A Work In Progress

A Work

In Progress

Mike Silverman, a.k.a. That One Guy makes music that defies convention and effortlessly evades stagnation.
By Max Sidman

It's not easy to pin down Mike Silverman, except to say that he is a consummate musician. As a current member of more bands than most people play in throughout their entire lives, Mike is prolific to say the least, but music is what he does. As a professional musician, a bass player and musical thinker of the highest caliber, Mike is working constantly, both in the studio and live on an almost nightly basis.

With his recent addition to surf-jammers, The Mermen, on electric bass; as a member of the Bay Area tango outfit Parlando / Strictly Tango; the frontman of his own epic rock act, The Fabulous Hedgehogs, in which he plays the stand-up bass; an experimental project called Soilent Green, in which he plays "the pipe" (we'll get to that shortly); and with all the studio work he does, it's amazing that Mike finds the time to expend on his own project, a one man aural extravaganza called That One Guy, one of the most intriguing, unusual and unsung musical projects to come out of the Bay Area in years.

When I recently caught up with Mike Silverman, a.k.a. That One Guy, he was at home in Walnut Creek, reworking and building on the That One Guy rig, a massive amount of wiring and equipment that runs a one-string electric bass-his "evil" bass-though a signal splitter and a set of pedal boards that create both guitar and bass sounds, while an analogue drum machine and other organic percussion techniques fill the rhythmic gaps in the music and vocal effects take his voice and run it through a plethora of grinders, loopers, tweekers and pedals. Mike then added "the pipe" to his lineup some months back, and it makes for an all-new, interesting experience, both auditory and visual. The pipe is a cold metal tower with one standup bass string running down its middle and two buttons connected to the drum machine mounted on the side. A stringed attachment sprouts from the top of the pipe and hooks back down behind it. This part of the rig utilizes another single string, and makes completely different sounds than the main section of the instrument.

It really is like nothing that has ever been done before and, despite the strangeness of the entire set-up, people are drawn to the music of That One Guy, usually even before Mike is done setting up all his gear. For example, That One Guy plays a regular gig every Tuesday in Berkeley at a club called Jupiter, and he does the weekends at the club's sister spot in Walnut Creek, a decidedly more up-scale crowd. But despite Mike's reservations about playing in front of people who aren't necessarily on the cutting edge of the music scene, they seem to be into it.

"I didn't expect it to go well, but it really has," he says as we get to talking. He knows that the That One Guy is as much visual as it is auditory.

"It's true!" he declares with a nervous chuckle. "I definitely think so. Whether I like it or not, people are interested in it, almost no matter what. But that's what's cool about it, especially about the Walnut Creek gigs. It's all kinds of people, lots of older yuppies and stuff, and they're all into it. They're even totally intrigued by the music. They stick around after I set up and check it out."

This isn't the first time I've spoken with Mike. In fact, it's the third. There is just something about this musician that is hard to ignore. Perhaps it's his drive, or maybe it's the fact that he does so much and has such an extensive knowledge about music. Perhaps it's that one funny story he has about working with Jewel last year (you'll have to ask him about that yourself), or maybe it's just that he is one of the most genuine, nicest people I've ever met. Whatever the reason, talking to Mike Silverman is always fun and interesting, and especially when he's talking about music.

Mike was first turned onto music-the bass specifically-by his father, a businessman by trade, but a man who put himself through USC business school by playing stand-up bass in jazz bands. When Mike was 10 years old, he took possession of his father's old upright when his dad told him that he was giving up the instrument and was planning on cutting it in half length-wise and planting ferns in it in the back yard. "He was quirky that way," says Mike.

As a bass man of the old guard, Mike's father gave him more than just that old stand-up (a bass that Mike still plays with his band, The Fabulous Hedgehogs). He gave Mike an understanding about the nuances of music, the subtleties and intricacies that dictate what feels right for each piece. In other words, Mike learned to keep it simple.

"My father really showed me that doing the right thing is more important than doing unnecessary things," he remembers. "Sound, feel and groove are so much more important that flash."

"I ended up at The Conservatory of Music in San Francisco," he continues about his music training, "and they do all classical there. I learned a lot about classical stuff, but none of it really applies to what I'm doing now. The thing I really learned about music there was the approach-sound production, pitch and intonation. All of that I definitely use, but everything else is my own discovery."

This kind of attitude is a bit of a departure from the tried and true techniques, formulas and idioms that Mike learned at The Conservatory, but then, the only people who seem to swear up and down by the tenets of music school are those mired in it-teachers and students bound for teaching jobs. Mike Silverman is neither.

"The phrase 'music school' is a contradiction in terms," he explains. "Ask any professional musician-they've done all their learning outside of school. All the people who are taught and studied at The Conservatory did their own thing. Bach did something that was completely his own, and it was so revolutionary that people have been studying it for the last 300 years. Now his methods are the methods taught."

Mike's musical exploits are vast and varied, but all give him a different way to exercise his music, an outlet for different inspirations and ideas. The Mermen is not necessarily something he has to think about-the music is there, and all he has to do is play it. With Parlando / Strictly Tango, the work is mostly traditional Latin-flavored tunes, while Dogslyde affords him the opportunity to play something closer to straight-ahead jazz. The Fabulous Hedgehogs are a grand-scale rock band with more twists than a Red Vine, and Mike's latest project, Soylent Green, features a trumpet player, a drummer, a turntablist, and Mike on the pipe. He is a self-taught saw player (his only saw inspiration was a high school Spanish teacher) whose saw bowing skills appear on the Force 7 CD, and he spends a lot of time in the studio doing contract work for producers who make commercials, films and work with some pretty big name stars. Mike's chops have enhanced the work of Jewel, Jerry Cantrel and Counting Crows, just to name a few.

"I do tons of studio work," says Mike, who knows that, when he tells most people that he's a professional musician, they automatically think of the starving artist, eating ramen three times a day. "It ain't like that, man. There's so much work out there, but it's hard work, and there are no set hours. Sometimes a studio session will start at 11AM or 1PM, and go all day. Then I'll have a gig that night that will go to, like, 3AM, and I pretty much gig every night."

Mike says he likes working in the studio, though, mostly because it is a new experience for him, a prime learning opportunity. "I really like recording," he beams. "I love working with great producers and great engineers because it's a whole other world and I'm trying to get more into producing." Further learning and growing is achieved through playing live. Soylent Green offers him the structure of playing with other musicians and the freedom of total improvisation, and it allows him to really work in the pipe and make it a more complete part of his musical arsenal.

"Now I'm actually doing a lot more of my own stuff, which is cool. I've been playing That One Guy, like, three nights a week, and we're doing the Soylent Green thing two nights, so I've been playing the pipe five times a week." Mike also enjoys the chance to improvise because, though That One Guy allows for some, it just doesn't happen quite the same way. "When you're improvising in a group you can throw ideas around as they happen and they take on a life of their own. When you're by yourself, that kind of thing can happen but it's nice to already have a well of things to draw from. You can set your own mood."

And set a mood is often what That One Guy does. Just watching him set up can send a buzz through the room, and people gather around with big, dumbfounded grins on their faces. It really is somewhat of a spectacle, and according to Mike, it always has been.

That One Guy was not the long-term plan of a truly unique musician, but rather a project put together on the fly, and one that hasn't really maintained a set pattern or set of rules since its inception.

"That One Guy started a long time ago, almost on a dare," laughs Mike. "It was the end of a Hedgehogs gig and the owner of the place we were playing at gave us only 50 bucks for the whole band. As a joke, I said, 'I'm gonna start a one man band, play these shitty little clubs and keep the 50 for myself.' The club owner said, 'You can do that? What are you doing tomorrow?' He called my bluff."

That One guy was born the next night at the club owner's other establishment, a small dive where the lack of a stage forced Mike to play on top of the bar itself, and the lack of a PA system forced him to rig his microphone through the bar's Jukebox speaker. Mike played his electric bass through a small amp and used beats provided by the same old, analogue drum machine he uses today.

"I had no tunes, nothin'" he confesses. "I was playing covers-Cameo's "Word Up," P-Funk covers, things like that. I did some improv in some of the grooves and people really seemed to like it. It was completely undeveloped, but I think the people really dug the energy of it." After that gig, the bar owner asked Mike to perform every Sunday at the club where the original idea was conceived, and That One Guy quickly became a work in progress.

"With each gig I'd have new ideas. I'd bring in a new piece of gear or just rewire something. Eventually, it pared itself down to just the one string-the rig got bigger and the strings got fewer," he pauses for just a moment. "Yeah, it's just completely taken on a life of its own."

One of the things that draws people to That One Guy is the fact that he makes so much noise using only one string. It may seem limiting to play that way, especially when every bass comes with at least four perfectly good strings, but Mike found that, as his rig developed, one string actually gave him more freedom to move.

"I was trying to decide which direction to go with it," Mike explains about his rig's development. "At first, I was thinking that I needed to build a custom 10-string instrument or something, that I shouldn't be playing bass. After all, I'm not just the bass player of That One Guy, I'm trying to fill up all the sounds. Then I thought about it, and the way I rig it all up-trying to get big sounds out of sparse parts-I realized that I should go down to less strings. Why not one string? Since then, I've discovered ways to play the one-string in ways I can't technically do with a four-string. It's just one string, I can really bash on it."

And it's not just the one string on his "evil" bass, but also on the pipe. The most impressive part of his rig to date, this Goliath contraption is a noise maker like no other. It is a stringed instrument (one string) but its feel is decidedly rhythmic. Between the minimalist metallic slide sound and the analogue drum machine buttons, it is a one-man rhythm machine, creating a unique sonic experience has to be heard to be believed, and is a sight that leaves most with gaping jaws. Essentially, he plays the pipe like an upright, but, Mike says, it takes much more abuse than a standard wooden stand-up. "I'm playing the one string on the pipe much differently than I play the upright. The pipe takes much more abuse sonically. It doesn't feedback, and it's just bulletproof."

The pipe exemplifies the nature of Mike's That One Guy rig, something that is constantly evolving, changing and growing, if not in size, at least in capability. In fact, as Mike I spoke throughout last week, he was rewiring and reworking parts of the rig to make it a more efficient machine, and he added a few things as well. He says there's nothing new on the outside of the rig, that most of his changes are internal, electronic, the kind of thing he can't easily describe.

"I don't know how to put what I've done into words. A lot of it you can't even see 'cause it's all technical. I've added a lot of new pieces and rewired a lot, so the rig's a lot more efficient. It works a lot better, and it's definitely a better sound," says Mike, who uses all the components of this mammoth set-up to emulate the sound of a full band. Contained within his monstrous rig are the components that do just that. "It's all kinds of stuff, man; not really a ton of effects or anything, but mostly just organized signal paths. Everything I'm doing is, in a way, like six or seven different instruments at once. It's all patched into a mixer, an Echoplex looping device... It's all pretty much analog too."

"I'm trying to expand the rig sonically, but at the same time, keep it under control for set-up and tear down," he continues. "Last month at the Jupiter, it was so ridiculous, just a big pile of shit. Now-and you won't be able to tell by just looking at it-it's actually been scaled down in terms of the way it's organized, but there's way more in terms of sounds." Still, it's just not enough for Mike, and as we wrapped up our conversation, he mentioned that he had just been brain-storming about That One guy, and had some major changes in mind.

"I think I'm gonna redo the whole thing in a couple of weeks," he chuckles, referring the project as a constant work in progress. "I think I've come to the realization that it's way I should think about everything I'm doing."

He is a strange combination of Morrissey and Elvis, and has the makings of an international pop icon. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? That one guy knows...

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