May 12, 1973: Teen bassist Aric Sigman
May 12, 1973
Teenage Bass Player Keeps Titanic Afloat
ARIC SIGMAN,
like a lot of kids who grow up well-to-do, is routinely unintimidated by
sumptuous best-of-everything settings like his grandmother’s Delaware District
living room.
He’s made his home here with Dr. and Mrs. Nathaniel
Kutzman,
His immediate instinct is simply to be comfortable and he
satisfies it by snatching an antique French chair, turning it around and
sitting on it backwards, his arms propped against its dark wooden back.
In less than 48 hours, he has to be back in Paris for a
concert somewhere, he’s not sure where, and in the few days he’s been here he
hasn’t completed his one musical objective, that being to buy a Stratocaster
guitar (they’re four times as costly in France) to graft its body onto the neck
of his six-string bass and see what he can do with the vibrato bar.
* * *
HE HAS a
six-string bass and an eight-string bass which has its strings doubled like a
12-string guitar. The melodic possibilities are what Aric likes and he plays
melodic bass lines.
“I really dislike most conventional bass players,” he says.
“Most of them just follow the drums. They all use those Fender jazz basses with
flat-wound strings and you get this thump, thump, thump all the time. I like to
play fancier than that.”
Pride in his unconventionality combined with his youth (he’s
18) and his bluntness gives him a kind of scrappy determination which has
served him well since last November.
That’s when he borrowed from his mother and grandmother and
took a jet to
* * *
“I REALLY
want to be famous,” he says. “I really was crazy about being famous and I
became aware that I wasn’t going to make it if I stayed here. I didn’t know if
I was ready, but I just had to go over and do it.”
“Most of the auditions were not very good,” he says. “Then
after about six weeks I came across this one. I ran down to the studio and ran
into a hundred other bass players. It was rough.
* * *
“WE JUST
jammed some blues in the audition. Somebody said: ‘Hey, you really play blues
good.’ I have no idea how to play them. I really tried to be unconventional.
Two days later they phoned me and said here’s a ticket to
He’d become the sixth member of a band called Titanic. Four
Norwegians and one Briton, all in their late 20s, all English-speaking.
Aric found them mired in their usual off-stage bog –
drinking – without an idea in the world of what to put on an album, their third
for CBS-France, which was due in two months.
“What made them famous, they had a single,” Aric relates. “It
was number two in
* * *
THEY’D IMPROVED
until lately falling into endless on-stage jamming. But what they needed were
songs.
He’d never written songs before, but Aric was more than
willing to give it a try. In the end, he penned six of the seven songs on the
album and wrote lyrics for five of them.
“It becomes a lot like a 9-to-5 job,” he says, “except it
goes from early in the afternoon to quite late at night. We spent hours and
hours in the studio practicing and I’d spend hours and hours writing songs in
my bedroom.
“Oh, it was a horrible, dingy hotel room and I really
forced myself to stay there and write a song. Sometimes I’d have only 12 hours
to get one.”
* * *
AS YOU’D EXPECT,
the other members of Titanic had their doubts and arguments about the stuff
this brash kid was putting out. Besides that, he was calling their heroes –
Eddie Cochran and Jerry Lee Lewis – dumb and old-fashioned.
“Even the Beatles seem a little old-fashioned to me,” Aric
observes. His favorite group is Yes.
But he was getting them out of this album mess. In the end,
Aric says, they accepted everything he wrote, a wide variety of things. When
they finished the French studio demos, everyone agreed they sounded pretty
nice.
“The lyrics? I have an idea about lyrics,” he explains. “If
you read rock lyrics, they don’t make any sense, right? It’s the phrases that
sound right.
“Like ‘Roundabout.’ You ever listen to the words? It doesn’t
make any sense, but it sounds good.”
* * *
IT WAS back
to CBS studios in
“That’s because CBS-France is really tight,” Aric says. “We
were in there from 2 in the afternoon until 6 in the morning.
“We mixed some very good five- and six-part harmonies with
some classical kinds of things and we got a very good sound. Most of the
producers who heard it feel it’ll be one of the better albums this year.”
Between now and mid-June, when the album is due out in
France, Titanic will be touring, getting their live show in order before,
hopefully, they tackle America. Here the album, with Aric’s stage name, Arica
Siggs, on it, ought to be out in August.
* * *
“EVERYBODY’S
heard horrible things about
“I felt like a foreigner when I came back this time. The
houses look big, the cars look big, the people look big.
“One thing I’ve been doing here is eating. The food over
there is awful. In
“All me friends here have been makin’ fun of me about me
English accent. It’s getting worse and worse or better and better, depending on
how you look at it. Me first two weeks in
“It’s funny, people in high school used to ask what’re you
gonna do. And I’d say I’m gonna be famous. And they’d say, well, what’re you
gonna do. Well, now nobody laughs, that’s for sure.”
The box/sidebar:
He’s Happy in
Aric Sigman wasn’t in groups particularly when he was going
to
That’s how he wound up using a pick instead of his fingers,
round-wound strings instead of flat-wound ones. He likes their tone variations.
* * *
HE DEVELOPED
some strong ideas on music too:
“I hate American music. When it comes to rock, they seem to
lack originality. All the really big bands are British – Jethro Tull, Led
Zeppelin, Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, you
can go on and on.
“Except for Hendrix, all the great rock guitarists are
English. I think all the better rock drummers come from
Most of today’s well-known groups are stagnating in their
styles, he feels, and people are looking for new sounds, new songs. Aric also
thinks that until a renaissance comes along, total originality won’t be seen
again in rock.
* * *
“BEING AS YOUNG
as I am,” he says, “I can see how people make mistakes. I’m writing it all down
in a notebook so I can be objective about it later. One thing I say, you’ve
always got to have a good melody. Because if the melody’s bad, it’s difficult
to please people.
“I hope in a few years I’ll be able to cause an uproar in
music. I’ve got me ideas of who’s good and who’s bad, but who knows, maybe in
two or three years I’ll be washed up too. That’s funny, to be washed up at 21.
“I saw Jack Bruce a couple weeks ago. I used to think he
was the best bass player in the world, but this time I didn’t want to meet him.
I hate to be a braggart, but now he seems to be old-fashioned.”
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: Aric Sigman did not stay in music, but he
stayed in
He’s a chartered biologist, chartered psychologist,
chartered scientist and a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. He lectures,
appears on television and writes a lot about healthy behavior and brain
development in children. One of his books is entitled “Alcohol Nation: How to
Protect Our Children from Today’s Drinking Culture.”
In a publisher’s bio, it’s further noted that he’s “the
hands-on father of four children” and another book, “Remotely Controlled: How
Television Is Damaging Our Lives,” has touched off “ongoing public debate.” The
debate includes charges that he’s used bad science, which he denies.
His name is not mentioned on the Wikipedia page for
the band Titanic. Nor does it offer anything more than the name of that 1973
album, which was entitled “Eagle Rock.” Unless, of course, you go to Norwegian
Wikipedia, which indicates that
Another website, peoplepill.com, reports that Aric
released a single under his own name in 1982 – “Come On” backed with “I Am a
Nerd.” It notes that “both (are) performed in a new wave, synth style, with
lyrics about a science-oriented math scholar who has a penchant for computers.”
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