One day 15
years ago, I drove out to the Valley to interview Tommy
Tedesco.
Tedesco, who died in 1997, was a Hollywood session
musician, a
professional guitarist, a player in fact of nearly any
plucked string
instrument he could tune like a guitar. His near-complete
obscurity
among the public — that is, everyone apart from his peers,
his students
at the Guitar Institute of Technology, readers of his
“Studio Log” in
Guitar Player magazine and the credit-rooting
scholar-nerds of ’60s pop
— was in inverse relation to his actual profile in popular
music. We
walked into his kitchen at one point; a radio was playing
“A Taste of
Honey” by the Tijuana Brass. “That’s a record I was on,”
he said
nonchalantly. The odds were good he could have said the
same thing had
we walked in five or 15 minutes later. Tedesco also played
on “Good
Vibrations,” “Strangers in the Night,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,”
Lumpy Gravy and
“MacArthur Park,” and on the soundtracks of
The Godfather,
MASH and
Bonnie and Clyde,
among uncountable other tracks, songs, dates, jingles and
sides — more
than he could, or would want to, remember. “I am whatever
the part
calls for,” he told me. “If it’s a raucous thing, I’m
raucous; if it’s
a rock & roll 15-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.”
Opting for high-paid anonymous studio work over the
flashier rewards of the spotlight, Tedesco had been a
mainstay of the
loose but exclusive company of L.A. players who would
latterly be
known, in drummer Hal Blaine’s formulation, as the
Wrecking Crew. They
would dominate local pop productions for a golden decade,
lending their
talents to untold thousands of “sides” and helping create
the signature
sounds of such Top 40 auteurs as Phil Spector, Brian
Wilson, Lee
Hazelwood and Jimmy Webb — sounds that continue to cycle
through a
musical culture informed by nostalgia and sampling,
wherein all music
past is eternally present. These players built their
careers on an
ability to be both extraordinarily present and completely
invisible —
an ability appropriate to the making of music, the most
ethereal art.
(It is made literally of air.) They had their triple
scale, and were
content.
“Studio musicians were not interested in becoming
‘stars,’” bassist Carol Kaye, one of the few women to be
part of this
world, writes on her Web site. “We were part of the
process in business
to make people into ‘stars.’” And yet something beats
within the
American breast that finds such modesty . . . suspicious,
tragic, even
perverse — that demands credit where credit is due, longs
to hear the
unsung hero sung, the secret identity revealed. We like
this story
almost as much as the one about being rich and famous
before turning
20. Surely the success of the documentary
Standing in the Shadows of
Motown, like
The
Buena Vista Social Club
before it, has something to do with this feel-good
narrative of belated
recognition. (And like the musicians of The Buena Vista
Social Club,
Motown’s Funk Brothers have taken their newfound fame on
the road.)
Carol Kaye has a Web site, after all, as do Blaine and
such other
former associates as guitarists Billy Strange and Mike
Deasy, harmonica
player Tommy Morgan, pianist Mike Melvoin and bassist Joe
Osborn. They
have finally taken it upon themselves to let the world
know who they
are and what they have done. So we are here, as James
Brown famously
said, “to give the drummers some” — and the bassists, and
guitarists,
and piano players of the L.A. studios, and all those
superanonymous
string and brass players whose credits are beyond the
interest of even
the most avid pop trainspotters. And who are,
unfortunately, too
numerous to mention.
The
Wrecking Crew compose, of course,
merely a chapter in an ongoing tale that properly begins
127 years ago,
in a laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where young Tom
Edison first
recorded sound — making possible record hops, jukeboxes,
Alan Freed,
Clive Davis and the international fame of the Shaggs.
Until then, the
only way to hear music was to be present where it was
being made. A
single performance, inscribed in wax and reproduced ad
infinitum, could
travel through not only space but time, and be everywhere
present with
godlike simultaneity. On the one hand, this was good,
opening up new
avenues of exchange and influence. But at the same time it
meant that a
few players might stand in for many; it created a kind of
musical
elite, a new breed of highly skilled, faceless artisan —
the session
musician, studio musician or “yo cat” — working largely in
the few big
cities where the record business and the parallel,
intertwining
technologies of radio, television and film were based.
It was not, to be sure, a single set of skills. Recording
the score of an animated
cartoon, for instance, with its precise architecture of
flurrying notes
and abrupt time shifts, is a world away from filling in
the details on
a thinly sketched pop song. Some players are brilliant
readers who can
easily navigate “flyspecks” — the fast little notes that
can blacken a
page — or passages written high above the staff, or tricky
meters.
Others might be prized more for their
feel, or
their
funkiness, or
tastiness, or their
intuitive grasp of
the pocket, or
trademark
licks.
(Kaye theorizes that it was precisely their inferior
reading skills
that forced session players Glen Campbell and Leon Russell
to become
pop stars instead.) But certain things hold true for all
“first call”
players: Each is, within his niche, as near as possible
the Platonic
ideal of drum, bass, guitar, piano, horn, harp or
whatever. Like
Olympic athletes or people who can write out the
Gettysburg Address on
the head of a pin, they are better coordinated than the
rest of us are.
They have a more finely tuned sense of time and tone. They
are quick
studies able to rapidly apprehend the job at hand, to
access or emulate
whatever mood or emotion is called for (faking is
acceptable
show-business practice) and get it recorded as close to
immediately as
possible.
Notwithstanding the gunslinging glamour of the job,
they
are required also to be workaday professionals:
dependable, amiable (as
Blaine used to say, “If you smile, you stay around
awhile; if you pout,
you’re out!”), diplomatic and egoless — able to leave
opinions, taste
and even pride at the door.
The workday could run from 9 a.m.
to midnight, fueled by coffee and cigarettes and
vending-machine meals,
with naps stolen on the studio floor, and might include
as many as
three or four or even five sessions — a session being
defined by the
union as three hours, in which time three songs would
typically be
recorded. Brian Wilson would usually spend a whole
session on a single
track, and often go overtime, which endeared him to the
players. There
is much to be said for a job that goes into overtime
after three hours.
(The basic session rate for a sideman is currently
$339.20, though not
all dates are union dates, to be sure.)
It was a “clean, highly
professional on-time no-nonsense business,” in Kaye’s
words. One
hesitates to call it hackwork, because the best always
played better
than they had to, and much beautiful music was made.
Still, if one
considers the thousands, even tens of thousands of dates
claimed by the
busiest players in the busiest years — the 1960s, when
the pop
factories were running overtime manufacturing the mod
sounds that set
young America frugging — and subtracts the share of that
music which
might have been great or even moderately interesting to
play, that
leaves a lot of bad music to have been party to. But
that isn’t what we
remember.
The first Hollywood studio musicians
worked, appropriately enough, for the Hollywood studios;
as sound
remade the movies, every studio established its own
music department —
full-service organizations, with composers, conductors,
copyists,
librarians and a standing orchestra — and in the process
threw out of
work thousands of musicians across the country who had
played live
behind silent films.
In those days, you had to be a member of
the union local for a year before you could even qualify
for studio
work. It was a plum job, steady and well-paid, with an
average workweek
of something like 24 hours. The musicians were
accordingly first-rate:
In 1945 Leopold Stokowski, Walt Disney’s co-conspirator
on Fantasia,
organized the Hollywood Bowl Symphony from their ranks.
Around the same
time, the Hollywood String Quartet was formed by some
top-level studio
hands, including violinist Felix Slatkin (concertmaster
at Fox) and
Eleanor Aller Slatkin (first-chair cello at Warner
Bros.). The Slatkins
recorded Ravel, Beethoven and Schoenberg to wide
acclaim, and also
served Capitol Records as a kind of staff quartet for
pop and jazz
projects — they’re the sole accompaniment on Frank
Sinatra’s 1957 album
Close to You. (Felix was also behind Liberty
Records’ Fantastic
Strings, Eleanor can be found playing on Monkees
records, and together
they also produced conductor Leonard Slatkin.) And the
L.A. Woodwinds
of bassoonist Don Christlieb — the father of jazz and
session
saxophonist Pete Christlieb — were longtime staples of
the L.A.
avant-garde, participating in the seminal Evenings on
the Roof and
Monday Evening Concerts series and the local debuts of
Pierre Boulez
and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Christlieb would later work
with Frank Zappa.
It was not an absolute meritocracy. Well into the 1950s
the studio
orchestras — including radio and then television bands,
as Los Angeles
became increasingly a broadcast center — remained almost
exclusively
white, even as jazz musicians began to join them.
Drummer Lee Young
(brother of Lester Young, and a longtime Nat Cole
sideman) had been for
a long time the only black staff musician at a major
studio; Phil
Moore, an African-American pianist who had been an
arranger at MGM,
told Down Beat magazine in 1943 that studio
executives believed
that blacks were undisciplined and would not play music
as written. In
fact, until 1953, Los Angeles had separate union locals
for white
musicians and black, with predictable results. (“We
didn’t have the
good-money jobs until we merged,” recalled the late
bassist Leroy
Vinnegar.) Reedman Buddy Collette — who with alto
saxophonist Benny
Carter and pianist Marl Young was a prime mover in the
single-union
campaign — became the first African-American to play
regularly in a
network orchestra when Jerry Fielding hired him to play
for Groucho
Marx’s You Bet Your Life. Collette left the
Chico Hamilton
Quintet, of which he was a founding member, in favor of
Fielding and
steady work, and watched many of his former associates
(including
Hamilton, Dexter Gordon and Charles Mingus) decampto New
York and eventual greater renown.
There
was some feeling that studio work was antithetical to a
serious jazz
career. Another Chico Hamilton alumnus, guitarist Dennis
Budimir, who
went on to play with Frank Sinatra, Tom Waits and the
Partridge Family,
would remember, “When I first got into studio work, I
think some of the
fellas . . . were saying that I’d ‘sold out.’” But as
Vinnegar pointed
out, “To survive you had to do other things, because the
jazz scale in
L.A. was so low that you couldn’t raise a family.”
Fortunately,
there was a lot of day work available. From the late
’50s until the
early ’70s there reigned in Los Angeles a golden age of
session work.
It began perhaps with the hi-fi boom and the advent of
the LP, which
meant more grooves to fill — with filler, often — and it
certainly had
something to do with the westward migration of the music
business, and
the heady commercial youth of rock & roll. “There
was a great
influx in the mid-’60s,” recalls Van Dyke Parks, whose
own first
session was playing piano on “The Bare Necessities” for
Disney’s The
Jungle Book, “and I think that all of it had to do with
the technology
of the time. Records became a concrete part of the human
experience.”
And it was typical then for a good-selling artist or
band to release
two albums a year, about four times as many as most
manage now.
At
the same time, the breakup of the studio orchestras —
hurried by a 1959
musicians’ strike that resulted in soundtrack recording
being shifted
temporarily overseas — opened that market to
freelancers. The main
players did every sort of date, from soundtracks to
jingles to rock
& roll singles. Mostly jazz musicians, with a
sprinkling of country
players, they were the bridge that connected West Coast
jazz with the
film music of Henry Mancini and Lalo Schifrin, the Top
40 reflections
of whatever fads the Youthquake threw up, the easier
listening of Herb
Alpert and Peggy Lee, and the brief flowering of what
might be called
Southern California art pop, from Spector and Wilson to
Randy Newman to
the much-sampled composer-arranger David Axelrod; they
form the common
denominator of “The Pink Panther Theme,” “River Deep,
Mountain High,”
“Strangers in the Night,” “Spanish Flea,” “California
Dreamin’,” “I’m a
Believer,” “Surf City,” Pet Sounds and Newman’s “Davy
the Fat Boy.”
They were even cutting some early Motown records here,
though just
which ones remains a source of unresolvable controversy.
But even while many recognized the special
gifts of a Spector or Wilson,
few believed they were making music for the ages.
Indeed, the whole
point of the 1960s was to embrace the immediately
replaceable now,
which from an industrial standpoint meant feeding the
maw of a market
based on novelty. “Believe me, I didn’t get excited
about the Batman
theme,” Tommy Tedesco told me. “That was work, you
know?” When asked
once if there were any rock sessions he enjoyed,
guitarist and bass
player Bill Pitman, whose work includes “Good
Vibrations” and “Mr.
Tambourine Man,” answered, “No. Absolutely none.” Even
Earl Palmer,
who, as the drummer for Fats Domino and Little Richard,
actually helped
invent rock & roll, was cool on the subject. “I
lived in a jazz
world,” Palmer told his biographer. “I was not
interested in Little
Richard or Fats Domino. It’s something we did that was
not important to
us musically.” To keep their sanity, many contrived to
play jazz in
their off hours — and there were the occasional jazz
dates as well,
like Cannonball Adderly’s 1968 “Accent on Africa,” with
contributions
from session stalwarts like Palmer, Kaye, saxophonists
Buddy Collette
and Plas Johnson, pianist Don Randi and guitarist Howard
Roberts.
Not
all the players were prejudiced against pop, obviously.
And even the
skeptics understood the new music in a way their
predecessors did not,
and were at least willing, if not always happy, to play
it. The
challenges were creative rather than technical:
Virtuosity counted for
nothing in rock, which is — pace prog — unschooled
music, vernacular,
organized from the bottom up, a thing of inspired and
resourceful
amateurism. Yet once it became clear there was money to
be made out of
it, producers and labels moved to professionalize the
process and the
product. Plus, the emphasis on hit records, within the
narrow funnel of
the Top 40, encouraged a kind of magic thinking: To say
that something
sounds like a hit is, after all, to say it sounds like
another record
that already was a hit. And anyone or anything — a
musician, a studio,
an engineer, a drum sound — associated with one hit
record was hired to
ensure the next. “They were so superstitious,” Bill
Pitman once
remarked, “that if somebody put a cigarette in an
ashtray or something,
and it was burning at the time, they’d have to do it on
the next date.”
Which meant even more work for the best players: It was
a kind of
gracious circle.
This pop gold rush found its ultimate
expression in 1966 in a completely manufactured band,
the Monkees
(penultimate expression, if you count the Archies).
Their roots, if
that word may serve here, were in such previous phony
groups as the
Marketts (“Surfer’s Stomp”), the Fantastic Baggys (“Tell
’Em I’m
Surfin’”) and the Avalanches (“Avalanche”), all made
entirely of
session players. Tommy Tedesco is on all those records,
as he is on Deuces,
T’s, Roadsters and Drums
alongside Leon Russell, Glen Campbell, keyboard player
David Gates
(later of the group Bread), and bassists Carol Kaye and
Jimmy Bond. A
few fads down the road, there were the Ceyleib People,
whose Tanyet,
an album of Indian-inflected raga rock, featured session
guitarist Mike
Deasy, bassists Joe Osborn and Larry Knechtel (also
later of Bread, and
with Osborn a semiregular rhythm unit with Hal Blaine),
drummer Jim
Gordon, pianist Mike Melvoin, and reedman Jim Horn, with
a new young
session player named Ry Cooder. The Tijuana Brass, which
didn’t exist
as an actual group until after they’d had a few hit
records, was a
similar simulacrum. And it was already standard practice
for record
producers to augment or even replace the musicians in
“real” existing
groups — the Beach Boys, the Association, Paul Revere
and the Raiders,
the Mamas and the Papas — with more adept pros. The
Monkees were in
this sense “traditional.” Even the outside, cultish Love
had their date
with the Wrecking Crew. But for the time being, this
practice was a
kind of trade secret.
Real anonymity ended in the early ’70s,
when the Musicians Union began to require sleeve
credits, at least for
rhythm sections. This was bound to change in any case:
After the
Beatles, who seemed so heroically self-contained and
self-directed, the
old show-business paradigms no longer applied, or at any
rate could not
be seen to apply. The ascendant counterculture, with its
insistence on
authenticity, on being real, made it inevitable that the
Monkees would
demand to play their own instruments. In some sense,
that was the
beginning of the end of the golden age of session work.
Still, there were good times ahead.
In the hippie-sprung communal world of the rock era, and
with the music
press and public taking a more active interest in the
creative
particulars, session musicians were given a share in
rock’s outlaw
glamour. The hired “friends” of Delaney & Bonnie
& Friends —
including pianist Leon Russell, bassist Carl Radle,
Texas hornman Bobby
Keys, and studio drummers Jim Keltner and Jim Gordon —
most of whom
also served as Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen,
were not only
credited but saw their pictures on album sleeves, and
wound up playing
variously with the Rolling Stones, George Harrison and
Eric Clapton,
where they seemed less like hired guns than special
guests. If some of
the new session players were less endlessly adaptable
than the old,
this could be taken as further proof of their
authenticity. James
Taylor bassist Lee Sklar, who was studying to be a
sculptor, became a
session musician almost by accident by virtue of his
association with a
hit record and a “new sound” everyone wanted to buy —
suddenly he was
being called to play with Carole King, Jackson Browne,
Linda Ronstadt
and Rod Stewart. And Ry Cooder’s reputation as an artist
in his own
right remains inextricable from his reputation as a
sideman.
The
’70s also saw an emphasis on traditional aspects of
“good
musicianship”; it was the age of rock hyphenates —
art-rock, prog-rock,
country-rock and jazz-rock — all of which were concerned
to various
degrees with chops. Joni Mitchell hired musicians from
the mellow-jazz
L.A. Express and the Crusaders. Drawing from the same
pool was Steely
Dan, which was not a band at all but a shifting cast of
pros hired to
realize the quirky ideas of oddball perfectionists
Donald Fagen and
Walter Becker. “‘Studio musician’ — to us, there were no
grander words
in the English language than these,” they recall in
their notes to the
reissue of Pretzel Logic. Along with the likes of
saxophonists Plas
Johnson and Wilton Felder, guitarist Larry Carlton,
pianist Joe Sample,
percussionists Milt Holland and Victor Feldman, and
bassist Chuck
Rainey, they would use nearly every great studio drummer
of the day,
including Gordon, Keltner, Blaine, Paul Humphrey, Rick
Marotta and new
kid Jeff Porcaro, the son of studio percussionist Joe
Porcaro and heir
apparent to Keltner and Gordon — as Keltner and Gordon
had been to
Blaine and Earl Palmer. (Porcaro’s first recording
session was a double
drum date with Keltner, whom he idolized; he was 17, his
mother drove
him to the session, and he threw up on the way.) Porcaro
and David
Paich, the son of the arranger Marty Paich, were later
part of the
session-man supergroup Toto, which though it smelled of
calculation was
essentially their high school garage band writ large. As
with Steely
Dan, the crisp perfection of their playing was
celebrated by some,
reviled by others, but they sold millions of albums, and
their
“Rosanna” still sounds good.
Disco, a producer’s music nonpareil
that favored live musicians and lots of them, was a last
blast of
general employment. “Everybody was working,” Jeff
Porcaro recalled in
1990 at a Modern Drummer roundtable, two years before
his untimely
death. “You worked four sessions a day, grooved, and you
stayed up.”
Then, around 1980, the machines started to take over —
the Roland TR808
and the Linn Drum and the Yamaha DX7 and a rapidly
evolving race of
gizmos that by acceptably simulating actual instruments
seemed then to
spell the end of work for everyone but keyboard players
and drum
programmers. “The more sounds they could synthesize,”
Lee Sklar
recalled, “the less guys they would call to do things.”
Older
players had gravitated to film and television work as
new blood arrived
and the rock world shifted beneath them. But soundtrack
work started to
dry up, too: In order to avoid union surcharges and
back-end reuse
payments to players — when a movie is released on video,
for instance —
film composers were going overseas to record, as they
had during the
1959 musicians’ strike, and often to Seattle, where
symphony players
seceded from the American Federation of Musicians in
order to attract
work. The nature of soundtracks also changed: With Easy
Rider,
filmmakers discovered that old pop records could do in
place of newly
recorded scores. (Which does benefit the musicians who
originally
played on the sides — for every new use, they’re paid
again for the
session.) Players began to leave town — some went to
Nashville, where
living musicians were still seen as essential; some just
went back
home. Drummer Chuck Blackwell opened a stained-glass
shop in Broken
Arrow, Oklahoma. Leroy Vinnegar moved to Portland and
became a
central figure in that city’s lively jazz scene.
Carol Kaye
started playing live again, as did Tommy Tedesco. “This
is the last
phase of my career,” he told me. “I want to go out how I
came in — as a
player.”
There are still session musicians making money
— even a living — in L.A., as there will be as long as
there are solo
artists in need of temporary backing and producers who
believe there’s
a commercial edge to be gained from a professional
touch, and still
something to be said for the human touch. If they are
not well-known to
the general public, their names are legend to the ranks
of readers of
Modern Drummer and Guitar Player and the alumni
newsletters of the
Berklee College of Music and the Musicians Institute of
Technology
(originally the Guitar Institute, and founded in 1977 by
session player
Howard Roberts). There are bassists Nathan East and
James “Hutch”
Hutchinson; perennially moonlighting keyboardists
Benmont Tench (from
Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers) and Rami Jaffee (the
Wallflowers); drummers
Vinnie Colaiuta, Danny Frankel and Don Heffington, each
with his
stylistic niche; violinist Lili Haydn; and so many more.
Nevertheless,
no one coming up today will challenge Blaine’s claim of
some 35,000
recorded tracks, or even bassist Lyle Ritz’s 5,000. The
factory runs on
different equipment and at a different pace. Hit records
are not
knocked off in an hour anymore, between dates for a
jingle and a
soundtrack. The manufacture of pop music has become
decentralized,
demystified and automated; this has not made music any
worse or better,
but it has changed the parameters of what it might
encompass, and how
it might be made, and by whom. Much of the most
interesting music today
involves no musicians at all — in the old-time sense of
someone who
could “play an instrument” — or just steals them from
ancient vinyl.
And consider this: For $139, considerably less than the
cost of hiring
him for a session, you can purchase a CD-ROM titled
Heavy Hitters
Greatest Hits, which includes ready-to-assemble samples
of Jim Keltner
playing “multiple dry/ambient hard, medium and soft
hits” on his very
own drums.
Still, we should not count the humans out. There is
nothing quite like what happens when real people — even
ones paid to be
there — play music in a room together. Even as
deceptively square a
piece of old suburban fun as “A Taste of Honey,” the
song I heard
playing on Tommy Tedesco’s kitchen radio that day,
rewards a close
listening; it may be pure product, but you might even
say it grooves.
The clean-shaven Latinisms of Herb Alpert’s trumpet,
Tedesco’s
light-handed guitar, Julius Wechter’s watery marimba,
the easy-walking
bass of Lyle Ritz, and Hal Blaine’s famous four-count
bass-drum intro —
his own invention — and tumbling shuffle-fills all
approach real
perfection: the Platonic ideal of . . . Hollywood pop
mariachi. It’s
played so well that the players disappear, taking with
them every trace
of effort, of ego, of distraction. All that’s left is
music.
Copyright ©
Robert Lloyd 2004 and 2011