Herbie Flowers, a prolific British session musician who rode a handful of notes to rock immortality with his indelible bass line on Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” — just one of the many landmark recordings on which he supported a constellation of rock stars — died on Sept. 5. He was 86.
Family members announced his death on social media. The family did not say where he died or cite a cause.
Mr. Flowers, a bassist who also occasionally played tuba, began his career as a session musician in the late 1960s. He carved out his sliver of rock glory by playing on more than 500 hit albums by the end of the 1970s, according to the BBC.
The classic albums Mr. Flowers played on could have filled a dorm room shelf in the 1970s and ’80s. Among them were Elton John’s “Madman Across the Water” and Harry Nilsson’s “Nilsson Schmilsson,” both from 1971; Cat Stevens’s “Foreigner” (1973); and David Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs” (1974).
He joined forces with three-quarters of rock’s equivalent of the royal family, recording with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. He also recorded with Dusty Springfield, Serge Gainsbourg and David Essex, whom he joined on the sinewy 1973 hit “Rock On.”
Despite his proximity to fame, Mr. Flowers described himself as little more than a hired hand.
As a studio musician, he once told Bass Player magazine, “they play you the song or sling you a chord chart, and you come up with what you think are fancy bass lines.” You “get your job done as quickly as you can,” he added, “and as soon as they say ‘Thanks very much,’ get the hell out of there.
“Studio work is expensive. The producer doesn’t want you hanging around, being in the way.”
Brian Keith Flowers was born on May 19, 1938, in Isleworth, a London suburb. He got his start playing tuba in a Royal Air Force band in the mid-1950s before turning to bass and honing his skills in various jazz ensembles.
Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
Although he often referred to himself as a “jazzer,” Mr. Flowers was soon swept up in the tide of rock. In the late 1960s, he banded together with other crack studio musicians to form Blue Mink, a high-flying pop group that notched four Top 10 songs in Britain, including “Melting Pot,” a musical call for racial harmony that reached No. 3 on the British singles chart.
In the mid-1970s, he joined the final lineup of T. Rex, the British glam-rock band fronted by Marc Bolan and known for the 1971 anthem “Bang a Gong (Get It On).”
But Mr. Flowers had little interest in the limelight. “I toured with Bowie in America for six months and it was totally exhausting,” he said in a 1976 interview with The Evening Standard of London.
“I’d hate to be a pop star,” he added, “even if I earned a fortune.”
As a sideman, he was at little risk of that. For his work on Mr. Bowie’s 1969 landmark song “Space Oddity,” Mr. Flowers took home nine pounds.
He told Bass Player that he was paid a similar pittance for “Walk on the Wild Side” — one of a number of songs he contributed to during a three-day session in 1972 for Mr. Reed’s acclaimed album “Transformer.”
It was Mr. Bowie, who produced the album with Mick Ronson, who hired Mr. Flowers for the job. But Mr. Flowers said Mr. Bowie was not present when he showed up at Trident Studios in London at 10 on a Monday morning to record his part for “Walk on the Wild Side.”
Instead, Mr. Reed, who appeared jet-lagged, emerged from the isolation booth, handed Mr. Flowers a handwritten sheet of paper with the song’s chords, and left him to come up with a suitable bass line for what would become Mr. Reed’s signature song, a gritty chronicle of underground figures he knew from Andy Warhol’s New York demimonde.
Mr. Flowers laid down the initial bass line on his double bass. “There was no inspiration, just a bar of C and a bar of F going round and round,” he told Bass Player.
Minimalist as it was, the “mother of all bass lines,” as it has been called, sets an ominous tone during the song’s haunting 20-second instrumental introduction, and thereafter underscores Mr. Reed’s lyrical portrait of New York’s streets.
The song took on a rich sonic complexity after Mr. Flowers suggested overdubbing the acoustic bass line with a mirroring sequence on his Fender Jazz electric bass, but 10 notes higher.
“Where the double bass would do a glissando downwards,” Mr. Flowers said in an interview with the BBC, invoking the musical term for a slide between notes, “the bass guitar would do a glissando upwards.”
“It was quite a unique effect,” he added, “but it’s an effect that you could only use once on a record — ever. If any other bass player played that interval on a gig, the audience would shout out goodness knows what.”
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