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Wrecking Crew musicians get a long-deserved encore in excellent documentary

Decades removed from their heyday, the Wrecking Crew still functions as a litmus test for pop music passion. Musicians and pop aficionados know all about the collective of crack studio musicians who played on seemingly every 1960s rock and pop hit that didn't come out of Motown or Stax. Meanwhile, the casual listener has heard them hundreds of times without knowing it.

Such are the spoils of relative anonymity. Fortunately, at a time when ringer session players have largely gone the way of eight-track tapes, the Crew is now getting some due.

A killer documentary, The Wrecking Crew, comes out Friday after years of wrangling for music rights and playing festivals, including the 2008 Dallas Video Festival, in unfinished form. The film arrives on the heels of Kent Hartman's fine 2012 book, also called The Wrecking Crew. The Crew is also featured prominently in the upcoming Beach Boys drama Love & Mercy, which plays at the South by Southwest film festival next week.

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It's a fantastic story: A loosely connected group of musicians, many of them trained at conservatories, takes Los Angeles by storm and plays on hundreds of hit records, generally without receiving credit (they did get paid pretty well).

Glen Campbell, with Hal Blaine, was an excellent guitarist and one member of the Wrecking...
Glen Campbell, with Hal Blaine, was an excellent guitarist and one member of the Wrecking Crew who went on to achieve fame as a solo artist.(Hal Blaine / NYT)

The studios and the best producers, including Brian Wilson, Phil Spector and Lou Adler, knew what was up. They knew the youngsters forming rock bands couldn't always play well enough to hack it in the studio, and they knew whom to call in a pinch. "In a sense, you couldn't blame the labels," says Wrecking Crew pianist Don Randi by phone. "You didn't want people to know that these kids couldn't play."

The Wrecking Crew could play. A very small sampling of the songs they blessed: The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" (and the Pet Sounds album). The Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin'." Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson." Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep Mountain High." The Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man." The Crystals' "Then He Kissed Me." Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night." The list goes on. (Which reminds me: Sonny and Cher's "The Beat Goes On.")

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A couple of them - Glen Campbell and Leon Russell - broke out and became above-the-line stars. The bulk of the Crew consisted of artists like drummer extraordinaire Hal Blaine, bassist-guitarist Carol Kaye and guitarist Tommy Tedesco, whose son, Denny, directed the new documentary. Hartman's book describes "a small, tight-knit core group of about a couple of dozen who played on a hugely disproportionate share of the hits."

"They were stars when they got to the studio, and Nancy Sinatra or Brian Wilson looked at them like they were the stars."

They all knew how to deliver what was needed in a three-hour session (every minute more meant overtime pay), and they were all among the best at their instruments.

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In Love & Mercy, a young Brian Wilson (played by Paul Dano) introduces the rest of the Beach Boys to Blaine (Johnny Sneed) in the studio. "This is Hal Blaine," he says. "He's the best drummer playing right now, and nobody has heard of him." That sums up the Wrecking Crew pretty well. The people who mattered worshiped them. The general public couldn't recognize them on the street.

It's hard to find much bitterness among the surviving members. "I just wanted to reach my musical heights," Blaine says by email. "I was one of the lucky ones. For me it was like falling into a vat of chocolate."

"They were stars when they got to the studio, and Nancy Sinatra or Brian Wilson looked at them like they were the stars," says Denny Tedesco. (His dad died in 1997.) "They were thrilled to have them in the their band. They got the love among the musicians."

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The name-brand musicians who were relegated to the sidelines by the Crew's prowess? They didn't always share that love. In Hartman's book, Michael Nesmith of the Monkees reaches a boiling point over not being able to play on the group's recordings. He punches a hole in a hotel room wall during a tense business meeting. The only Byrd to play on the hit "Mr. Tambourine Man" was guitarist Jim (later Roger) McGuinn. This didn't sit well with the rest of the band, including a young man named David Crosby. Egos were bruised; classics were recorded.

The Wrecking Crew got its name from Blaine, after some of the old-school, stuffier musicians around town complained these T-shirt-and-jeans-wearing whippersnappers were wrecking the business. That was then. Today it's hard to imagine the history of rock without them.

The Wrecking Crew

The Wrecking Crew wasn't a group so much as an assortment of L.A. studio musicians who played on a staggering number of '60s and early '70s hits. There's no exact number of members; in his book The Wrecking Crew, Kent Hartman puts their core number at about two-dozen. Among the most prominent members: Drummers Hal Blaine and Earl Palmer, bassist/guitarist Carol Kaye, keyboard players Al De Lory and Leon Russell, and a future guitar/singing star named Glen Campbell.

They recorded literally hundreds of hits for some of the era's biggest artists. How big? Touch image below for a very small sampling.