I'm gonna be playing bass in a wedding band in a few months. Here's what I've learned about wedding bands: the idea sounds super lame until you're two minutes into a song like "Footloose" and then everything gets SUPER AWESOME FUNTIME and you admit you were wrong and everyone who told you it was gonna be lame was also wrong wrong wrong.

Have you every really listened to "Footloose?"

(Watch this video at YouTube.)

I had to search a long time* before I found out who played bass on this track: the formidable jazz guy Nathan East, who apparently played on nearly every 80s pop soundtrack you can think of.

Listen to the way the bass goes totally bananas in the choruses. It's just a I-IV progression, but East is playing non-stop. And fast. There also sounds like there's an octave pedal thrown in the mix, tracking along with the bass at a higher octave. I thought at first this was an electric guitar doubling the bass line, but it's almost too perfectly in time. If it is a guitar, my hat's off to whoever played it.

Now that I've been playing bass for a few years, songs that I thought were familiar are suddenly super-interesting, mostly because I'm hearing different things now. With pop hits like "Footloose" you tend to focus on the melody and the beat, never really noticing the backline of ace session guys playing like beasts.

This is but one of about fifteen songs I have to learn. Yeeeeesh.

• seriously, I finally ended up Googling "who played bass on Footloose?" and found the answer on some bass players' forum.

Update: I replaced the video above with one that's less awful.