Which Wrecking Crew? by Bill Kay

The name Wrecking Crew is so attractively aggressive and edgy that it has been snaffled by many creative groups over the years, from a hip-hop band to a film production company and loads of others in between.
It therefore comes as a surprise those who are not pop music historians that the term was first applied to a group of people who could pass for the claims department of an insurance company. They were dubbed the Wrecking Crew by their drummer, Hal Blaine.
But this was not a headline band, rather a loosely organised group of session musicians in the 1950s, 1960s and even as late as the 1980s who for long periods dominated the recording business in Los Angeles. According to a new documentary film about them, made by the son of one of the leading lights, guitarist Tommy Tedesco, the name alluding to the way they were seen by their more conventional contemporaries, who saw this bunch of upstarts as breaking up the then cosy session-musician trade on the west coast.
Their 'crime' was to be young and ambitious at the time rock 'n' roll was coming in, and actually contributing to the development of that style. It didn't hurt that they were extremely professional, and as they worked together more frequently and got to know one another's skills, they could produce inch-perfect backing - in a day, if necessary - to whole albums of the biggest singers and groups of the period, from Frank and Nancy Sinatra to Sonny and Cher, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Righteous Brothers, Sam Cooke and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass - a list that pins the Wrecking Crew firmly to a well-defined and now long-gone era.
It was a time when the music was new and the record companies only concerned about the product, not how it was made. So it was not regarded as important that a band couldn't play their music, as long as someone could. The result was a succession of highly produced and technically excellent songs - typified by the Phil Spector Wall of Sound - that were the final take of umpteen versions, often with ideas, riffs and twirls introduced by the Wrecking Crew. Carol Kaye, another guitarist, seems to have been particularly good at adding little segments that lifted a record and helped it become a hit - but were very difficult to reproduce on stage.
I watched the documentary last night in the open air at the California Plaza in downtown LA, as part of a series of free events called the Grand Performances. The arena, really the piazza of an office complex, was packed with plenty of regulars - seats were first come, first served, and many brought their own folding chairs along with cool boxes and picnic baskets to produce a lively atmosphere.
However, once the sun went down at about 8 pm - much earlier than the more northerly Britain - the temperature dropped and there was a chilly breeze that felt more like London than LA. Luckily I had a jacket, but I was reminded of a very different event - a classical concert in the main courtyard of Hampton Court - when I was extremely envious of those who had had the foresight to bring blankets. It didn't get quite that bad, but it was too close for comfort.
The documentary, which has taken 12 years to make, was introduced by Danny Tedesco and was clearly conceived as a tribute to his late father. It was therefore uncritical and portrayed the Wrecking Crew as a group of fundamentally good people who happened to be in the right place at the right time - and earned good money but never collected the huge royalties of the singers and bands they backed.
We learned a little about the difficulties of combining the irregular hours of a session musician with having a family, a familiar problem to most journalists. And it struck me that the Wrecking Crew had the mindset of newspaper sub-editors - talented people working largely beneath the surface, not making the megabucks (though enough in some cases to afford yachts and Rolls-Royces) but equally not taking the risks of being a headline act. One of the few who rose from the ranks was the singer Glen Campbell, parallelling the career of the rare sub-editor who becomes a by-lined writer. The gallows humour was very familiar to anyone who has worked in newspapers.
The Wrecking Crew era ended because groups and bands took over, and increasingly provided their own backing music. What the public didn't know, with the exception of the Monkees, was that as well as the solo singers few groups played their own music on their records and often mimed to their records in concert. Some couldn't play a note.
I had come across this phenomenon in Britain. John Allason, a Scot who had played with a band called the Marmalade in the 1960s, told me that the more successful Trogs couldn't play. Instead of miming to their records, however, they mimed to a live version of their songs played and sung by the Marmalade behind the stage curtain!