Hello Forum
Real name: Paul McGrath. I have been writing about music in Toronto since 1976, for The Globe and Mail newspaper and for CBC Radio and Television.
There are extraordinarily knowledgeable people gathered here, and I have learned a lot over the last decade or so. I am pleased to be allowed in.

I have always been fascinated by how new bits of machinery can alter the course of music in an instant - the Gibson fuzz pedal on the Stones' Satisfaction, Hendrix's wah, the Echo-Sonic amp, the list could go on.

So it is with Mike McLean's pre-amp. The most precise estimate I have seen of its arrival in the studio is "mid-1966", which is not precise enough for the historian in me. At the same moment, [[if "mid" can mean July) we have to somehow explain James Jamerson's sudden - really sudden - ascent into the realm of the gods, his bass work starting from "Reach Out" [[July 6) and going on for roughly the next 2 1\2 years, that elevated the instrument beyond any previous status, influenced every bassist since and propelled Motown into its third great season of glory: Temps, Tops, Marvin, Stevie. Pardon any simplification there.

Beans Bowles, in Standing In The Shadows Of Love, made the connection, saying James could hear himself for the first time and that prompted him to get busier.
So, I ask the forum if anyone has any thoughts about this, any more connection like the one Beans made.
In particular, someone somewhere talked about Jamerson being able to "hear the holes, hear the spaces." I would love to be able to use that in what I'm working on, but the insight does not belong to me and when I came across it I was lazy and did not attribute it. After long hours trying, I cannot retrieve it. I am wondering if anyone else remembers that or if someone else had said something similar.

In 2008, before I was making mental leaps like that, I had a long series of communications with McLean without asking him specifically about that. Huge missed opportunity. Let me post a bit from his communication about the overall Motown sound which, as a classical fan, he hated.
"Motown was desperate to make their productions as appealing to the mass audience as possible. Above all, they wanted to "get a HIT" [[a million seller) so that they could make a lot of money and continue to grow. There were problems of compromise which caused maintenance of natural timbre to assume a low priority. For example: If the record was going to have mass appeal, the lyrics had to be intelligible. The tendency to cram ten pounds of music into a five pound bag [[to get more "appeal") often led to sounds of certain musical instruments having the same frequencies as the singer. This caused "masking" of the lyrics so that they could not be understood. The natural thing to do was to reduce the loudness of those masking frequencies by using an "equalizer" to unequalize those offending instruments to correct the problem. End result: total destruction of the naturalness of timbre of those instruments. I found this highly offensive, and I loathed the resulting "Motown sound." The traditional way to fix this problem was to arrange the music properly. All one need do is listen to a recording of Frank Sinatra made by Capitol Records during the late 1950's, to hear music that does not require this sort of "JACKING IT ALL OUT OF SHAPE" to make it commercial."

Mike was well-meaning but kinda prickly, all in all.

Many thanks for your patience if you read this all.