About johnmarcus

JOHN MARCUS – Since 1991 Bass

I grew up in Florida in a musical family. I started playing clarinet in fourth grade, and I hated it because the Beatles and Monkees had just come out and I wanted to play guitar. So I got an acoustic guitar, picked up a Mel Bay book, and started banging out chords. When I was in the sixth or seventh grade, I hooked up with some kids down the street who had a little garage band; they already had a guitar player, a drummer, and a keyboard player, so I picked up a bass for, like, fifty bucks and it was love instantly. I got really serious about bass, listening to guys like Stanley Clarke and Jaco Pastorius and playing rock 'n' roll and jazz. My older brothers were into some pretty weird stuff and knew a lot of serious jazz guys, and they were a pretty big influence on me. In the middle '70s, I joined a rock band called Fantasy that had been signed and had had a hit record and were trying to regain their former glory, and it just came to the point where I hated rock 'n' roll and didn’t want to play it anymore. I'd always sworn that I would never play country music, but I met these bluegrass guys who played like nothing I had ever heard in my life and I said, "OK, this is cool." I also played in Tanya Tucker's band for awhile. Then a friend of mine said he knew this guy named Tim who needed a bass player, so I went and did a couple of things with him. He said, "We're not gonna rehearse, let’s just go out and wing it." And I said, "This is for me."