It was a sweltering late summer day in 2001 when I wandered into Burlington’s Red Square, curious about the sounds emanating from the club in the middle of the day. I was new to town, just another asshole college student trying to get his bearings and find a bar to make my regular spot. Imagine my surprise to hear a band rocking out to a crowd of approximately three people.
The band was called Chrome Cowboys, and its members were tearing up the stage as if they were in front of a few thousand fans. As a guitarist, I was immediately floored by Bill Mullins‘ incredible tone and hot-fire playing, but it was hard not to notice the bassist. The veins were standing out on his forearms as he leaned into one of the most well-worn Fender basses I’d ever seen, putting his all into every single note. I was transfixed by his feel, the grooves he so easily slipped into, and the combination of power and precision in his playing.
“Mark was so full of joy for music and life. He was like a perpetual teenager in that way,” Burlington musician and luthier Creston Lea said. “Which is why it was so hard to lose him.”
Mark Ransom, the bassist who captivated me that day and was an integral piece of the Burlington music scene for more than 40 years, died in December following complications from throat cancer treatment. As a member of more local bands than I can name, Ransom leaves behind an unmatched musical legacy in the Green Mountains.
A host of his former bandmates and friends will gather on Thursday, April 6, at the Higher Ground Ballroom in South Burlington to honor Ransom’s life and songs. The bill looks like an opened time capsule from the ’80s and ’90s Burlington music scene, with many of Ransom’s former bands reuniting for the evening, including the N-Zones, Chrome Cowboys, Mango Jam, the X-Rays and even the Honky Tonk Tuesday Band from his time holding down the low end at Radio Bean’s weekly Honky Tonk night.
“We’re going to play a lot of the old tunes that we did with Mark,” Mullins said of the upcoming tribute. “It’s sort of heavy playing them right now. You just wish he was there. That part is a little hard.”
Mullins played in many of Ransom’s bands, finding a kindred soul in the bassist.
“We were fans of the same kind of music, so we naturally had a bond,” Mullins explained. “And you could feel it, playing with him. He had such a great sense of groove on the bass, totally unique.”
Lea spent years in bands with Ransom as well, picking up invaluable advice and lessons from someone more than two decades his senior. It was common, according to Lea, for him and Ransom to hang out for hours after a gig, talking music.
“I’d come home at dawn, and my wife would just say, ‘Let me guess: You were talking with Mark,'” Lea recalled with a gentle laugh.
Ransom left Burlington in 2012 for a spell in Hawaii and returned in 2020. Years of treatment for cancer had taken their toll, and it became difficult for the bassist to wield his well-known blue Fender precision bass. So Ransom asked Lea, who runs his own custom luthier company, Creston Electric, to build him a lighter instrument.
“I was so conflicted,” Lea remembered. “I told him that I’d love to build him a bass, but the truth was that no one wanted to see him play anything other than that placid-blue Fender.”
According to Lea, Ransom simply replied, “Well, guess I better give the people what they want.”
When Radio Bean held a tribute to Ransom earlier this year, Lea saw that Fender standing alone on the stage, he recalled, like the sword in the stone.
“It was almost too much to look at it,” Lea confided. “He played that bass three nights a week for more than 40 years. All that wear and tear is Mark, no one else.”
Lea will step in to play bass for Chrome Cowboys at the tribute show.
“I’m really feeling the pressure of trying to fill those colossally jumbo-size shoes,” Lea said. “There’s a 40-year span of people who played with him, so there’s really two generations of musicians who feel this loss. But to be able to celebrate someone like Mark and his music in a roomful of people who all feel the same about him as I do … it’s going to feel really good.”
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Obituary: Mark Ransom, 1950-2022
This article appears in The Money & Retirement Issue 2023.
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