Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament has owned plenty of memorable bass guitars, but few have a story as wild as the “NBA” basses built by renowned Seattle builder Mike Lull. The distinctive custom basses became some of Ament’s most recognizable instruments – and some of his most spectacularly ill-fated.
On a special edition of NBA Soundsystem, Ament explained: “I wanted to be inspired 100 percent of the time I was playing music. And by putting the names of my most inspirational pro basketball players on the bass, at any given time, if I felt like the mojo was slipping I would look down at the bass and see Nate Archibald’s name and get fired up.”
When Ament first approached Lull, the two Seattle bass veterans had a shared understanding of what Ament needed from an instrument: something distinctive enough to stand out onstage, but rugged enough to survive the rigors of Pearl Jam’s increasingly unpredictable live shows – including one particularly chaotic night that would leave it in pieces.
Latest Videos FromGuitar World
“The first NBA bass was probably the first really nice bass I ever had. It had good electronics and played great,” said Ament in the December 2011 issue of Bass Player. “I had two of those basses. Both met their demise on the road.”
The “NBA” bass was a particularly ambitious build for Lull, both in terms of its electronics and its design. It also marked the first time he had combined several Bartolini pickups in this particular configuration.
“It was the first time we had used a big Bartolini humbucker in the neck position and a pair of Bartolini J-Bass pickups,” said Lull. “It had a J-style alder body, a maple neck, and a rosewood fingerboard. Jeff did all the graphics on it. It was pretty extreme.
“It also had high-end hardware – I think it had Gotoh tuners and a Ken Smith bridge, since they were the big high-mass bridges of the day. That first one was a pretty tremendous sounding bass.”
Both basses would ultimately meet brutal ends. “I think that one got destroyed in Vancouver,” said Ament. “It was right at the end of the main set, somebody in the audience threw a full 7-Up can at the stage and it hit me right between the eyes. I remember being stunned for 10 or 15 seconds, and then looked down to see 7-Up spraying out of the dented can. Then I got super-pissed!
“Back then we were pretty loose – I’d throw basses across the stage to my tech George Webb. But that time I just threw it back towards my amp and went back to the dressing room. I was really upset. I didn’t mean to break that bass, but we don’t play music to get full cans of soda thrown at us.
“I wasn’t going to return to the show, but the guys talked me into coming back out. When I did, George handed me my crappy backup bass and said, ‘You broke your bass.’ It was horrible – a double whammy.
“Mike built another one, and that one broke at the first Lollapalooza show in San Francisco. For the first four songs there were about 200 photographers up front and my rig wasn’t working. By the second or third song it started coming back.
“I went back out, but then it died. So I chucked my bass straight up in the air. As it was up in the air, I walked over to George and said, ‘I’m not going back out there until you get this rig running.’ But the bass didn’t make it. Unfortunately, being young and stupid can ruin some good things.”
