Learnings to set and keep the groove is an essential skill for bass players and drummers. They have to work very closely together.
Rock like BTO is great practice music. It’s not always easy keeping that driving beat going for 4 minutes. One slip in concentration and you’ll loose it.
It was me the OP is talking about, and yes Bruce Thomas is a great guy and a great bassist - an example of a musician that everyone has heard a million times but only few know the name of, because he played in a band whose frontman (Elvis Costello) overshadowed all the other players even though they, not him, were responsible for 75% of how the songs sounded. And playing along with his bass lines was a big part of my musical education.
When it comes to learning bass, the single biggest piece of advice I could give is to learn the part IN ISOLATION OF THE SONG’S RHYTHM and do it before you try to play it along with the song. What I mean is this: take it measure by measure; listen to the bass part in question; discern what you are able to figure out by ear (I do not recommend the use of tabs - all but the most insanely complex bass parts can be figured out by ear, and doing so is part of building your musician chops) and play along with the part for a few minutes on your own bass. You will make mistakes. Lots of them. Don’t worry about that.
After you’ve done this, STOP the music. Then try to play the part on your bass, by yourself, with no music in the background. During this stage of figuring out the part, THE TIMING DOES NOT MATTER, what matters is the melody. You are figuring out quite simply the order of the notes. This part will take repetition and most likely you’ll have to play whatever song you’re learning a few more times to listen and try to get a sense of what the notes are. Hell, I have repeated a measure of a song multiple times just to figure out ONE note in a bass part. Before you try to play in time, you need to know what the notes are.
I can’t stress this enough. Practicing along with a metronome and inevitably restarting again and again and again because you were slightly off the beat (because you were stumbling over one note, most likely) is a waste of time. Don’t practice a bass part in time until you know exactly what the notes are.
Once you are reasonably confident in what the notes are, THEN play along with the song and focus on perfecting the rhythmic timing.
It helps to have a passing knowledge of BASIC music theory if only so you can mentally think “oh yeah now in this part I’m hitting the dominant seventh, then in the next measure it’s an A minor arpeggio, then after that I play a walk down from the major seventh, etc” - on the other hand there are guys who can play the HELL out of a bass and still don’t know what any of that even means. Individual bass playing styles can be highly idiosyncratic because of the nature of the instrument, and there are many different paths to sounding good and developing a unique voice - there’s no one “right way” to do it. The only thing that really holds true 100% of the time is the more you play, the better you’ll be.
Is figuring it out important to you? If not, do you know about tablature? I am no bass player, but here is a tab of “Accidents Will Happen” as played by Bruce Thomas. The sliding parts under “she says she can’t go home” etc are a bit tricky, but the rest is just ascending and descending patterns that are pretty easy and sound cool as hell. Bruce Thomas is the absolute best. You can find numerous free tabs online.