“I grabbed a diaper and shoved it under the strings near the bridge”: How Tony Levin came up with his muted bass tone on Peter Gabriel's Don't Give Up

Having backed such musically adventurous acts as King Crimson and Peter Gabriel, Tony Levin’s had a career filled with opportunities to create bass parts outside of the tried-and-true.

“Indeed, that’s almost all of what I do,” he told Bass Player. “I don’t have to think about coming up with a functional bass guitar part that provides what’s needed because I’ve been doing that my whole life. What I try to focus on is being creative and coming up with different things.”

One of Levin’s most memorable efforts is the multi-part line on Gabriel’s Don’t Give Up, a haunting duet with Kate Bush from the 1986 album, So. As Levin mentioned in the June '95 issue of BP, the presence of his infant daughter – sometimes held in a harness on his chest while he was playing – indirectly helped him develop a new texture.

“I heard the other parts, and I just had a sense of what I wanted to do: a tubby sound, with as much bottom as possible, with short, dampened notes. I didn’t think too much about it – I just went around looking for dampening material. I grabbed one of Megan’s diapers and shoved it under the strings near the bridge.

“In England diapers are called nappies, so Peter and I called it the ‘super wonder nappy sound.’ I didn’t know what I’d play until I got the dampening in there.” 

According to Levin, who often looks to other instruments for inspiration, his chordal bass figure was developed from a drum loop.

“All Peter had for an idea was a drum machine part that played through the whole piece. The rhythm pattern and pitches gave me the idea for the notes I played. I also made the phrase twice as long, but I think that drum machine part stayed in the final mix.”

Chugging along in a slow 12/8, the song fades in with a rhythmic figure rich in double-stops. During the chorus, Levin steps back with simple, low, dotted half-notes; this leaves plenty of room for Kate Bush’s sensitive vocal.

Letting the pedal tones decay, Levin adds subtle syncopation and occasional upper-register slides between the vocal phrases, using a volume pedal to create the swells.

“Just by reaching for a different instrument or trying other textures or tones – like putting in dampers, or using a pick – I’ll absolutely come up with a different part. You may not always have that luxury, but on an album like Peter Gabriel’s, the producer might take more time than I’d want looking for unusual parts. That’s how you arrive at things like putting diapers under your strings.”

Levin recorded the song fingerstyle on a Music Man StingRay 4-string. Until later years when Ernie Ball released a 5-string StingRay, Levin performed the entire song live with his E string tuned down to accommodate the low Eb.