Article by Kent Hartman on the cream of LA's session musicians, the Wrecking Crew, from:
http://www.americanheritage.comWas Hal Blaine one of your favorite musicians back in the 1960s? How
about Larry Knechtel? Carol Kaye? Oh yes they were.
On a cool, overcast February night in Hollywood, near the slightly
scruffy, down-on-its- luck intersection of Vine Street and Santa
Monica Boulevard—the final stretch of Route 66—a group of highly
talented musicians gathered in a weathered, non-descript former
dentist's office are about to make rock 'n' roll history. No one
present, from the bass player to the drummer to the guitarist, has
any inkling that this particular studio session is likely to differ
from any other. For the song being cut this night is by the Beach
Boys, one of the biggest bands in pop music, and a band quite
accustomed to churning out Top 10 AM radio favorites.
As Brian Wilson, the group's producer and chief songwriter, calls
out instructions from the control booth over the talk-back speaker—
"let's play a little tighter on that first break, okay, guys?"—the
drummer clears his throat, counts off "one, two, three, four," and
suddenly a staccato burst of Hammond B2 organ notes, punctuated by
the rhythmic thump of a Fender bass guitar and a cleverly syncopated
snare drum, begins to fill Gold Star Recording Studios. The sound of
the future number one hit "Good Vibrations" is clearly evident. Yep,
this is the Beach Boys all right. Except it's not. In fact, there's
not a Beach Boy in the room.
During the sixties and seventies, perhaps the most fertile period of
popular music our nation has ever produced, recording stars such as
the Monkees, Carpenters, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, Jan & Dean,
the Beach Boys, the Association, the Grass Roots, Simon and
Garfunkel, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Kenny Rogers & the First
Edition, the Mamas and the Papas, and dozens more ruled the
airwaves. However, most listeners are likely unaware that a good
share of these legendary artists seldom, if ever, played any of the
instruments on their own records.
That's right. Virtually all the instruments were played by an
uncredited close-knit group of Los Angeles studio musicians, often
referred to today by insiders as the Wrecking Crew (a name coined by
the drummer Hal Blaine after the fact to describe how he and other
sidemen had revolutionized the recording industry). From "Last Train
to Clarksville" to "Monday, Monday" to "Mrs. Robinson," these same
studio pros time and again provided most or all of the guitars,
bass, drums, keyboards, horns, and more on hundreds of the best-
known singles and albums of all time. Their collective story
provides a surprising behind-the-scenes glimpse of the creation of
the songs that became the soundtrack for one of the most socially
volatile periods in American history.
Radio listeners and record buyers never knew the truth, and that was
just the way the major labels like Columbia, Liberty, Dunhill, A&M,
and Capitol wanted to keep it. Preserving the illusion that famous
bands played their own instruments was big business, very big
business. As the Wrecking Crew bass player Carol Kaye dryly
observes, "We all knew the scam that the record companies
perpetrated. "
Most listeners are unaware that many legendary artists never played
on their own records.
Image was (and is) everything in the music industry. And if a band's
image in the 1960s was all about playing some hip jangly 12-string
guitar riffs and creating some funky grooves, as in "Mr. Tambourine
Man" by the Byrds, then you can be sure companies like Columbia
Records (the Byrds' label) discouraged the public from knowing what
really went on behind studio doors. To make certain he got the best
possible performance for this all-important first single release,
Terry Melcher, the Byrds' producer (and Doris Day's son), hired the
Wrecking Crew to play all the backing instruments on the song. In
other words, there was not a Byrd in sight, with the exception of
the guitarist Jim (Roger) McGuinn, who was allowed to play his
Rickenbacker electric 12-string on the song. But as far as the
record-buying public knew, this future gold record featured nothing
but all five Byrds in full flight.
Radio stations were kept in the dark too. The famous sixties Top 40
disc jockey Arnie ("Woo Woo") Ginsburg, formerly of WMEX Boston,
recalls that he certainly had no idea. "Back then," says
Ginsburg, "I never paid much attention to the recording side of the
business, and the record labels certainly never said anything to us
about who really played on what. So we never knew."
For example, the first two Monkees albums on Colgems (The Monkees
and More of the Monkees) made no mention of the fact that Micky,
Davy, Peter, and Mike merely showed up to sing their parts and then
went home. The public assumed that the "Prefab Four" played all
their own instruments. And why shouldn't they? The Monkees clearly
played them on TV every week—or did they? In fact, the Monkees, like
many other "live" television performers of the era, simply lip-
synched the words to each song while handling instruments that
weren't even plugged in. As it was, both Monkees albums shot
straight to number one on the charts.
The ascendancy of the Wrecking Crew began with the gradual demise of
the studio system at the big film companies in the late 1950s,
resulting in the inevitable breakup of the big studio orchestras as
well. With these formal orchestras no longer in place, but with an
ever-increasing need by producers to record soundtracks for
television and film, a new generation of studio musicians found a
growing demand for their services. At the same time, early rock 'n'
roll began sweeping the country. These factors combined to create an
unprecedented demand for topnotch studio players able to handle a
variety of dates, from soundtracks to jingles to singles. And as the
established studio players who had come up with the big orchestras
prior to World War II began to retire, in stepped the future members
of the Wrecking Crew, one by one, to take their places.
Who were they? The Wrecking Crew included such superb players as
Mike Melvoin, Don Randi, Larry Knechtel, Leon Russell, and Al DeLory
on keyboards; Billy Strange, Howard Roberts, Al Casey, Jerry Cole,
Louie Shelton, Glen Campbell, Mike Deasy, Tommy Tedesco, Bill
Pitman, and Barney Kessel on guitar; Lyle Ritz and Chuck Berghofer
on standup bass; Carol Kaye, Joe Osborn, and Ray Pohlman on electric
bass; Hal Blaine, Earl Palmer, and Jim Gordon on drums; and several
horn players who often appeared on sessions, among them Chuck
Findley (trumpet), Plas Johnson (sax), Ollie Mitchell (trumpet), Lew
McCreary (trombone), Jay Migliori (sax), Jim Horn (sax, flute),
Steve Douglas (sax), Allan Beutler (sax), Roy Caton (trumpet), and
Jackie Kelso (sax).
These rising studio players couldn't have come from more varied
circumstances. Some had jazz backgrounds; others had never played
anything but country. Some were trained pros, able to sight-read
anything put in front of them; others couldn't read music at all,
relying instead on ear, intuition, and finesse. They came to L.A.
from Delight, Arkansas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Cleveland, Ohio. A more
unlikely, disparate group of music hopefuls would have been hard to
find. But one thing they all shared was a passion to play their
instruments. And did they ever play!
The older studio players from the forties and fifties were formal,
tending to wear blazers and neckties to each date and often treating
sessions as if they were punching a time clock. The new players
tended to be informal and spontaneous, often collaborating with the
producers on arrangements as opposed to relying strictly on sheet
music and chord charts. This all made for a great difference in how
records were cut.
Hal Blaine has played on more than 40 number one records, an
achievement unmatched in popular music history.
The drummer Hal Blaine recalls that "producers knew that our
involvement with a production was different. Nine times out of ten
the producer or arranger would tell us to use the charts as a guide,
that's all. We were encouraged to go for it, to go beyond what had
been written. We had the opportunity to create, to be a team of
arrangers." The well-known producer and former record label owner
Lou Adler (the Mamas and the Papas, Jan & Dean, Carole King)
agrees: "For me, I'm not a trained musician. These were people that
not only could read me but could read my mind, in a sense."
As word began to spread about this unusually talented bunch of new
session players, all the big L.A. music producers naturally wanted
in, and many of the Wrecking Crew began to spend more time with
their instruments than with their families. "I was working three and
sometimes four 3-hour sessions per day, and that was six days a
week," recalls the thrice-married Blaine. "There were times, when a
session ran late into the night, that I just laid down on the studio
floor right next to my kit for a few hours of sleep."
During the early 1960s, especially until about 1966, studio
technology, or, rather, its lack, also contributed to the need to
hire a large number of session players for each recording date. As
high-fidelity stereo recordings became popular—along with the
growing desire by producers like Brian Wilson, Bones Howe, and Snuff
Garrett to explore the creative limits of what their studios could
handle—the number of tracks available for recording became a
pressing issue. Compared with today's recording studios, which offer
a virtually unlimited number of discrete tracks on which to record
individual instruments and voices during a session, studios back in
the early to mid-sixties were lucky to have four. This paucity
necessitated simultaneous participation by multiple players, since
individual overdubbing or layering would have been technically and
sonically problematic and undesirable.
For the Wrecking Crew, each session was just another day at one of
several "offices." Sometimes it was Gold Star Recording Studios,
where hundreds of hit singles were recorded during the sixties and
seventies. Other sessions were held at Western Recorders on Sunset
or perhaps over at Radio Recorders on Santa Monica Boulevard. And if
it was a Columbia act or a large orchestra date, then CBS Studios on
Gower became the likely destination. The Monkees' producers were
fond of using RCA Victor Studios, as was Colonel Parker,
whose "boy," Elvis, cut many tracks at RCA when he was in town to
film movies ("Love Me Tender" was recorded there, for example).
Of course, the leading studio players of the sixties and early
seventies were by no means wholly relegated to cutting three-minute
rock 'n' roll singles for the multitude of L.A. bands aspiring to
become Tiger Beat magazine's next cover story. Frank Sinatra and
Dean Martin also routinely took advantage of their services; Jimmy
Bowen, then a brash producer still in his twenties responsible for
such hits as "Strangers in the Night," "Somethin' Stupid,"
and "Everybody Loves Somebody," recalls that when you wanted the
best, you hired the Wrecking Crew. "I loved Hal Blaine. Hal could
push a big orchestra so good, like on a Sinatra session. And Larry
Knechtel was one talented guy. I used him a bunch on both bass and
piano."
Hal Blaine was perhaps the best-known and most eagerly sought member
of the Wrecking Crew. From the late fifties through the mid-
seventies, he recorded nearly 35,000 tracks as the primary drummer
for artists such as Gary Lewis and the Playboys, Carpenters, John
Denver, and dozens upon dozens of others. By the way, that's
Blaine's big, crashing drum sound on Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge
Over Troubled Water"—where he notably accompanied himself by
slamming tire chains on the floor. That's also his signature bass
drum thump on "A Taste of Honey" from Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass.
As the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson reveals in the liner notes to the
Pet Sounds Sessions box set, Blaine "gave the right tempos. As a
matter of fact, he came up with more of the tempos than I did. I
just said, `Look, I want it to feel like this. I want it to be
happy, I want it to feel `up,' happy and very straight ahead,' and …
he would move around, he would move his hands and I went, `Yeah,
there we go' and he'd just take it from there."
To date, Hal Blaine has played on more than 40 number one and 350
Top 10 records, an achievement unmatched by anyone else in popular
music history. "Even for me, it's kind of a mind-blowing thing to
think about," he says. Mike Botts, former drummer for the soft-rock
group Bread, remembers: "Every studio I went to in the late sixties,
there was a rubber stamp imprint on the wall of the drum booth that
said, `Hal Blaine strikes again.' Hal was getting so many studio
dates he actually had a rubber stamp made. He was everywhere!"
Born Harold Simon Belsky on February 5, 1929, in Holyoke,
Massachusetts, this son of Lithuanian and Polish immigrants began
his career drumming for a variety of nondescript touring bands that
routinely crisscrossed the United States through-out the 1950s,
playing casinos, supper clubs, and small theaters. Catching a luck
break in 1957, he managed to hook on with the up-and-coming teen
idol Tommy Sands. "Everything went wonderfully with the Tommy Sands
show. I was getting some great studio experience and was meeting all
of the producers at Capitol Records."
Styles changed. In the 1970s the big record labels started signing
artists who insisted on playing their own instruments.
Soon progressing to regular studio work through his growing list of
connections, Blaine became the first-call drummer for many of the
biggest names in the music business—from Sinatra to the Beach Boys
to Simon and Garfunkel—for the next 15 years. And his versatile
playing and innate sense of timing also helped a number of fledgling
performers evolve from studio neophytes to superstars. "Our group
had never sung with anything but one acoustic guitar until that
fateful day in 1965 when we came together in Studio 3 at Western
Recorders," says Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the
Papas. "There, the Mamas and Papas `sound' was created with the
distinctive beat that Hal Blaine had already made himself famous
for."
If Hal Blaine was the unofficial king of the Wrecking Crew, the
queen was the bass player Carol Kaye. The only female among this
faceless band of pros, the California-raised Kaye (born Carol Smith
in Everett, Washington) is considered by many to be one of the best
electric bass players of all time. "Carol Kaye was the greatest bass
player I've ever met," says Brian Wilson. Which is curious because,
as she says, "My background was the jazz world. I played electric
guitar on jazz dates long before I started playing bass on the
rock 'n' roll sessions in the sixties. I played with people like
Teddy Edwards, Jack Sheldon, and Billy Higgins."
Because she came from such an accomplished background, some of the
Wrecking Crew dates proved to be a little less than satisfying for
the gifted Kaye. "To tell you the truth," she says, "it was the
Monkees that made me want to quit the business. I said to
myself, `Jeez, I hate this music; it's so uncreative.' " But her
occasional lack of enthusiasm didn't stop her from creating and
playing some of the most famous rock 'n' roll bass lines in history.
Songs such as "California Girls," "The Beat Goes On," and even
the "Theme From Shaft" all owe their bottom ends to her deft
playing.
She has more than 10,000 sessions to her credit. "I almost feel
embarrassed about all the credits," she says, "but these tunes
represent the work of everybody, not just me, not just the star of
the tune, but mostly family-oriented musicians who were respected,
in-demand, no-nonsense, coffee-driven professionals. " She also is
regarded as a leading bass teacher, with dozens of instructional
books, CDs, and videos to her credit. "I had no problems being the
only woman," she says. "In fact, I probably harassed them!"
Though several members of the Wrecking Crew are considered legends
by music-industry insiders, only one actually has the particular
appellation as part of his name. "Larry the Legend," Larry Knechtel,
was perhaps the most versatile player ever to step inside a
recording studio. Born in Bell, California, in 1940, he spent his
nascent musical years playing keyboard for the twang guitarist Duane
Eddy and the Rebels. As the demand for session players grew during
the early 1960s, he started playing a few dates for Phil Spector and
quickly became a favorite choice of producers, arrangers, and
contractors everywhere. "Larry Knechtel is a real musician," says
the famous L.A. producer Bones Howe (the Turtles, the Association,
the 5th Dimension). "With his improvisational skills, he could have
been a brilliant jazz musician."
Even without jazz, Knechtel's knack for just the right riff made the
difference on a huge number of now-classic pop hits. From bass
on "Mrs. Robinson" to organ on "Good Vibrations" to the magnificent
grand piano on "Bridge Over Troubled Water" (for which he won a
Grammy), no member of the Wrecking Crew played so many different
instruments on so many different hits. He played the harpsichord on
the Partridge Family's "I Think I Love You"; he even played the wah-
wah guitar solo on "Guitar Man" by Bread. Of course, being so
amazingly fluent occasionally drew the enmity of those whose names
actually did appear on the album jackets. "I remember the Turtles,
the Association—those guys—standing there in the studio watching me,
hoping I'd either make a mistake or die," he cheerfully recalls.
Most members of the Wrecking Crew were quite content playing
lucrative studio dates six days a week—thanks to a very strong union—
while the record labels' marketing departments made sure only the
singers and bands themselves received credit on the actual
releases. "We were in the business of making stars," says Kaye. "We
didn't want to be stars ourselves."
However, one especially talented guitar player—who couldn't read a
note of music, by the way—did break away from the structure of the
studio world to become a genuine music superstar, with more than 20
Top 40 hits and a weekly television show on CBS. He was Glen Travis
Campbell. "Glen was a big part of the Wrecking Crew," remembers
Blaine. "He was one of those great guitarists who could hear a part
once and he had it down pat. And the arrangers just loved that he
could play these off-the-wall solos, just the wildest solos you ever
heard!" The guitar riffs on "Dance, Dance, Dance" and "I Get Around"
by the Beach Boys are just two examples of the style that made
Campbell a first-call player.
By the late 1960s, with producing help from his fellow Wrecking Crew
member Al DeLory, Campbell began cutting the solo records that would
launch his public career. His hits included "Galveston," "By the
Time I Get to Phoenix," and, of course, his signature
tune, "Rhinestone Cowboy." "Those were fun days," he says of his
Wrecking Crew years. "They were all such great players I used them
on all my songs too."
The other Wrecking Crew member to make a commercial splash on his
own was the keyboardist Leon Russell. Born Claude Russell Bridges in
Lawton, Oklahoma, this ambitious piano prodigy moved to L.A. when he
was only 16 (he lied about his age) in order to try his hand at
session work. His playing soon found its way onto releases by Phil
Spector, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Gary Lewis and the
Playboys, the Byrds, Jan & Dean, Bob Dylan, Herb Alpert, and many
others. "When I first started in this business, Leon Russell taught
me what real showmanship was," says Mark Lindsay, the former lead
singer of Paul Revere & the Raiders. "In the early days, maybe
around '61 or so, on a tour where Paul couldn't make it, we hired
Leon to play piano. He took the stage that first night, kicked the
piano bench backward like Jerry Lee Lewis, and proceeded to whip the
crowd into a frenzy with his theatrical playing. I said to
myself, `Ah, so this is how you do it!'"
The versatile, driven Russell also began to write his own songs,
scoring radio hits in the early seventies with "Lady Blue"
and "Tight Rope" on his own Shelter Records label. His body of work
contains many songs covered by other major artists, including "This
Masquerade" by George Benson, "Delta Lady" by Joe Cocker,
and "Superstar" by Carpenters. Many consider Russell, still on the
road today, the most talented Wrecking Crew pianist of them all. "He
was a great, great player," says Campbell.
Not every member of the Wrecking Crew found lasting success and
happiness. One especially gifted player, the drummer Jim Gordon, co-
writer of "Layla" with Eric Clapton, began to hear voices in the
early seventies and gradually changed from a pleasant, curly-haired,
almost shy drumming phenomenon into an undependable, unemployable
recluse. "Jim originally got along great with everybody," remembers
Blaine, "but he started walking out on sessions and telling other
musicians, `You're trying to take my soul.' Very weird, almost
voodoo kinds of things."
By 1983, with his once-thriving session career in virtual ruins
because of an acute case of schizophrenia compounded by heavy heroin
use, the six-foot-three- inch Gordon unexpectedly appeared at the
North Hollywood home of his mother late one June evening and
bludgeoned and stabbed her to death. "That whole thing that went
down with him I couldn't believe. I never even saw him do drugs or
anything," says Chuck Berghofer, the bass player responsible for the
famous signature run on "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'." At his
trial in Los Angeles, James Beck Gordon was found guilty of second-
degree murder and sentenced to 16 years to life. He lives today in
the California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo, collecting
royalties, taking his medications, and occasionally playing in the
prison band.
Just as the influence of Top 40 AM radio began to lose favor among
young radio listeners to the growing number of progressive, album-
oriented "underground" FM stations by the early seventies, the
musical climate in L.A. also began to change. Always attempting to
reflect the attitudes of America's youth in the music they released—
if often a couple of steps behind—the big record labels began
signing artists who insisted on playing their own instruments. Slick
packaging was no longer hip. Authenticity— being real—was the new
philosophy. So as self-contained bands like the Eagles, the Doobie
Brothers, and Chicago came along, the job prospects for the Wrecking
Crew began to dwindle. And with the advent of synthesizers, drum
machines, and home recording studios, their eventual dissolution was
inevitable.
Motown had its Funk Brothers. Nashville had its "cats." Elvis even
had his very own top-of-the-line sidemen. Every genre and locale had
(and has) its supporting players. But no group of musicians has ever
played on more hits with more stars than the Wrecking Crew. "The
whole era was a magic combination of artists, writers, and
producers," says Larry Knechtel. "We loved what we did, and for
about 10 years it was as good as it gets."
Kent Hartman is a freelance writer, music-industry executive, and
syndicated-radio- show producer.
