That Pop-Punk Bassist Guy

3 weeks after buying his first bass guitar Brett feels he has mastered his repertoire of Blink 182 and Greenday covers. It has been a long slog of looking at bass tabs and memorising the 4 notes to each song most of the time in order to get him to this point, and like a day-shift stipper leaving the club at 3 in the afternoon, Brett has a false sense of believe that he's ready to conquer the world.

Responding to an ad from a pop-punk band looking for a bassist, he shows up keener then Rolf Harris to a Wiggles concert. When asked to play he busts out his most technical overture, Carousel by Blink 182. After several instances of "Wait" ... "I've got it this time".... "ahhh... I dropped my pic"...... he finally staggers through the 30 second intro and stops playing. Dressed in their skin tight black jeans and with hair straighter then a long sleeve shirt thats been through an Asian dry cleaners, the band leans back and says "That was... sick...bro"

Through no-one else responding to the ad, Brett was in by default.

A few weeks later, the band has got 4 cover songs and an original down tight. By tight, it means they got through it from start to finish one time. At this point Brett still hasn't figured out that the 'twisty things' at the top of the bass neck can be moved to adjust the tuning. The strings were on when he bought it and they haven't broke yet so he sees no need to investigate further.

Having scored their first gig on the third Tuesday night of the month at a dive bar (not to be confused with the second Tuesday night of each month for metal night which can be read on my previous post https://steemit.com/music/@backstagepass/that-metal-guy) , Brett arrives with just his bass and his distortion pedal. Brett figured his bass wasn't meshing with the guitars because they were distorted and he wasn't, so hes distorted his sound instead of addressing the real issue of tuning. Plugging into the DI he trys to wow the sound engineer with a Chilli Peppers slap bass riff as if he was Flea himself. The engineer having heard this riff from the 100 previous shitty kids who've just picked up a bass, mutes him and moves on to the guitars.

Halfway through the set Brett drops his only pic and cant find it. He hasn't ever played with his fingers before besides that 1 Chilli Peppers slap riff he learnt, and across the rest of the set he has the musical dexterity of an autistic kid shitting all over himself.

Even though Brett has no musical talent he got into a band on bass which allows him to bullshit chicks who show up after his set has finished and tell them his is a musician. The girls that did see him play are as impressed as Kayne watching Taylor Swift receive an award. As Brett idolises his pop-punk idol Mark Hoppus as the best bassist in the world, he knows that being a pop-punk bassist requires no practise other then knowing his 4 note progressions.

Brett has finally found his loophole into being classified as a musician.

"Do you want to hear a sick riff from the Chilli Peppers, or Carousel by Blink?"