Jimmy - Assuming that you do buy an electric bass, you'll need to decide whether you want a fretted or unfretted instrument. If you want to go fretless, buying a beater or a Mexican-made Fender is probably not an option. There just aren't many cheap fretless basses out there. Most folks that are good enough to play fretless are willing to pay for a quality instrument.

Of course, you could buy an inexpensive fretted bass and have a new fretless fingerboard installed, but that modification would probably cost as much as the guitar. Or, you could go the cheapy route and just snatch the frets off (You should be able to do that yourself. It's a lot like pulling teeth.) and fill the slots with epoxy mixed with sawdust of whatever kind of wood the fretboard is made of. My friend Tim has a 30+ year-old Jazz Bass that he did the cut-rate conversion on and it works just fine. It sorta screws up the resale value, but he's never gonna sell the thing anyway.