Guesting on Breaking Absolutes, bass legend Billy Sheehan talked about working with Sons Of Apollo, Winery Dogs, Mr. Big, Talas, bass innovation, his solo work, and more. Check out the interview below.

Q: I want to go back to early Billy - what formulated your interest in this genre of music, and then the second part of that question is why the bass? Was there some reason you chose the bass or did you fall into that?

Sheehan: "I'll do the second question first - when I was very young, around the corner from my house was a guy named Joe Jesse - he was a bass player, and he was a really cool guy, and he had a Triumph motorcycle, and a beautiful girlfriend, and he was a bass player. And I wanted to be like Joe. Joe was just a super cool guy and I looked up to him. I remember my brother saying to me, we were listening to the radio as a little kid, he goes, 'Yeah, you hear that there?' I go, 'Yeah!' 'That's the bass.' I go, 'Yeah - like Joe plays.' 'Yeah, that's a bass.' And when I sleep at night - because I was a little kid they wouldn't let me go near where they were rehearsing, I had to go to bed early - and I'd lay in my bed, I could hear the bass from his house like you hear a subwoofer on a car stereo from very far away, you hear the bass first. So I just was enthralled with it. Finally, one day Joe let me in the house, and I got to pick his bass up and plucked it for a little while. I got a blister on my finger, it bit back right away, so I knew that we had a future together.

Then when I saw The Beatles play on The Ed Sullivan Show on that actual broadcast - I saw the girls screaming, I knew that I wanted that for my job. Why not the bass? And it was I was lucky initially because bass players were difficult to find. Everybody had a guitar but not as many people had a bass, so you almost always had an offer for a gig, so I got gigs right away, got bands right away, so that was good. And it kind of spoke to me, I'm tall and skinny, so is the bass, it's low as my voice, it kind of worked out well like that.

The guitar, of course, is the glory instrument or lead vocalist, even more glory. The bass is more of a working-man thing - you're back there with a drummer, you're holding it together, you're doing your thing, and it's a vital foundation to the rest of the band. I kind of like being in that position of just holding things together. So that why the bass."