Review by David Anthony
Recent treatments of popular music production have emphasized the behind the scenes operations of live performance and recordings. This was the theme of 20 Feet From Stardom, tracing the unheralded yet essential role played by background singers. The Wrecking Crew takes this further, by focusing upon an expert set of studio musicians whose contributions vastly improved the quality of popular music.
The Wrecking Crew is the brainchild of Denny Tedesco, son of guitar and mandolin master Tommy Tedesco. Using a mix of period footage and more recent interviews, he reconstructs the world of the sixties through the nineties and the debt owed to a small but highly skilled number of imaginative innovators. Focusing upon people like Hal Blaine, Bones Howe and composer Jimmy Webb, The Wrecking Crew opens up a largely unexplored dimension of how mass music got made at a pivotal period.
The process through which the chart-topping hits of what now is regarded as a golden age of music production was one which if the musicians are to be believed occurred with varying degrees of awareness. The general narrative put forth in the film is that a good deal of it was largely unconscious, driven mostly by the exigencies of work. Players worked incessantly, in multiple recording sessions then hit the bandstands at night. They were constantly on the move, doing violence to anything approaching the normalcy of family life – if indeed that exists anyway.
What The Wrecking Crew does well is take us into the lives of the players, the bassist Carol Kaye who gave us memorable lines line the beginning of Cher’s The Beat Goes On. Then there is tenor saxophonist Plas Johnson who made an indelible impression with his singular statement of Henri Mancini’s Pink Panther theme, changing history.
The Wrecking Crew demonstrates in sequence after sequence how much of an impact this surprisingly small set of studio musicians had upon the music industry. Everyone used them. They played in multiple styles and found ways of integrating genres and through their experience creating optimal conditions for the artists whose careers they buttressed to appear more fluent and capable than they were.
The value of this type of revisionist reconstruction cannot be overestimated. The Wrecking Crew dramatizes the degree to which things are not always as they seem.
See it and you will likely not experience recorded music in quite the same way again.
This is David H. Anthony.