The Wrecking Crew: The Musicians Behind the Music By Elvis Nash
Most people know the records.
They know The Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Sinatra, Sonny & Cher, The Mamas & the Papas, The Monkees, The Byrds, Glen Campbell, and The Righteous Brothers.
But most people never knew the musicians standing behind many of those records.
They became known as The Wrecking Crew—a loose collection of Los Angeles studio musicians who helped create an enormous amount of American popular music during the 1960s and into the 1970s. They weren’t one official band with a fixed membership. They were working musicians who got called when producers needed people who could walk into a studio, read a chart, hear an idea, and make it work.
And that’s the part of their story I love.
Before Computers Could Fix Everything
Recording wasn’t what it is today.
You couldn’t move every note around on a computer until everybody sounded perfect. You couldn’t manufacture feel by clicking a mouse.
You hired musicians who could play.
And these people could play.
Drummer Hal Blaine, bassist Carol Kaye, guitarist Tommy Tedesco, keyboardist Don Randi, saxophonist Plas Johnson, guitarist Glen Campbell, bassist Joe Osborn, keyboardist Larry Knechtel and many others became part of this remarkable Los Angeles studio scene.
They weren’t necessarily there to become stars.
They were there to make the star’s record sound great.
That’s musicianship.
Sometimes They Created the Hook
Calling these people “backing musicians” doesn’t really explain what they did.
Sometimes they helped create the musical part everybody remembers.
Listen to the opening drums on the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby.” That’s Hal Blaine. The Library of Congress notes that the recording featured an ensemble of top session players who would become associated with the Wrecking Crew, with Blaine creating that famous opening drum pattern.
Carol Kaye is another great example. She didn’t simply show up, play root notes and collect a check. On “The Beat Goes On,” she devised the bass riff that became one of the record’s defining features. She also contributed an opening figure during the making of Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman.”
That’s creativity.
A songwriter can bring in words and chords. A producer can have a vision. A singer can have a great voice.
But then somebody has to turn all of that into a record.
Glen Campbell Was One of Them
Here’s something younger listeners may not realize.
Before Glen Campbell became a major solo artist, he was a highly regarded session guitarist working in Los Angeles.
He was part of this world.
Think about that for a minute.
You’re sitting in a studio beside musicians who might never have their faces on an album cover, yet some of them are good enough to become stars themselves.
The public saw the singer.
The studio saw the musicians.
That’s two completely different views of the music business.
They Were Part of the Sound of an Era
The Wrecking Crew played behind an extraordinary range of artists. The documentary devoted to them identifies work involving everyone from The Beach Boys and Frank Sinatra to Sonny & Cher, Jan & Dean, The Monkees and The Mamas & the Papas. They were also central to recordings associated with Phil Spector’s famous Wall of Sound.
That means millions of people grew up hearing these musicians without knowing their names.
Turn on the radio.
Hear the drums.
Hear the bass.
Hear the guitar lick.
Hear the piano.
You might have been listening to the same handful of studio professionals you heard on another artist’s record an hour earlier.
Different singer.
Different song.
Same great musicians.
There’s a Lesson Here for Modern Music
Today we argue endlessly about technology.
AI. Auto-Tune. Samples. Loops. Plug-ins. Virtual instruments.
I use modern technology myself. I’m not interested in pretending it’s 1965.
But The Wrecking Crew reminds us of something technology can’t make irrelevant:
A song and a record are not necessarily the same thing.
The song may start with one person and a guitar.
The record becomes something bigger.
A bass player hears a better movement.
A drummer changes the groove.
A guitarist finds a lick nobody thought of.
A background singer finds a harmony.
An engineer hears something nobody else hears.
Suddenly the song has a personality.
That’s why I’ve never believed music has to be some lonely competition where everybody proves they did everything themselves.
Great records have always been about collaboration.
No Songwriter Is an Island
I’ve written before that no songwriter is an island.
The Wrecking Crew proves the point.
The person whose name appears on the record isn’t necessarily responsible for every beautiful thing you hear coming out of the speakers.
There may be a songwriter.
A singer.
A producer.
An arranger.
A drummer.
A bass player.
Three guitar players.
Background singers.
An engineer.
And somebody sitting quietly in the corner who suddenly says, “What if we did it this way?”
Then everybody stops.
They try it.
And there’s the record.
That isn’t cheating.
That’s making music.
The People Behind the Curtain
For years, most listeners had little idea who these musicians were. Denny Tedesco, son of guitarist Tommy Tedesco, eventually spent years documenting their story in The Wrecking Crew, preserving the memories of the musicians and the artists and producers who worked with them.
I’m glad he did.
Because music history shouldn’t consist only of famous faces standing at microphones.
Somewhere behind almost every great record are people whose names the public never learned.
The Wrecking Crew were those people.
They went to work.
They played the session.
They packed up their instruments.
Then they went to another studio and did it again.
Meanwhile, the records they helped create went around the world.
That’s not a bad legacy for a bunch of musicians who were supposedly just there to play the parts.
They weren’t standing behind music history.
They were helping make it.
— Elvis Nash