I think you forgot one, John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin).
He is awesome, and his solo album proves just how talented he is!
forgot to mention, that i also will go with the recommendation to play with your fingers, you will get better that way
As someone who plays bass, guitar and piano, I would suggest you at least get a working knowledge of the piano prior to learning bass OR guitar. Makes it much easier to follow everything going on.
Although what Xploder says will work, it is not necessary in order to pursue the instrument for your own edification. I can play pretty much any instrument that is out there to some degree. I agree that the piano helps but only inasmuch as the piano shows the not delineations in a much clearer fashion. For example, on a bass guitar (or really any string instrument with a fingerboard) you can play any midrange note in several places. On a piano, there is only one place to play any given note for the respective range. It is just the nature of the bass instrument and something that you will learn fairly quickly. If you want to learn the instrument, learn only it. You will advance much faster that way instead of going through the round about way of learning several other instruments beforehand. I have taught many guitar students and I have never taught them how to play any part of the piano. Most of the students that stuck with the program can now play the guitar with plenty of skill and the ones that became serious about it can actually play several other instruments simply because some of the skills transfer over. Their technique isn’t necessarily the best on the other instruments (guitar technique is very different from the piano). It is a good suggestion if you want to go to college for music because you will have to learn to play the piano; otherwise, there really isn’t a need.
BTW, learning to read tab is alright though it isn’t the best method of playing. It will give you some reasonable skills right off the bat but your rhythm and sight reading skills will really suffer because it is so different. Lute tabalature is better in this regard since it actually gives you the rhythm of the quickest moving notes but guitar and bass tab lack that aspect of the music. When you learn to read music the theoretical function of it becomes more apparent. You will see patterns and actually know what to call them because you will know how to name them on the instrument. With just tabalature, you will miss that. You will learn to say oh that is the low string 5, 9 next string 7 or something like that rather than saying A, C sharp, E, Oh, that is an A major chord. There is a big difference knowing what the notes you are playing when you play in a group rather than just playing on your own and as a bass player you will have to have that ability.
HUGS!
Sqrl