drummage #7

Trying to think who the modern day equivalent of the Steve Miller Band was -- a rock radio staple, hit after hit after hit, year after year after year, bland but reliable and undeniable -- I concluded it would have be the Foo Fighters. In just one respect, Foo has the edge over SMB, which is that they have two superb drummers rather than just one in the band (Grohl opting not to join the select ranks of the singing drummer and got someone else to do the job).


Check out the near-enough breakbeat at the start of  "Take the Money and Run". (Also the ear-worm nice-touch of that flurry of claps every so often).

  

More journeyman groove-maintenance of a high caliber.
 

 The name of that journeyman is Gary Mallaber. 

And then this slinky ultragroove, notable more for the whole band's conjoined contribution. (And  that synth intro... separate track on the LP, sometimes played together with "Fly Like An Eagle" on the radio....  makes me wonder why synthpop was any big whoop when it came along... well, it was the coldness and stiltedness = New Thing factor, whereas here synthesiser is used in a totally fluid and muso rock-funk-fusion sort of way that's perfectly consonant with the Old Wave way of doing things) 

There's people who swear by the white blues psychedelia of Children of the Future and Sailor and Brave New World...   I've never gotten around to them...  I have a feeling I'd probably prefer the hookmeister Miller who sold his talent short churning out all this road-trip-friendly fare during the middling meridian point of the American Seventies...