The Wrecking Crew:  The Inside Story Of Rock & Roll’s Best Kept Secret, by Kent Hartman

Admittedly, this book’s contents were not a secret to me as I have for some time been familiar with the phenomenon of studio musicians and their craft in writing and performing on songs that were attributed to bands.  Within Rock & Roll there has been a noted anti-professional tendency among many of the fans that has conflicted with the professionalism that is inherent in the business side of the music industry, including studio performances.  This book’s contents, revealing the way that a group of mostly anonymous but immensely talented studio musicians performed on most of the biggest hits of the 1960’s that were made in Los Angeles, may be a surprise to some people, but for many people it will simply confirm their understanding of the dishonesty that is involved in a great deal of the music business in the way that performing credits and the resulting mechanical rights are often particularly shady business and that a great many bands who benefited from the professionalism of the studio musicians who were apart of the clique also known as the “the wrecking crew” were resentful about the way that their absence from studio recordings was a slight to their musical gifts.

This book is about 250 pages and nineteen chapters and mostly focuses on the experiences of Hal Blaine, Glen Campbell, and Cheryl Kaye as being the centers of a rotating group of studio musicians, as well as a detailed discussion of the studio sessions they appeared on for seminal 60’s hits.  The author begins with a prologue and then discusses the ways that these various studio musicians ended up in Los Angeles.  After that comes a discussion of the Limbo Rock (2), He’s A Rebel (3), The Little Old Lady (From Pasadena) (4), What I’d Say (5), I Got You, Babe (6), Mr. Tambourine Man (7), River Deep, Mountain High (8), Eve Of Destruction (9), Strangers In The Night (10), Good Vibrations (11), Let’s Live For Today (12), Up, Up, and Away (13), Classical Gas (14), Wichita Lineman (15), MacArthur Park (16), Bridge Over Troubled Water (17), (They Long To Be) Close To You (18), and Love Will Keep Us Together (19), among many other songs that the group was involved in.  Whether they were helping to write songs or going on the road to support acts like the Beach Boys, or laying low and performing music that would appear on the names of others, thanks to the push of people like Phil Spector wanting a clean and professional LA sound, this group was immensely influential in music history.

Over and over again, this book reminds the reader of the poignant nature of the music business.  The performers in this particular book, most of them obscure, made a very good living laying down the music for recording gigs at union scale while the music itself was promoted under a variety of names of artists and bands who served as the public face for the LA sound that they created.  And yet these people often had drug problems as well as terrible relationship drama and often seemed to be particularly unhappy people.  For all of their talent, the music industry just didn’t seem to be the sort of business where people found happiness and contentment, even if they were immensely creative people.  Indeed, the LA studio environment rewarded people who were creative but made sure that the creativity generally benefited other people, who had an image of creativity to keep unsullied from the realities of needing to depend on others to provide a clean sound to play on the radio.  And at the end of it all the wrecking crew was sidelined for other studio musicians after them, people like Andrew Gold and the members of Toto, who faced the same sort of anonymous life in performing music for artists and the same hostility from those who wished to deny the importance of talent and ability and professionalism to the rock & roll and pop music scene.