Two More Interesting Wrecking Crew Article...

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Mr Bill

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And Here's Two More...

--Mr Bill

Boppadoppadoppadoppadang!
by John Payne



I’m hanging out by the pool at Hal Blaine’s Palm Springs pad, and he’s regaling me with stories about his life and busy times during the golden age of the L.A. session scene, when he played on over 8,000 songs and ghost-drummed on recordings by an estimated 175 bands. Blaine’s a genial and down-to-earth kinda guy, and between puffs on his ever-present stogie, he’s telling me what it was all about.

What it was all about, in part, was variety: Blaine’s name is attached to an almost bewilderingly diverse array of pop, rock, jazz, big band, television and film recordings circa late-’50s to mid-’70s. The merest sliver of names and projects involved would include the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas, Phil Spector, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, George Harrison, the Monkees, the Partridge Family, Three’s Company, Batman, The Love Bug, The Nutty Professor, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., John Denver, the Tijuana Brass, the Carpenters, Jan & Dean, Petula Clark, Neil Diamond, Steely Dan, the Muppets, and . . . forget it, man — Hal Blaine was simply everywhere.

How did he get there? Practice, practice — and preparation. Originally from Hartford, Connecticut, Blaine moved to L.A. as a music-obsessed teenager and, while soaking up celebrity vibes during the day as a Malibu beach cabin boy, played R&B-oriented dates with mostly black musicians in the San Bernardino area. Returning from his Army stint in Korea, he used the G.I. Bill to attend music school in Chicago, where he learned arranging, harmony, piano, voice and, crucially, how to sight-read any music put in front of him — a skill that paid off handsomely in his future studio work.

Back in L.A., Blaine began hustling jobs wherever he could get them, and although at age 25 he was already playing with Count Basie’s orchestra, he also scraped by doing sets in strip bars and scuzzy clubs like the Crossbow in the Valley. He could play whatever the musical setting required. “To this day,” he says, “I don’t care what the song is, I hear it and I can hum along, I can do countermelodies to it. Realize that these are not the kinds of things that every drummer can do.”

Blaine’s reputation as a quick study spread throughout the L.A. music and film business, the demand for his skills coinciding fortuitously with the growing popularity of rock & roll in the late ’50s and early ’60s. “When that so-called rock & roll thing started to happen, a lot of [movie studio session players] just refused; they didn’t like the words rock & roll, said ‘I won’t play that crap.’ You know, they were jazz people, and I never put jazz down, except that through the years you learn that jazz doesn’t pay anything.” He recalls the amazement in a music supervisor’s voice when the Wrecking Crew — as Blaine dubbed the top session players — ripped through the cues for a Love Bug session at Disney, having patiently endured a patronizing lecture on the fundamentals of film scoring.

“He says, ‘We’re going to slowly play a click track. Now, a click track is just something that keeps you —’ like we didn’t know. And as soon as we heard eight clicks — boppadoppadoppadoppadang! — we played the whole thing, 10 or 12 bars, something like that. And he says, ‘My god, I wish we’d have taken that! That was perfect. How did you guys do that?’ And Tommy Tedesco, may he rest in peace, one of the most famous lines in Hollywood, he said, ‘Well, sir, we practice a lot during the day.’”

The studio orchestra players, or “blue blazer guys,” as Blaine called them, thought the likes of the Crew were wrecking the biz. “They had no idea that we were graduates of music schools, that we could write or read or arrange. But within a very short time, they all wanted to be our best friends. They knew that we had more or less taken over the business.”



My interest in Blaine dates back to my admiration as a kid for the drumming of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson; I used to tell anybody who’d listen, Man, Dennis Wilson, that guy is the greatest! And he probably did play on the first couple of Beach Boys albums. But I came to find that it was Blaine whacking the tubs on subsequent records, including the masterpiece Pet Sounds. This was a revelation to me, that bands weren’t necessarily self-sufficient, that they had help in the studio, and sometimes onstage. But weren’t the band members’ egos bruised a bit? “Dennis Wilson loved it,” says Blaine. “He was on his boat while I was making records, and, you know, I was earning $35 in the afternoon, he was making $3,500 or $35,000 that night onstage.

“What happened was that a person like myself, or [fellow drummer] Earl Palmer, we were guys who could come in and do an album in four hours, or a double session, six hours — three hours and three hours. The guys that were in the groups, like the Byrds, they could rehearse for months and still not get in the studio and do it right. So I became everybody’s drummer, and the other guys did too, because we could go in and go bing bing bing, and everything was a No. 1, or at least a Top 10.”

Word of Blaine’s work, with Phil Spector and the Beach Boys in particular, spread to every producer in Hollywood, and more were coming from England, Nashville and New York, seeking the sound of the Wrecking Crew, whose touch seemingly turned records gold. Hitmakers like Bones Howe, Lou Adler and Snuff Garrett were regular customers for that sound, and getting it often involved Blaine’s polite instructions on proper mike placement for the full-on crazy rock effect. “Producers wanted me to come up with things,” he says, “and I learned very early on the word hook. If you listen to so many of those hit records, you’ll hear a hook that I did somewhere, drumwise, and it happened near the beginning, in the middle and in the end. And those were the hooks that made hit records of that era.” (An example of a Hal Blaine hook is the well-known snare-and-tom-tom triplet fills he plays on just about every Phil Spector song.)

In other words, Blaine wasn’t called upon to be a mere drumming machine, but rather a valued contributor — interestingly, valued most by producers we regard as creative geniuses. “On Pet Sounds,” he says, “Brian Wilson gave me carte blanche — ‘Whatever you think, whatever you feel, go ahead’ — and I was playing little plastic orange juice bottles, little clicks and bings and bangs and anything else I could grab. Brian used to come to the Spector sessions, at the Gold Star studios on Santa Monica and Vine — it’s not there anymore — and he loved the stuff we were doing. When I would suggest castanets in the middle of a rock & roll record, everybody would say, ‘This is not a Mexican record.’ But it’s just a time, it’s just rhythm.

“And that’s the way we used to make records — to make them feel good; if they felt good, we had a good record. Jingle bells in the middle of a rock & roll song? Nobody ever heard of that, and the other players were saying, ‘Are you crazy, what’re you talking about?’ And Phil says, ‘No, leave it that way!’

Still, preparedness remained the key to Blaine’s success: “I always had score paper with me, reams of it, and I rarely did a date where I didn’t write the part out; once in a while you’d fake something, but generally I knew all the stops and starts, where I would play a fill, etc.”

The work kept coming for Blaine and the Crew throughout the ’60s, but tapered off toward the mid-’70s. Blaine took it in stride, went on the road with John Denver, and eased himself into a slightly saner schedule of pet projects for the love of playing, such as working with his friend David Grisman on an album of traditional Jewish melodies called Songs of Our Fathers, and its companion volume, coming soon. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, has a permanent exhibit at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, and now the Smithsonian wants to acquire his famous Ludwig blue-sparkle drum set. You can learn more of his jam-packed story in his newly reissued book, Hal Blaine and the Wrecking Crew (Mixbooks), as well as a recent audiobook, Hooray for Hollywood (and Local 47) (available at www.halblaine.com). Or, best of all, you can spin your radio dial to the nearest classic rock station and savor the next Hal Blaine chart topper, which ought to be coming along any minute now.

Hal, you know what you accomplished is pretty phenomenal, don’t you?

“It’s amazing the way it all went,” he says, “and they were fun times, they really were. We knew we were making history. But trust me when I tell you, I never had that kind of ego. It was my work, and it was what I loved. Basically, I’m an accompanist — but I’m a great accompanist. And that was my feat in life.”

The Lady at the Bottom of the Groove
by Matthew Duersten



Carol Kaye’s earliest musical memory is of sitting alone in her father’s Model-A Ford outside of the Elks Club in Everett, Washington, listening to the strains of his Dixieland band inside. “The hair raised on my arms,” she recalls in her low, jazz-hipster voice. “I thought, ‘Ahhhhh, listen to that music! The power!’ That’s the same feeling I’d get later on a hit take.”

From her first session for Sam Cooke in 1957 to her last in 1969 for singer-composer Dorie Previn, Kaye’s arm hair had quite a workout. She is arguably the most recorded bassist in pop history, male or female, having played on over 10,000 dates (an estimated 40,000 songs). Her Latin-jazz style of hard-picked bass propped up songs of countless artists, from the Beach Boys (including the near-mythical Pet Sounds and Smile sessions) to Ike and Tina Turner, Phil Spector, the Monkees, the Ventures, Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra and Mel Torme, as well as such revered film composers as Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, Henry Mancini, Alfred and Lionel Newman, Bernard Herrmann, John Williams, Quincy Jones and Johnny Mandel.

Kaye started her career at age 15, playing guitar in mostly black L.A. nightclubs with greats like Teddy Edwards, Billy Higgins, Curtis Counce, Red Mitchell and Jack Sheldon. She was famous for her wit and her ability to piss with the bully boys of L.A. session work — many of whom were accomplished jazz players who came from hardscrabble Depression-era beginnings. This accounted for their ability to absorb the punishing schedules of the recording studio. (They called surf-rock dates “ditch diggers” because the music was so physically demanding; the Spector dates would involve 25 consecutive takes sans bathroom breaks.) “We’d drink 10, 12 cups of coffee a day,” Kaye says. “When I had my third baby, I was getting about two to three hours of sleep per night. I could literally sleep [in the studio] with my eyes open.”



L.A. Weekly: What were the studios like back then?

Carol Kaye: They weren’t the cleanest environments. Studios like United and Western had tile flooring. They were filled with all the cords and amps and microphones and gear, so the floor gets dirty, and sometimes your earphones got on the floor. You have five minutes to run to the bathroom, to get a candy bar, cigarettes, to go to the phones to get your next recording gig. You have about 40 people trying to do this at once. You’re in a hurry to get back, you forget that the earphones are down on the dirty floor, and you’d put ’em back on and you’d get one heck of an ear infection.



You were always photographed wearing sunglasses in the studio. Was that your style?

You do that because it’s so bright in the studio and you need sunglasses to read the music. They even wrote the music on green paper to avoid the glare of those neon lights. And you wore sweaters, because they kept the air-conditioning real cold. It didn’t matter what you looked like clotheswise. We all wore jeans, mostly. I remember we were on a lunch break from a Beach Boys gig . . . Leon [Russell] had been out in his new Cadillac with that long beard of his, and his robes and cowboy hat — even back in the ’60s he dressed pretty out-there. The cops stopped him and thought that he’d stolen the car. He’d left his wallet at the studio, so the cops followed him back. After Leon showed them his license, one cop looks at all of us: “Why the hell don’t y’all get a real job? You guys can’t be makin’ more than 20 bucks!” Everybody was real quiet, and as soon as they left, we all started laughing, ’cause we were making about $400!



How are cutting film and TV scores different from rock dates?

You had to read every note perfect, ’cause they didn’t roll that film back for anyone. You had to play while the film was going on, and you’re cutting the music in pieces. You’re recording with a click track going click click click in your headphones all the time. You also couldn’t fool around as much as you do on the record dates, it was very quiet and serious. When the conductor raised his baton, you were tuned up and ready to go. It was like being in the Army. Nelson Riddle would stand up on the podium with his baton and that ol’ stone face, except for he had this one eyebrow he’d raise. I used to like to make him raise it by doing something extra on the bass. I always had a tendency to be a little late, because I had instruments to lug around. Once I accidentally left my car in Alfred Hitchcock’s parking spot. Bad move. After that, the musicians were banned from the parking lot. The guys didn’t like me there for a while.



Your generation of session players helped the Musicians Union become stronger — but why did you work for Motown if it was non-union?

We liked the music. They had to hold me back on other dates, because they didn’t want the bass part to be too busy, but [Motown] was a place where I could play what I heard. We did a lot of those dates, even though they had the signs that they were not the legal demos that they said that they were. We did that for about two or three years, and then somebody snitched to the union — and I know who it was; Earl Palmer thought it was me, and I thought it was Earl for a while, too. Earl called me up and says, “Hey, listen to ‘Bernadette’! Those are our tracks!” I always thought that “My Girl” was done in Detroit, and yet the Hollywood Horns get credit on that, so go figure that one out. I’d say about 50 percent of the Motown hits were recorded out here in L.A. since around ’62. I don’t think they’ll ever get that straightened out, because Motown didn’t keep records.



Why is there still controversy over album credits?

Well, according to the Musicians Union records, the stuff we did from the ’60s are still the hottest-selling records in terms of numbers across the world. Many of those groups, like the surf groups or the Monkees, didn’t even do their own music. I think it’s right that people know the truth, but there’s a danger there, because the record companies are still enjoying the sales. Then someone comes along and says, “We’re the ones who created those parts” — would the record still sell? There’s a lot at stake there, and I don’t think it’s a popular notion among record companies to admit they used us. It hurt me to stick to my credits all these years, because people have attacked me for it. They can’t believe a blond gal with blue eyes could play. Listen to Mission: Impossible — you think I can’t play like a man, for crying out loud? I mean, there’s no bigger balls on a bass part than that!”
 
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