What's your favourite Beatle bassline? | Page 5 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

All the basslines! I have favourites from the albums to practice with:  Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite ! starts with actual bass chords which I think is unique. I Want You (She’s So Heavy) has almost unfollowable rills even to the point of interrupting the main line, which Paul gets away with because so much else is happening on the track, and that’s AFTER all the heavy lines under the vocals. Nowhere Man is a really intense walking line that focuses on harmonising with the vocal, on the other hand Lovely Rita is an amazing bouncy thing that seems to lightly hit the changes on its own journey through the song. She Came In Through The Bathroom Window is similar and demonstrates a thing that the really good players do, which is to vary their parts in each verse or each chorus (James Jamerson was notorious for this).  Check out Cry Baby Cry , the bassline is very unobtrusive and does something different every verse. The Word is bouncy, the fuzz bass of Think For Yourself and Mean Mr Mustard is great and they should have done more of it, the tightness of Savoy Truffle is as fun to play as the dizzying Rain . I never get tired of playing along to the Beatles. Might go right now and play What Goes On .

Pineapple Records said
I just listened to Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! and couldn’t hear bass chords at the beginning.

It’s almost impossible to hear, particularly on the new remix, but they are there when the bass is isolated:

Right at the beginning, which is almost impossible to play along with! It’s also clearly heard in Anthology 2 from Take 1 so not an afterthought either. Unrelated note: why did we get Take 7 again on the new Sgt Pepper ‘s 50th?

I noticed that too about She Came In Through The Bathroom Window and Cry Baby Cry , and I note that in general in many songs over the years, Paul is good about putting a variance in when he will repeat something, whether a chorus or a riff or something (whereas most other pop musicians it seems feel bound to repeat formulas exactly throughout the song).  

To be fair, it’s something bassists argue about. Kim Deal, who I admire immensely, is utterly implacable about playing the simple line without embellishment, and regards variance as a form of egotism. And her music (and that of the Pixies) relies on that simplicity for its effect. I’ve never heard Tina Weymouth say anything similar, but she seems to echo that philosophy in her style. Sting’s basslines are deceptively simple and repetitive. Sir Horace Gentleman does vary things a tiny bit but usually sticks to the plan, as does Colin Moulding.

But on the other hand many players, especially the great session players, all have that way of putting interesting variance and always in the service of the song. Some bassist think like songwriters, and some don’t. I’m a huge fan of Tony Levin, who is a master of this art and the criminally unsung George Murray, who played some monster lines for some of Bowie’s greatest albums.