They Made The Sounds of The 60's

The Wrecking Crew Movie
Special Showing at
Mo's Fullerton Music
Saturday Aug. 27
Five Scoops of Bosco

Denny Tedesco knew his father was dying. He had been diagnosed with cancer.

"I didn't know how much longer I'd have with my father," he says.

His father, Tommy Tedesco, spent his life playing guitar in Hollywood recording studios. He played on so many hit records, he lost count. That's him playing the obbligato that opens "California Dreamin' " by the Mamas and the Papas. He played on "Good Vibrations," "Strangers in the Night," "Da Doo Ron Ron," "MacArthur Park" and Frank Zappa's "Lumpy Gravy."

His son runs his own San Fernando Valley production company, filming commercials and infomercials.

"When my dad was diagnosed with cancer in 1995 ... I knew that was the time I had to make the movie," he says.

He pulled together and filmed a round-table discussion among his father and three of his father's colleagues - drummer Hal Blaine, bassist Carol Kaye and saxophonist Plas Johnson - just the four of them talking, joking, reminiscing. It was a scene the director based on Woody Allen's "Broadway Danny Rose," in which comedians sit around the Carnegie Deli telling stories.

"It was a quartet without instruments," Tedesco says. "Their instruments were always their tongues. They were sharp, witty people. I didn't want to intrude. I wanted to catch that, just be a fly on the wall."

He edited the day's shoot into a 14-minute piece and went looking for investors. Finding few, he started shooting interviews on his own - first Nancy Sinatra and pianist Don Randi, then Cher (who started in the business singing background vocals on Phil Spector sessions) and Dick Clark. Most of the musicians involved were already collecting Social Security - "We'd already lost Steve Douglas and Ray Pohlman," Tedesco says - and a number of them have died since Tedesco filmed their interviews, including drummer Earl Palmer, who died last month at age 83.

Twelve years later, more than 10 years after the elder Tedesco died, "The Wrecking Crew" will have a premiere public screening at the Mill Valley Film Festival, followed by a performance featuring Blaine, bassist Chuck Berghofer (who did the walk-down upright-bass part on "These Boots Are Made for Walking") and Randi from the film, backing some guest singers.

The session musicians in "The Wrecking Crew" were a loose pool of young studio players in Los Angeles during the early '60s, the rock 'n' roll crowd that took over from older guys doing the Nat King Cole or Sinatra sessions for Nelson Riddle. These new-breed session musicians might not even read music, but they played the Elvis Presley sessions, formed the Wall of Sound for producer Spector, performed on all the Beach Boys records and became unsung architects in building the sound of West Coast pop.

Paul Justman's 2002 documentary based on Alan Slutsky's book "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" centered on tragic Motown bassist James Jamerson, but it was really the story of all the Motown sidemen who had been systematically denied credit and were paid in cash, without the union benefits that Hollywood musicians enjoyed.

"When they didn't put our names on the albums," says Randi, 71, "they put our names on the contract, and that's all that matters."

"To me, it was just a job I did, and that was it," says Blaine, 79, retired and living in Palm Springs. "And I got paid very well to do it."

Of course, Blaine is being characteristically disingenuous - the Hollywood session players were more than well-paid union musicians.

"I realize there's not a working drummer who doesn't know my name," Blaine says.

These musicians-for-hire rewrote the sound of pop music. They made vital, largely uncredited contributions to the musical vocabulary of the culture - from Blaine's kick drum intro for the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" to the harmony vocals on Merle Haggard's "Today I Started Loving You Again" by Glen Campbell (who usually played guitar on these sessions, long before he was a recording artist himself).

Tedesco captures their tumultuous, raucous world in interviews (with participants such as Brian Wilson, Herb Alpert, Campbell and other surviving sidemen), a staggering soundtrack of 130 recordings featuring the musicians and Blaine's voluminous collection of session snapshots. Ever the practical joker, Blaine also supplied the only available motion-picture footage from the sessions, a gag reel in which he intercut 8mm home movies of the other musicians with scenes from a porn film. Tedesco was able to extract a few mysterious pieces of Blaine's film.

The most daunting aspect of producing the documentary was procuring clearance to use the recordings in the soundtrack; music publishers are not famous for sentiment. But Tedesco insisted on the potentially budget-crippling number of songs.

"We needed the diversity to show not so much the quality but the breadth of what they did," he says. "They were working musicians - this is what they did. We needed that many to make that impact."

In the end, the publishers and record labels came through.

"I know it sounds politically incorrect, but if you know someone in the record or music publishing business, give 'em a hug," he says. "There was not one song I wanted that I didn't get."

"The Wrecking Crew" often takes flight in solo interviews with musicians holding instruments in their hands. Bassist Kaye is a salty, feisty dame who marvels for the cameras over the invention of the bass lines Wilson composed for her to play on "Good Vibrations." Saxophonist Johnson tootles his trademark "Pink Panther Theme." Much of the movie's charm comes from the musicians' familiarity with famous pieces of music, like racecar mechanics looking under the hood.

"My father always told guitar students, 'You've got music, and you've got the music business. Sometimes it mixes,' " Tedesco says. "He always said he played for smiles: If the leader smiles, he did his job. He always had to do his best, no matter what he was given to play."

Blaine, who played on six consecutive Grammy-winning records of the year, used to keep two drum sets and hire an assistant to move them from studio to studio, setting up one kit while Blaine was still playing the other. Blaine scooted from session to session on a motorcycle, lest he get stuck in traffic. When he first retired at age 55, he had accumulated the largest pension fund in the history of his union.

"I always told people," Blaine says, "that it's no different - well, it is different, but it's a lot like working at General Electric putting doors on refrigerators."

Ba-da-boom.

Reviewed by Joel Selvin
Mr. Selvin is a Writer For the San Francisco Chronicle