Today I found out that one of my biggest influences on the bass has passed away: Randy Coven. His music played a major role in my development as a bass player and he helped shape my approach to the role of bass in a band setting.
When I first started playing bass guitar I tried to find notable bassists to look up to. I wanted to find the players that took the instrument and propelled it far beyond what it was known for. I wanted to know who were the ones out there taking the bass guitar to the limits. By perusing through magazines like Guitar For The Practicing Musician I came across names like Billy Sheehan, Randy Coven, Geddy Lee, Steve Bailey. At the time, I was mainly interested in tapping and flashy playing, so naturally I gravitated towards guys like Billy Sheehan and Randy Coven. These were the prominent guys in the genre I liked best.
I became familiar with Randy Coven through his contributing articles in Guitar For the Practicing Musician. He even had a couple of solo albums available through the magazines own record label, Guitar Recordings. However, it was very difficult to find instrumental albums out there. This was back in the day when people didn’t have every song ever recorded at their immediate disposal. But one day I found a copy of Randy Coven’s “Sammy Says Ouch” while on vacation. What a happy find – I also found the first album by Nitro during that album scouting venture. Why do I remember this stuff?
Well, I bought it and loved it instantly. I had never heard bass playing like that. The first song absolutely blew me away. I had no idea what he was doing. It was crazy.
So I took the first song to my guitar teacher and had him attempt to figure it out for me. We got through the first several riffs, not the whole song, but the majority of what was going on and all the crazy techniques employed in making sound the way it did. Wow, I had a lot to work on.
Back when I first started playing bass I had an old Peavey bass guitar.
I named that bass guitar Randy.
I’m not even kidding. I took masking tape and wrote “Randy” on the back of my bass. That was its name. And that was the only name I ever gave to any of my instruments. None of my other bass guitars are named. Just Randy.
And I still have Randy to this day. My dad bought it for me at a pawn shop and it was the instrument that helped get me to where I am today.
This sucks, you know. I never got a chance to meet Randy Coven but I did get a chance to see him play live once. It was years ago at a Prog Power festival and he was playing with a band called Ark at the time. That was it. The only time I’d actually see him play live.
Even though I only saw him live one time, I owned all his albums he’d ever been on: all the solo stuff, all the stuff with Ark, all the stuff with CPR.
I just wanted to share some thoughts on Randy Coven and if you haven’t heard his stuff before then check out this song below. It’s the first song I heard from him and the song I brought to my guitar teacher to learn.
So, I was a fan of Randy’s way back in the day, I had his first two albums on the Guitar for the Practicing Musician and I was just thinking about him tonight for the first time in ages and I found this. The sadness of his death was offset by finding out about it in such a wonderful tribute. Thank you for writing this, even a decade later.