Musical Milestone #2 (continued)

Before I say what it was, I’ve got to explain why it hooked me. When I was a kid, songs were comprised of two things: singing and music. Then I learned how to hear the drums, and the guitars. But the bass? What’s a bass? My first instrument was a little acoustic guitar that I got for Christmas when I was a little Kiss fan. I never played it well, but I would sit on the bed and play one-string versions of songs. A few years later, I went home with a friend after school, and his mom had a surprise for him. It was a new amp, and a bass! His mom said it needed to be tuned, and asked me if I knew how. I told her I knew how to tune a guitar, so I picked it up….I was in awe of the large guitar. It was foreign and wacky and big. We plugged it in and turned it on, and I tuned it like a guitar. “Tom Sawyer” by Rush came on the radio, and I tried to play the one-string version of the song like I always did on my guitar. Instead of feeling like I was playing the guitar part wrong, I realized that I was playing the bass part right! I’d been playing bass parts on my acoustic guitar. The bass emerged from the ambiguous back corners of my mind, and took a place in the spotlight. From that moment on, the bass parts jumped at me from every direction, every song has a bass, how come I never got it? .. I learned to dig the bass by listening to Rush. The band I heard in Freds car that day took my bass joy to the next level.

It was darker and chunkier and new, the singer is singing his lungs out about epic adventures, scary dreams, and medieval battles. It has 2 guitars, not a rhythm and a lead, but two guys dualling back and forth and playing harmonies like classical music, the drums are pounding, and the bass……………holy crap….this bass is like a damn machine gun or something.

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”whoa to you oh Earth and Sea, for the devil sends the beast with wrath for he knows the time is short. Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number, it’s number is six hundred and sixty six” ……whoa! What did he say?….

It was Iron Maiden.