I Was Mitch Hedberg’s Bass Player

Editor’s Note: Mitch Hedberg’s legendary album Strategic Grill Locations features the comedian’s signature one-liners over the walking bass of Chuck Savage. He’s just written a new book on his time with Hedberg called Just Bring the Bass Up There… It’ll Be Cool, and in today’s guest post, he’s sharing a behind-the-scenes look at his time with the late comedy icon. The book is available now on Amazon or Savage’s website.

I’ve been playing bass since 1976. Upright and electric. Forty years of bands across Texas — The Missiles, Jesse Dayton, the Supersuckers, Walking Time Bombs. But the gig that put my name on a record most people actually know was the one I almost couldn’t play.

In the spring of 1999, I met a comedian named Mitch Hedberg in the parking lot of the Laff Stop comedy club in Houston, Texas. A club owner named Mark Babbitt had seen me playing upright bass around town and thought it might work behind Mitch’s act. He put us together.

I walked up to Mitch and asked the obvious questions. What do you want me to play? Fast? Slow? What key? What style?

He said, “Just bring the bass up there, and it’ll be cool.”

That was the full briefing. No setlist. No rehearsal. Forty-five minutes later we were on stage together. It worked. By that Sunday night we had something neither of us planned. He told me to book myself with him anytime he was in Texas.

A few months later — September 7th, 1999 — Mitch decided it was time to record. The club had a DAT setup already wired in. This was going to be his first album. He called it Strategic Grill Locations.

I showed up to the Laff Stop that afternoon for sound check. I unzipped my bass case. The neck was completely broken off.

I panicked.

Right next to a famous Houston club called Rockefellers, there was a pawn shop. I knew the owner. I knew he had an upright bass he played himself. I ran over and begged him to let me borrow it. He rented it to me for fifty dollars. It didn’t have a case.

I laid that bass on a piece of cardboard in the back of a pickup truck and hauled it across town to the Laff Stop in River Oaks.

Here’s the thing that bass players will understand. That pawn shop bass was strung with gut — nylon strings. I had only ever played metal string upright. The feel is completely different. The tension is different. The attack is different. The way you pull tone out of the instrument is different. I was about to record a live album on someone else’s bass, on a string type I had never touched before in my life.

I pulled it off.

What I had figured out in the months we’d been playing together was something I never talked about with Mitch. He didn’t tell me to do it. I just figured it out. Play quiet while he was setting up the joke. Then hit hard — louder, more rhythmic — right when the big laugh came. Give the audience something to ride on top of the laughter. Like a wave. The bass and the laugh together.

If you listen to Strategic Grill Locations, that’s what you hear. A comedian delivering some of the greatest one-liners ever written, and underneath him, a bass player on a borrowed instrument riding every punchline like a surfer catching a wave he can see coming before the audience can.

Mitch calls me out by name five times on that recording. At the top of the set he says — “So don’t mess up the bass tonight, Chuck, because we’re on CD here.” Later he checks in — “How’s the bass picking up in the recording?” After a big laugh he says — “Chuck’s killing. He’s doing good.”

That album went on to become one of the most celebrated comedy recordings ever made. Spin Magazine ranked it number 16 on the 40 Greatest Comedy Albums of All Time. AllMusic gave it 4.5 out of 5. John Mulaney called it one of his four favorite stand-up albums. It’s been quoted every single day for twenty-seven years by people who never saw Mitch live.

I was paid three hundred dollars for the session. I never received royalties.

I sat behind Mitch Hedberg for six years after that night. Clubs, theaters, an MTV pilot, Canadian national television. I was there for all of it — the road, the laughs, and the loss. He died on March 30th, 2005. He was thirty-seven years old.

I finally wrote the book.

It’s called “Just Bring the Bass Up There — It’ll Be Cool.” It’s the only insider account of the making of Strategic Grill Locations and the six years I spent on stage with one of the funniest human beings who ever lived.

I’m not a writer. I’m a bass player. But somebody needed to tell this story, and I was the only one who could.