GEAR

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Bryan Beller

4 days ago

LESSONS, SESSIONS & CONFESSIONS: This is a good a time as any to restate for the record that I - a primarily touring musician spending lots of time at home these days - am available for Skype private lessons and remote bass tracking sessions. Look at all those shiny basses - now including a certain special instrument I recently reacquired. 😉

Looking further on the bright side, it’s been quite rewarding revisiting some of the denser material in my bassist repertoire (Aristocrats, Mike Keneally, Steve Vai, etc) from an educational perspective. Sometimes I forget everything I went through to learn this stuff in the first place! For the brave souls who want to enter that process, many treasures and surprises await. Regarding sessions, it’s always exciting to bring new instruments to the table, as well as revisiting some old ones. As I’ve said many times, the song will always tell you what to do.

I admit that the “confessions” bit was just to complete a clever headline. (Wait, that *was* a confession, wasn’t it?) I don’t have anything to confess, other than, like so many of you, I have no idea when life will return to normal. It’s a crazy world out there right now. Stay safe, and if you’re a musician, somehow, keep playing. ... See MoreSee Less

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Bryan Beller

1 week ago

TOBIAS UPDATE - THE INTERNET DESERVES A BETTER CLASS OF STORY: But, in this case, I can’t really give it to you. Or, to keep going with The Dark Knight meme language, the tale of my stolen-and-returned Tobias Lacewood Tobias #1402 isn’t the story we need in 2020, but it’s the story that 2020 deserves. And now I’m going to have to break My One Rule: Never tell a boring story. But I’m going to, right here, with as little drama as possible. In a timeline:

1991: The bass is built in Michael Tobias’ shop in Los Angeles. Luthier/finisher/musician Paul Slagle becomes the original owner.
May 1992: I reach out to Tobias via phone during my senior year at Berklee College Of Music . Somehow (I can’t remember this part) I am connected with Paul Slagle, who has one for sale (probably because there was a long backorder on new Tobias basses). I fly from Boston to Los Angeles to meet Paul, watch him play it at The Robin Hood Pub in Sherman Oaks, and buy it from him the next day.
May 1992-December 1994: It becomes my #1 instrument. I play it in a Metallica tribute show at Berklee, my Berklee Senior Recital, gigs with the blues-rock band 100 Proof, the Dweezil/Ahmet Zappa band Z (two tracks from 1993’s “Shampoohorn”, plus a 3-week tour of the USA), and Mike Keneally (a few gigs in San Diego, and the recording session for 1994’s “Boil That Dust Speck”).
December 31, 1994: The instrument is stolen (with no forced entry) from my North Hollywood apartment by a recently fired maintenance worker at the complex, who kept his uniform and made key copies. He had been in my apartment a week before to fix something (while still employed by the complex), and the instrument had been left out on display. Several eyewitnesses saw him entering and leaving my apartment minutes before I got home, dressed in uniform, carrying white garbage bags filled with “something”.
Early 1995: He was arrested, tried, and found “not guilty”.
August 2017: I posted this message in the Talkbass.com forum, along with a picture of the bass:

“This beautiful 1986 Tobias Basic with a lacewood maple top was stolen out of my apartment by a building maintenance worker in 1994. I bought it three years before and it was my #1 at the time I first moved to Los Angeles in 1993. The serial number is #1402. Somehow it never turned up at the local pawnshops, and since this was the pre-internet era, it's hard to know what happened to it.

23 years later, it's entirely possible that this instrument has ended up in the hands of someone who has no knowledge of its troubled provenance. If that person happens to be you - I will gladly pay a fair price for it. It's more than likely that the instrument stayed in California somewhere, but you never know.

What say you, TalkBass community? Any chance this shot in the dark hits light?”

September 1, 2020: A person e-mails me to say “I do actually own that bass”. He is located just blocks from where the bass was stolen and bought it from someone locally in 1997.
September 5, 2020: I buy the Tobias back from this person, for the fair price I said I would in the TalkBass post.

And there it is. Or as Paul Harvey would say…now you know the rest of the story.

The only post-script is that I have just learned - literally as I was writing this post - is that Paul Slagle passed away in March 2020 after a long battle with leukemia. I had no idea as I hadn’t been in touch with Paul since 1992, and I was planning on reaching out to him today. Rest in peace, Paul, and thanks again for being the first person to sell me this amazing instrument.

(Picture from March 9, 1994, at A.L. Gators in Baltimore MD, live from the Z “K.A.O.S.” tour) ... See MoreSee Less

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