Pop Music : With Baker on Skins, Masters Still Skids

The name of the group is Masters of Reality, but there was something unreal about seeing the band introduce its new drummer at its Palace concert Friday: rock legend Ginger Baker, lending his thunder to a sometimes intriguing but still fairly obscure crew of blues revisionists.

The Masters better make sure the new guy doesn’t throw things off balance. Baker got the biggest cheer, the longest solo and the best lighting (sometimes during someone else’s solo). On the darkened stage, he periodically materialized in a hazy glow, hovering over the band like an apparition in a Disneyland ride.

Down below, burly, cowboy-hatted singer-guitarist Chris Goss and new lead guitarist Daniel Rey stood their ground, forging a blues-based crunch-rock.

The Syracuse-born, L.A.-based quartet sounds a bit like a rootsy Cult and gives signs of being on to some undiscovered blues-rock mystique, weaving threads of field hollers, work songs and Delta blues into a hard-rock frame, hammering it home amid strobe lights and stage fog.

It never came quite into focus, though. When a band is hot on a scent, you want them to follow the trail with single-minded intensity. What we got during the Palace show was “We’re just jammin’ now.”