Tedesco

Tommy Tedesco first worked as a Hollywood session guitarist in 1953, for The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, a television show about a man who never went to work. Ironically, this was the beginning of Tedesco's long career as a man who never went home. "I look back," says Tedesco, who is large and Italian, with the mien of a dockworker and the beard of Maynard G. Krebs, "and I can't believe that I would start at nine in the morning and go to midnight every day year after year, record after record after record. Like, I'd do Tennessee Ernie Ford from nine to twelve, and then at one o'clock I might go do Leave It to Beaver, then at six o'clock, I would possibly do Pat Boone, and then at nine o'clock a Phil Spector date with the Ronettes. And this went on every day. "We went 'round the clock. There was a rock group called the Marketts – I was the guitar player in the Marketts. There was a group called the Routers – I was the guitar player. They never put our names down. Hal Blaine was the drummer. Ray Pohlman or Carol Kaye was the bass player. Leon Russell was the piano player. If the Marketts would get a hit, they'd put together a group to go out on the road, but we'd still do the records. We had a hit as the Arkansas Junior High School Band – I played banjo – and they had to find some kids to appear." Tommy Tedesco is a session man, a working musician. He used to work more than he works now – he's down to about a dozen sessions a month, with no complaints, and of course that's not counting the seminars he runs at the Musicians (formerly the Guitar) Institute of Technology in Hollywood or his club dates – but he works. He's a high-ranking lifer in a generally faceless army commissioned to make music for motion pictures and TV shows, to support singers who have no band of their own and to step in for pop stars who can't play as well as the hired guns. You may have never heard his name – though he's a legend among his peers, and his two method books (Anatomy of a Guitar Player and For Guitar Players Only) and the "Studio Log" workshop he writes for Guitar Player magazine have increased his renown among the laity – but you can't have lived in America in the last three decades and missed hearing him. He played on Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night," the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations," the Crystal's "Da Doo Ron Ron," Frank Zappa's Lumpy Gravy, Richard Harris's "MacArthur Park" and Jan and Dean's "Dead Man's Curve"; on the soundtrack of The Godfather, Gloria, Cocoon, M*A*S*H, The River and Bonnie and Clyde; and on "No Matter What Shape Your Stomach's In," an Alka-Seltzer commercial that became a hit for a non-existent band called the T-Bones. For "about forty albums" he was the first of the Fifty Guitars of Tommy Garrett. ("They're the albums you hear in dentists' offices or in elevators.") He's played alongside classical guitarist John Williams, jazz great Joe Pass, bossa nova king Laurindo Almeida. There are no stringed instruments from which he cannot pluck a usable noise – he owns dozens of them, from all over the world, and typically totes 40 or so to a session – and no style he can't at least fake. While his specialty has come to be "nylon-string guitar solo, pretty Spanish stuff," his proudest claim is, "I am whatever the part calls for. If it's a raucous thing, I'm raucous; if it's a rock 'n' roll fifteen-year-old, I'm there, in my body, turned into whatever. When I play banjo, I really feel banjo licks; when I play mandolin, it's going to be just exactly the feeling you're gonna want to hear." Music as method: He's the Stanislavksi of the studios and, despite the anonymous nature of his art, takes his assignments seriously. Most of them, anyway. "Believe me, I didn't get excited about the Batman theme – that was work, you know?" Mainly what he doesn't take seriously is himself. Tedesco is almost as well known in his profession for his unpredictability, independence and extravagant humor as for his exceptional musicianship. He scored a perfect 30 on The Gong Show for singing his self-mocking "Requiem for a Studio Guitar Player" while dressed in a tutu. When Monkee-gone-solo asked him for, "something a little different," Tedesco turned his amplifier all the way up, heaved his guitar into the air and watched it fall. ("Sure enough it came out on the record.") He was "Tommy Marinucci," one of Happy Kyne's Mirth Makers on the Martin Mull-hosted talk-show parody Fernwood 2-Night ("It was just a beautiful job; we stretched out all the way"), occasionally stepping forward to sing something like "Skateboard Angel." When he went to work a late-'60s session for then-notorious rock "freak" Frank Zappa, Tedesco arrived at the studio "dressed in pajamas or something. [Zappa remembers it as a t-shirt, golf cap and scout kerchief.] It was strictly a spoof role 'cause I'd seen a picture of Frank, and he was scary-looking. He says, 'I like your costume.' I say, 'I like yours.' He says, 'You don't remember me, but I used to come when I was fourteen years old to watch you play at the West Covina bowling alley,' or something. It cracked me up. But his music was tough and great, so that set me down a peg; let's say I don't go out dressed in pajama bottoms any more – until I'm sure of myself." The guitar Tommy used on that date has recently been mounted in the Hard Rock Cafe in Dallas. "I had scratched 'Stradivarius Tedesco' all over it, and I used to put cigarette butts out on it – just for dramatic effect." All these sessions bought Tedesco a nice, long house on a quiet street in the Valley. He filled it with family; with guitars, bozoukis and tipples; with trophies, plaques and certificates; and, at one end, he fashioned himself a little sanctum sanctorum consecrated to the Joy of Music. (He is no longer the man who never comes home.) "Away from this room," he says, plopped like a pasha among guitars and amps and tape recorders, "I'm a money player. But as soon as I get back here, I'm sixteen years old again – a whole different bag." Sixteen is about the age young Tommy was when he began taking guitar seriously; before that, he'd been taking it more like castor oil. "I was six or seven years old, and someone's son was playing guitar, singing an Italian song. My father said, 'Boy, that's nice,' and the next thing I knew I had a guitar. My father forced me to play the guitar. I hated the guitar. To this day, the teacher I had then says that out of his thousands of students, I was the worst; he can't believe I play guitar for a living." Conciliation came eventually, then a career: Tedesco was working with a trio, playing "wedding jobs" in his home town of Niagara Falls, New York, when – in a 42nd Street scenario – he was asked to fill a suddenly empty chair in the Ralph Marterie Orchestra, in town for a dance at Niagara University. Merterie offered him a job. Two days later: New York, followed by the road and a stand at the Hollywood Palladium; it was then that Tedesco got his first taste of studio work and saw his future before him like a map. > "I love guitar," he says, leading a visitor out of the sanctum and down the length of his house, "but if I'd been given a sax, maybe I'd love sax. Still . . . I played guitar 'til four-thirty this morning, watching a movie on TV. I'm sure if I were a sax player that wouldn't be going on. I wouldn't be able to watch Robert Mitchum and play sax at the same time – they'd have me committed." Instrument cases abound; in every room, guitars and less readily nameable cousins are propped in corners, hang on the walls. "That's a guitarron; I got a call for it a few years ago, and it's sat here ever since. I never got to use it again, thank God – it's an awful instrument to play. I have guitars set up all over, 'cause I'm lazy, if I want to, I can just go and grab one. "I'm trying to play live a lot. This is the last phase of my career; I want to go out how I came in – as a player." For 20 years, he absented himself from club work to concentrate on the studio, but one day, about ten years ago, "one of the kids at the Institute asked me what I do aesthetically . And I made a joke – 'Well, I eat a lot.' But it got me thinking, and pretty soon I started playing. I'm doing albums; I've played all over England, Europe. I had a twenty-year cold; this is my decongestant – it opened up my mind and heart." Simultaneously, he's looking back over his career with new attention to details he never bothered about at the time. He can't tell you most of the records he's on, can't tell you much about Phil Spector or Brian Wilson or Elvis – "I just did the dates and left." He rarely met artists he backed. "I left them alone. I thought, 'I'm a little shy with new people, they're the big wheels – I'll just do my job.' But possibly some were afraid to come to me. Anita Kerr says that when she first saw me she was afraid to tell me anything – I had that look. "It's just the last few years I'm looking back. Recently, I heard a record called 'Memories' by Elvis Presley, and I hear this pretty guitar solo – I say, 'Well, that's me!' On the Cosby show, they played a Ray Charles record. I heard this guitar stuff – 'Oh my God, that's me!'" Walking into the kitchen, he finds the radio playing a familiar tune. "That's a record I was on," he says. "Herb Alpert – 'A Taste of Honey.' That's Hal Blaine on drums." He sits at the kitchen table and takes into his lap his favorite guitar, made in Spain by Ramirez. "It just feels good to have this here," he says. "When I'm watching TV, it takes one second to come in and grab it. Once I do, it's all over – it'll be in my hand for five hours." Once he left it lying in the living room. "And my wife said, 'Hon, would you get this guitar out of here? I said, 'Halt! This guitar is the reason we have a living room. If it were up to me we would have the guitar in the middle of it. So now, everybody leaves it alone." Copyright © Robert Lloyd 1988 and 2006. Other writing Homepage