was not this mellow, kind of subdued jazz performance, it was the opposite – it was a rock ‘n’ roll moment. What he brought to the stage, in our own sort of way, whether it’s Flea or myself or a million other bass players out there, Bootsy even – you want to be yourself, but you also want to bring the energy. Whatever that means according to the personality, that special ingredient that musician has, you bring that, because that’s what Jaco did, and that’s where we pull it from. All of the sudden it made sense – let’s have a little moment of celebration for Jaco and his edge and attitude and his influence, because he was punk in a lot of ways. He was a daredevil. And it’s a great moment at the end of the film.

In the ’80s and even in the ’90s there was a lot of really Jaco-esque, fretless sounds going around, especially in the British bands, the New Romantics. Kajagoogoo – there’s a song called “Too Shy,” a big, big hit in 1983. I spoke to the bass player and the leader of that band, Nick Beggs, and he told me, absolutely, 100 percent – the intro to that song, which was really special at the time, was 100 percent influenced by Jaco Pastorius, and he had actually met Jaco too, around that time. It’s amazing. And he had a story too. And then I talked to Matt Sorum, he was the drummer in Guns N’ Roses, and he’s telling me that he hung out with Jaco and he had a story. They actually jammed together.

What is your brush-with-Jaco story?

In 1985 there was a guitar show called the Los Angeles Guitar Show. It was actually in Hollywood, at a hotel called the Merlin Hotel. Every room on certain floors was centered around various different musical instrument companies. I was in one room and I heard this really loud, thunderous – I couldn’t even identify the instrument because it was just this massive distortion, the walls are shaking. It was like an earthquake. It was almost bordering on annoying – like, what the fuck, somebody’s being disrespectful to everyone else [laughs]. It was one door over or something, so I walked in the room and it was Jaco. He’s there with an artist relations guy who’s handing him instruments. I’m the first one in the room. He’s sitting down, and he’s playing, and he just kind of stares at me. I was speechless. I basically took a knee 10 feet from him, just sat there and I watched him play. And all of the sudden the room starts to fill up, it was packed. And he played. It was almost like when he turned the amp up to, what we would say 11, it was just to get people in the room – he’s gonna put on a little show for us. Everybody was quiet. We all came in the room and we’re just looking at him, watching him play. And he starts playing quotes – Jerry Jemmott quotes, classic bass lines, Aretha Franklin, he played some Otis Redding, and he did some of his own compositional quotes as well. At one point he’s looking at all of us, he’s playing and he’s just looking at us, not saying a word, not even smiling – like he was sizing us up. He had those intense eyes, you know? And he’s looking everybody in the eye. It was at a time when he wasn’t in the best place, in terms of his – there were a lot of stories about him and what was going on with his bipolar syndrome. But there he is. It was a powerful moment because he was really sizing us up, almost saying with his eyes, “I’m here, and I could still kick your ass.” [Laughs]

He reminded me of the skateboarders or the surfers that I grew up with in Venice Beach, California. And him growing up in Florida, in Fort Lauderdale, growing up on the sand, there’s also that vibe and the connection. The first time I saw him was at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and that’s one block from the beach. When I first saw him, I was like, this guy’s really cool, he’s a beach guy, he’s ripping on the bass, he’s like Hendrix on bass.

So you were one of those Dogtown kids in Venice?

Yeah, I grew up around all those cats, Jay Adams, Tony Alva. They all remind me of Jaco. That’s the closest types of people I can identify and connect Jaco too, those guys who were changing the universe of extreme sports ’cause of what they were doing. It was all centered around this go-for-it attitude. Even being in the band Suicidal Tendencies – “Suicidal” did not have anything to do with killing yourself. “Suicidal” in that realm equated to going for it. That’s why the skateboarders really identified with the music and the attitude of that band. That was the thing about Jaco. There was the music and the attitude and the go-for-it approach, jumping off the amps. When I saw him at the Santa Monica Civic he slid into his bass guitar like he was sliding into home plate. Who’s ever done that? That’s what I connected him to, the lifestyle and the people as well as his ability to play.

Have your bandmates in Metallica seen this film?

Lars, who’s a huge film buff, and he loves documentaries, he actually saw a couple of the earlier cuts. It was surprising to me, because he’s a harsh critic – I remember him calling me in Mexico City, we were there for two weeks, this would have been three years ago. I remember him saying, “This is fantastic,” which was surprising. And then at one point his father wanted to see the movie, because his father knew Wayne Shorter, he knew a lot of the jazz musicians that came through Copenhagen. Being a fan of Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter and Jaco, he wanted to see it. “Can you get a copy of the film so my dad can see it?” It was nice to have that support. But the thing is, I don’t want – I’m not trying to throw anything at my guys and say “Hey, check this out” or “Support me.” If it’s separate from the group I like to hopefully earn their respect the right way. If they want to see it, they’ll see it, and hopefully they’ll like it, and if they don’t, that’s OK too [laughs].

Jaco screens November 11 and 18 at the Leeds International Film Festival. It also opens the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival in Jaco Pastorius’s hometown on November 6.



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