Bass Guitar
July/August 2005


He found fame and fortune in Soundgarden, but Hater was his baby. Ben Shepherd gives our Bill Murphy the word on the resurrection of his beloved side project.

The Second Coming

"I'm still ashamed of it," Ben Shepherd recalls of the first time his mug appeared on the cover of a certain bass magazine at the height of Soundgarden's popularity. "They bumped Ray Brown to put me on, and it's like, Holy shit, do you know what you're doing? Ever since then, I've felt stupid doing interviews, because I didn't even know what to talk about."

Eight years after the breakup of Soundgarden, Shepherd has plenty to say about he bass, and other topics besides. He recently logged studio sessions with an up-and-coming blues-rock guitar prodigy named Jordan Cook, and is writing and recording new songs of his own, he says, "by the dozens." Most imminent, and obviously of great importance to Shepherd, the Seattle-based imprint Burn Burn Burn has unearthed the long-shelved second outing by Hater, the punked-up side project the bassist launched with Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron back in 1992, and which he hopes to reconvene for a limited series of gigs this summer. Aptly titled The 2nd, the album was originally mixed and mastered in 1995, and finds Shepherd reprising the role he took on Hater's debut a year earlier as frontman. Interestingly, most of the bass duties were handled by Alan Davis--known for his longtime stint with ex-Screaming Trees vocalist Mark Lanegan (for whom Shepherd has also guested on several albums, the most recent being 2001's Field Songs).

"If I remember correctly, I did play bass on The 2nd's 'Walk Alone,'" Shepherd admits. "It's actually a really hooky line, but you can only hear it at the very end of the song. I wish I could have redone it."

A decade after the band recorded The 2nd, Shepherd recalls that Hater "has got a charm to it because it was just for the fun of recording together. I had given Alan Davis a Microfrets bass, and I think he used that on all the songs he tracked with us. He's still mad at me for the beginning of 'Downpour at Mt. Angel'--that was the first time he'd ever played that song. Same with 'Try'--man," laughs Shepherd, "try to play that on bass. Alan wanted to retrack it, and I was like, no way, that's a hangnail, man! Hangnails are what you want--you don't want a motherfuckin' piece of polished glass!"

Raw and raucous throughout, the thirteen cuts on The 2nd capture a loose unit at the height of their creative powers, channeling at times the energy of the Stooges or early Can. When pressed, Shepherd cites the punk roots of his own bass heroes, such as Black Flag's Chuck Dukowsky, original Soundgarden bassist Hiro Yamamoto (whose vacated seat Shepherd auditioned for, and landed in 1990) and Charles Mingus. That's right. . . Mingus.

"I heard once about how he liked to play dirty chords," Shepherd says, "and I was like, See, that's punk rock--that's cool."

Shepherd's awareness of the masters at this point in his career is so profound that he enjoys playing impromptu games of "Bass Trivial Pursuit." "Who played bass on Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson? That's my question," he asks. I'm still searching for the answer.

Shepherd also knows his gear. For all the many Tele-style P-Basses, Hofners, Rickenbackers, StingRays, Voxes and Guilds he has owned "and lost, and given away and destroyed" over the years, he still swears by the first real bass he ever had; a '72 Fender P-Bass nicknamed "Tree," strung with Dean Markley flatwounds and run through everything from a full-blown Mesa/Boogie 400+ triple-stack down to a vintage Ampeg B-15 Portaflex.

"There's a sound I've always gone for," says Shepherd. "Basically, if something is fretted, make it sound fretless. If you hear something, then don't put it on there--let people hear it for themselves. Try to push it to be blatant, but then hold off from actually putting your handprint on the blatancy, so that the mind can fill in the gap. Like if a song suggests trumpet, don't put the trumpet on there. That's what a lot of 'silence is golden' means."

That the man who played bass for one of the heaviest rock bands in history casually drops names like Mingus and Miles Davis is of a piece with the way he has approached being a musician. "You can either mean it, or you can fake it," he says. "You're always trying to reach further and play stuff you can't really play yet. That's what made Soundgarden fun--stretching out like that. For me personally, there was a lot more I wanted to do. I didn't want to stop at all, but you know, I take it as it comes."


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