This is possibly true on stage, but I've had some bass players, most of them in fact, that I had to spoon feed the rest of the time when they weren't playing. Dumb as a bag of rocks, almost every damned one of them. Jerry Cox, and Bradee are about the only exceptions I can think of. It wasn't so much that they couldn't conjugate verbs or stuff like that, just always some stupid shit, trying to compensate for the fact that they were "only the bass player". I could tell you some stories, but I'll spare you this time.