“Seeing my dad holding my bass is really crazy,” says local bass phenomenon MonoNeon. “He’s like my first musical hero. He’s a very funky player. I’d just practice to all of his records, try to find anything he played on and just learn it. I wanted to be just like him and I still do.” It’s a moving testimony to the power of musical families to keep the spirit of creativity flowing across generations. But when MonoNeon refers to his father playing “my bass,” it’s not just his personal axe. It literally has his name on it: the new Fender MonoNeon Jazz Bass V.
Fender electric basses have long been the go-to axes for most professionals, and MonoNeon has been no exception, often seen playing a Fender Jazz Bass over the years. But he’s also been known to deviate from that standard, with a penchant for five-string basses. The new signature instrument combines all of that, not to mention a whole lot of MonoNeon’s aesthetics. The alder body sports a brilliant yellow polyurethane finish, setting off the neon orange headstock and pickguard. Other unique features include an active preamp and a three-band active equalizer to dial in the desired tone.
Other Memphians have been so honored, as with the Peavey Steve Cropper Signature Telecaster, the Magneto Eric Gales RD-3 Signature Guitar, and the Fender Donald “Duck” Dunn Signature Precision Bass, but the new MonoNeon Jazz Bass V is the most distinctive, visually speaking. And it’s surely the only signature model that the artist himself plays upside down; the left-handed player has noted before that he favors “a right-handed bass. I guess it’s upside-down, you’d call it. I flipped it over, so the G string’s on top and the E string’s on the bottom.”
Beyond the experimentalism of his music, MonoNeon, aka Dywane Thomas Jr., has always followed his own sartorial star. Lately, his love of neon colors has morphed into a taste for quilted fabrics with subtler hues. A video celebrating the new instrument on Fender’s YouTube channel features the bassist in all his quilted glory, speaking with his mother, grandmother, and father. Narrator George Clinton intones, “I’ll be your guide through the Monoverse, where cities were built on foundations of funk and adorned with microtonal detail.” The video’s animated portions amplify the whimsical hues of the new bass and its player.
In the video, MonoNeon further explains the new model’s aesthetics and design: “I love how the construction workers look on the highway, you can see them far away. It’s inspired by that. Chose the gold [hardware] because I wanted to, you know, pimp out the bass a little bit. I chose the HiMass string-through bridge because of the sustain. And I’ve got my own custom MonoNeon jazz pickups.”
But there’s more: Reflecting the bassist’s love of decals and his habit of hanging a sock over his instrument’s tuning pegs, each MonoNeon Jazz Bass V comes with a MonoNeon sticker pack and a custom headstock sock.
Segments of the video featuring MonoNeon’s family are especially moving, as when he speaks of his Grandma Liz. “I really got close to my grandma because of music. The older I get, I’m starting to realize I get a lot from her, especially vocally,” he notes, adding that she’s also behind his love of quilts. “There’s a lot of love that’s put into making quilts, so I think I just feel that. I like to be covered up because it’s like a force field. I like to be safe.”
Scenes of MonoNeon playing with his father, Dywane Thomas Sr. (son of jazz pianist Charles Thomas), reveal more about the family’s musical history. “I got to work with a lot of people just from being me,” recalls Thomas Sr., a celebrated bassist in his own right. “You tell me to go right, I go left. So that’s why I embrace what he does. It’s out of the norm, and it isn’t out of the norm. It’s something new. His style is his style.” Reflecting on his son having his own signature bass, Thomas Sr. muses, “I’m not surprised. It was going to happen, and it’s going to continue to happen.”
