Green Day's Mike Dirnt wrote the bassline for Longview on LSD: "Later, it took me a long time to be able to play it, but it made sense when I was on drugs"

Green Day's Dookie album

The original punk scene threw up some unique players back in the day, as more or less any music fan over 50 will tell you – Peter Hook, Paul Simonon, Glen Matlock, Jah Wobble and Jean-Jacques Burnel among them. Even poor, doomed Sid  Vicious brought a certain macabre charisma to the music, plugged in or otherwise. 

But maybe the ghost of Sid dogged punk bass playing for a while – encouraging this idea that punk bass players, at best, were just staying out of the way and holding down tight rhythms. Incredible players like Rancid’s Matt Freeman, Karl Alvarez of The Descendents/All, or Less Than Jake’s Roger Lima suggest otherwise.