This bass, which Stanley refers to as "the brown bass," was crafted sometime around 1972 at the Alembic Company in San Francisco. He played it as his "main axe" for over ten years before "retiring" it "to give it a rest."

"It was getting too old, man. I had to give some of my other fifty or so basses a chance." The brown bass was purchased as a replacement for his first Alembic, stolen almost immediately after he got it. A very young Return To Forever had its equipment truck stolen. "Everything was gone", remembers Stan. "Some kid brougth back my acoustic bass. He said he bought it on the street in the Greenwich Village... (Sarcastically). Sure he did. Some guy in Jersey probably has that first bass."

The boys of Johnson Street (from Hideaway 1986)

Thus the brown bass joined an already budding career. A tall, lanky nineteen-year-old kid from Philadelphia had come to New York City to find his fortune, and found it. Horace Silver hired Stanley for a six-month tour of the United States whick turned out to be "the bass line heard `round the world". From that one initial exposure, an already brilliant but still unknown talent was discovered. He became an in-demand sideman working with the likes of Dexter Gordon, Gil Evans, Stan Getz, and a young keyboardist named Chick Corea.

Hot fun (from the classic album School Days 1976)

Stanley and Chick formed Return to Forever, a jazz-rock fusion band whose influence is still felt more than eight albums (two gold) and twelve years since they disbanded. Although Stan played in electric/acid rock bands in school, at that time he was working almost exclusivley on th upright bass, considering the electric " an inferior instrument. Then Chick said, "look, we´re going to go electric. We need an electric bass; you gotta do it- or you´re fired." Necessity being the mother of invention, Stanley soon became a "mother" on the electric bass as well.

Stanley, Chick, Al DiMeola, and Lenny White shook the world as Return To Forever for five years. There were other membeers of the band, briefly, like Flora Purim, Airto, and drummer Steve Gadd. " But Steve´s wife wouldn´t let him go out on the road. That´s when we got Lenny." The "quartet" version of the band remains the most famous.

With RTF, the brown bass did a lot of surviving, and produced a lot of notes. Stan recalls "thinking about page three of a Chick Corea arrangement. When you play with Chick, you enjoy yourself-but not really. Because you always knew some line was coming up, you could barely play. You´d work on it for eight hours day- that´s how much we practiced- for five weeks and the, onstage, that moment came shen you had to play it all together. It almmost didn´t matter wheter the audience was there or not."

The most complex music Stanley remembers playing was while doing a film soundtrack session for Lalo Schifrin. "There was a lot of people in the studio and alot of things going on at once. And then there was this music. it was tough; real hard stuff to play !"

Then there was Gainsville. RTF had an outdoor gig in Gainsville, Florida. " I remember walking towards the stage for sound check when I saw this stuff happen. A big gust of wind came up and blew my basses over. It was like in slow motion. My acoustic blew off the stage and broke into a million pieces. This one (the brown bass) fell, but it didn`t break."