Russ Kunkel, of all the great drummers I've known over the years is the most comfortingly song-oriented of them all. Here's a tune we did for a film in that sort of Laurel Canyon/late 70s vein with Becca Byram Whitley on vocals, Russ on drums, and me playing the bass and guitars and whatnot. From setting up first mic to mixed in 3 hours for union reasons, so it could have been a little fleshed out if we'd had another day for things like really zeroing in on the bass part, maybe a little acoustic guitar here and there, some more attention to the background vocal stacking and the like, probably some more elaborate mix decisions, but hey, we were in a terrible hurry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIaciLMuVR4

And Waddy is just one of those guys, like Tom Bukovac, in that every time he puts down a part it just works. I wish I could find some of the stuff w've done together online. Neither of them, none of them really are showboaters, though they all could be. Danny Kortschmar I'd put up with Elliott Easton as a genius-level parts writing virtuoso, on top of his bulletproof guitar playing. Lee Sklar? I mean, really. Funky, smart, funny, can play anything, soulful as hell. There were others, too, like Andrew Gold, who was really underappreciated in my opinion, as evidenced by his producing and playing every part on Linda Ronstadt's version of "You're No Good."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0vJNp5asqc

What Gold is doing here is really hard, and he makes it look easy; every drum fill, dynamic shift, every guitar lick and solo, the electric piano, the breakdown, the build, the last solo, it's all just amazing. Of course, having one of the greatest American singers navigating helps a bit...