Carlo's single coil comparison is molto bene. Remember, this was the era when Gibson went to extraordinary lengths to make its basses sound clearer.
It's not a bad sound over a large rig nor does it fail to cut through, but I remember when the seller of my Bicentennial said to me, "whenever I play this bass, I need a larger rig to hear myself, with my Precision, a small rig will do just fine ... And we play a lot of clubs with our blues band so that TBird has to go ...".
Give it a chance to get used to the sound. As everyone knows here, I'm not the most avid and overt Bicentennial era TBird fan, but even on me the sound grew over time. If you are not exactly playing heavy metal, that "single coil" sound can work. Those pups sound even a bit like visually vastly different Ripper pups to me which are also - I believe - sidewinders.