10 Great Classic Metal Bassists: What Makes for Greatness?

As with any sort of highly positive qualifier -- "supreme," "top-notch," "greatest" and so on -- the quickest and most cursory of internet searches uncovers dozens of lists (not all of which would necessarily qualify as "great" themselves).  There's Metal Descent's Top Ten Most Recognizable Heavy Metal Bassists, Heavy Metal Time Machine's Top Ten Bass Players,  Gears of Rock's Top Ten Metal Bassists of All Time -- there's even more specialized lists like Metalholic's Top 12 Female Hard Rock/Metal Bassists 2013.

Interestingly, you see quite a few now-iconic metal bassists make their way into less genre-focused lists like Ultimate Guitar's Top 10 Bassists of All Time -- which includes a few proto-metal band's long-axemen (Cream's Jack Bruce, for example).  Steve Harris and Cliff Burton often jockey for position as the top-number metal representatives on these sorts of lists -- and rightly so, I think.  In fact, I've been doing quite a bit of thinking off and on, not so much about these sorts of lists, but of just what qualifies a bassist as being genuinely "great" -- not just good, competent, a contributor to his or her band, their songs, and their sound -- but someone outstanding, of a clearly superlative rank.  Those musings have had me assembling a list of my own -- one restricted, understandably enough, to  bass heroes of the core of metal, the now-classic, dynamic forms it assumed and spilled over into during the 1970s and 1980s.