And he was twelve stories tall with much genitalia too. Who knew. They don't teach that in our crappy public schools.

I understand how you feel.  I decided not to burn the ax and just try to grateful that some gifted people can help me see new possibilities.  The basics of playing bass lines and chords isn't that complex - especially in the key of E.  The key of G is a good tonal center to learn this with other-than-open chords.

Jack Grassel publishes some books on this technique.  His book requires some fairly serious reading and he uses the "harmonically correct", "big" jazz chords, you can "round off" some his chords, to make it more manageable.  You can see his books at https:/www.hearthemusic.info/pages/Solo GuitarBooks.asp

You can catch jack playing in Racine or Milwaukee areas - when he is buy himself (or as a duo with his wife Jill Jensen), he plays a more complex style of bass/rhythm/lead guitar.  He has a monster CD that is all recorded "straight":  GUITAR SMOKE (https:/www.hearthemusic.info/pages/jgC artPage.asp)  Serious bass/chords/melodies/leads there.

He invented a guitar (with Raun Guitar, http://rauenguitars.com) that he calls a "Superax".  It has half a fender precision bass pickup mounted between the 2 traditional pickups on an electric, under that low E and A strings.  It's a stereo effect - you run the bass pickup through an octave petal, dropping the bass 2 octaves.  The result is a 2 string bass and a 4 string guitar.  I have one - it's a blast, Rauen doesn't charge that much to do this.

Walking in 4 isn't so hard once you learn the system -- on beat 1 and 3, you must always play a chord tone (usually R,3,5; but maybe a 2,6, or 7.  On beats 2 and 4, play a "passing tone" that "leads" to the next chord tone (usually a half step or whole step away from next note, though other intervals, especially a fifth up or down are effective).  Contraire to popular myths, bass lines are not built on scales and modes -- they are built on a sequence of "harmonic" (beats 1 and 3 in 4/4) and "dissonant" tones (beats 2 and 4) The base line in GUITAR BOOGIE is a standard guitar riff, however, most of it is built on major scales with flat 7.

Michael - post if you want to see some more.  I have some of this laid out with simple chords.  Its pretty kewl when you start looking at it as a "system" instead of being overwhelmed by the licks.  And when you start playing the bass lines, there is no need to play all the fancy jazz chords because the music gets its "tension" and "release" from the interaction of the simpler chords and the bass lines.