You’ve heard them play a million times but you have no idea who they are — that’s the concept at the center of Denny Tedesco’s The Wrecking Crew. The eponymous L.A.-based cadre of session musicians (career musicians paid to play on other artists’ recordings and performances) were featured on hundreds of 60s pop and rock recordings, working with everyone from Elvis to the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, the Mamas and the Papas, the Supremes, and too many more to list. Tedesco — who is the son of one of the Crew’s most famous “members,” guitarist Tommy Tedesco — primarily uses interviews and recordings to create a study on the nature of what it means to be, by everyone’s agreement, the talent that made great songs and records possible, but recognized by not a single person in the general American public.
The loose group of musicians who made up the Wrecking Crew — some of the most famous members include arranger Jack Nitzsche, pianist Leon Russell, guitarists Bill Pittman, Glen Campbell, Al Casey, and Tedesco, drummers Earl Palmer and Hal Blaine, and Carol Kaye, the greatest electric bassist of all time — was initially born out of an influx of New York musicians emigrating to L.A. as part of the surf-inspired mid-60s recording boom (as Dick Clark reminisces, “the 60s called all of the music to the west”). Replacing an older, more uptight generation of studio musicians in L.A., many Wrecking Crew members were used due to their skillful capacity to play rock-n-roll, surf, and pop, despite many of them having formal musical backgrounds in jazz and occasionally expressing disdain at the music they recorded. Swept up in the 60s west coast musical upsurge, the Wrecking Crew musicians consequently played on incalculable numbers of pop hits, not to mention jingles, film scores, and television themes.
Of course, one of the ideas brought up by Denny Tedesco’s film is the shadowy nature of the core group of musicians and their prolific role in the L.A. recording output. Most designated Wrecking Crew musicians admit that they aren’t necessarily sure who exactly was a member of the Wrecking Crew, or how many members there were, or what constituted membership, though by most estimates there were between ten to forty session musicians considered part of the “movement.” Indeed, according to the film, many musicians didn’t even know that they were called “the Wrecking Crew” or heard the term until years afterwards, and Carol Kaye has publicly disputed the labeling of the group as such.
But beyond the complications of title and membership, the shadowy issue highlighted by Tedesco’s film goes even deeper. Many of the Wrecking Crew musicians — despite ample pay — were never credited on many of the records they played on, and even at the height of their use and output, would never have been recognizable to an average radio listener, even as recordings they played on were ubiquitous on pop radio. When Denny’s father Tommy Tedesco died in the late 90s, many of the announcements of his death focused on the fact that no one had heard of him, one even sloppily referring to him as “Tony Todesco.”
Of equal interest to the quasi-anonymous nature of the group is the assembly-line style recording process of mid-60s pop songs featured in the film. As with the Golden era of Hollywood filmmaking, The Wrecking Crew highlights a systematically collaborative, factory-method period when the studio process mattered less than the scheduled output. And the scheduled output was tremendous — at one point, guitarist Al Casey recalls sessions where four songs were recorded in three hours, and drummer Earl Palmer recalls a stretch of time where he recorded an album a day for Liberty Records. But beyond the sheer numbers, it’s fascinating to hear about a factory-like division of labor among songwriters, producers, studio musicians, and credited performers. During this period of time, producers provided session musicians with a “road map” of chord charts, and then studio musicians were essentially free to come up with their own parts as they saw fit. The end result was a hodge-podge of ideas from various contributing members, though more often than not, none of them would end up on the record sleeve cover. It’s a stark contrast to the late-20th century idea of sole creative genius and complete singular originality.
Of course, it’s these same ideas of originality and creative ownership that end up eroding the experiences of many of the Wrecking Crew musicians. There’s a palpable feeling of having been disrespected emanating from many musicians describing their lack of credit for playing on big-time musicians’ most famous recordings. In particular, saxophonist Plas Johnson describes the pain of playing all the memorable parts of a song that doesn’t feature his name on it anywhere, paired with the Milli Vanilli-type arrangement of the record company hiring a group of white high-schoolers to send on the road in place of the studio musicians who recorded it.
The discussion of all of these intermingling ideas around credit, originality, collaboration, and the creative process are the most interesting part of The Wrecking Crew. As the musical world reels from the verdict of the Gaye family’s “Blurred Lines” lawsuit and its implications for ideas of creative ownership and attribution, The Wrecking Crew doesn’t feel so much like a study in bygone creative processes but a dangerously relevant contribution to the conversation — a conversation in many ways as shadowy and complicated as the Wrecking Crew itself.
