Pump It Up Bass Cover

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Pump It Up Bass Cover or “What’s So Challenging About Peace, Love and Pump It Up’s Bass-line?”

This was the surprise, first runner-up in the people’s choice, video selection contest and is a wonderfully iconic bass-line played by the great Bruce Thomas. This is the sort of bass-line that, should someone ever ask you, “I don’t know what the function of the bass guitar is, what does it sound like?” This song would serve as a good example to answer that question. You’d be surprised at just how many people don’t really know the difference between a guitar and a bass. Not that I’m judging. Some people just love music and don’t get bogged down with the details of how it’s created.

The challenging part about learning this song was the busy little bass-line played during the choruses. It plays the riff 12 times in the song. Five of those times, it is played the same way. I call that “Riff # 1.” The other seven times it is played are slightly different from one another (though there may be one or two that repeat themselves, I forget). Anyway, while the song as a whole was not entirely difficult to figure out, the challenge was learning those individual riffs and stringing them together in the proper order. I’d played this song before in a cover band and, in that case, simply picked the 3 or 4 riffs that I was most comfortable with and thought sounded the best and just repeated those. I tend to get a bit anal-retentive about such things when learning songs that I plan to post a video for. I think I only screwed one up towards the end of the song. I’ll have to check and see if I made a face when that happened or just played it off all cool-like.

I’ve got a little story to tell about Bruce Thomas. 2011 was a rough year. In the spring of that year I was diagnosed with throat cancer. It was detected quite early but it took some time, trouble, a couple of minor surgeries, scans and second opinions to detect it’s source and come up with a treatment course. That treatment course turned out to be 36 radiation treatments, five days a week over an 8 week period. Because of my schedule, I had to take a leave of absence from work for treatment and it took an additional 8 weeks to recover and gain enough strength to be able to return to work. The whole experience was pretty rattling and being out of work for 4 months took a financial toll as well. Anyway, I had just returned to work and was checking my email on my phone when I saw a YouTube message from a Bruce Thomas. I thought to myself, “Jeez, that name sounds familiar.” When it dawned on me who it was, I thought it was some sort of joke or someone who was just using his name as sometimes people will do. The message said that he had seen a couple of my Elvis Costello covers and had put them up on his personal website. It turned out that it was “THE” Bruce Thomas and I can’t tell you what an incredible lift it was to hear from a person who I had so much respect for as a bass player. We conversed a couple of times…mostly about cats as I remember it. He’s a cat person as well. It’s really amazing at just how small the world has become and how a seemingly small gesture can mean so much, isn’t it?

Here’s the link to Bruce’s “Hall of Fame” page where he featured two of my covers - http://www.brucethomas.co.uk/?p=1638

A link to his Webpage proper - http://www.brucethomas.co.uk

And a link to his Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/people/Bruce-Thomas/100009640461785

The cover is “Pump It Up” from Elvis Costello’s sophomore album, “This Year's Model” which came out in the year of our lord, 1978.

As for me, I'm 4 years post treatment and so far, so good.

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