Jaco Pastorious

Jaco Pastorious is the greatest bass player ever!! He may have been drunk all the time but he was still unbelievable. When he played “the dry cleaner from Des Moines” with Joni Mitchell I actually got chills. I personally think that he is just one of the best, tied with Ron Carter and Victor Wooten, but he would have told you otherwise. From what I understand he was very very pretentious. This negative aspect in his personality ultimately ended his life.
Jaco grew up in Florida were it is extremely humid. This location completely changed the course of bass history. He first fell in love with and tried to play the upright bass, but he said that the weather turned his bass into splinters. Pastorious did not give up! He went out and bought the bass that would be known as the bass of doom. It was a fender jazz bass. Jaco later removed the frets and filled the with wood putty (this really works well if you have a lot of patience and any wood working background at all)so that it would sound more like an upright bass. He would not practice on the bass of doom because the strings would actually tear away at the finger board creating little divots that would throw each note slightly out of tune, and it would also create a lot of “fret” buzzing.
He has played on countless records with huge named players. As I said before my favorite stuff of his is with Joni Mitchell. The balance of his perfect low notes and her thick relatively upper register voice was perfect. A Zen master could not mix a concoction so balanced.
The way that he ultimately died was from making a couple of karate chopping security guards angry. They would not let Jaco into a bar so Jaco screamed “don’t you know who I am” and began to fight the security guards. They killed him out of self defense. This is the story that I heard, it may not be true, but it is interesting.