The Wrecking Crew at work. Photo courtesy of Hal Blaine.
The Wrecking Crew is the best-selling musical outfit you’ve never heard of. Oh, you’ve heard them – as the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Monkees, or the 5th Dimension. You’ve heard them behind Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, Simon and Garfunkel, and Sonny and Cher; as the building blocks of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound; as the fanfare to some of your favorite old TV shows. But in their prime, when their chops graced a huge chunk of the hit parade, you never saw their names on a record.
In short, they were session players, back when session players were anonymous and prolific and played just about every kind of music. The name, supposedly bestowed by drummer Hal Blaine, covers a free-floating assemblage of 50-odd musicians who worked on call in LA studios from the ’50s to the ’70s. Core members like drummers Blaine and Earl Palmer; guitarists Tommy Tedesco, Al Casey, and Bill Pitman; bassists Carol Kaye (the lone female in the group) and Joe Osborn; and keyboardists Don Randi and Mike Melvoin played on thousands of records, from the sublime (“Good Vibrations,” “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling”) to the ridiculous (the Alvin and the Chipmunks theme). A few, like Glen Campbell and Leon Russell, went on to solo success.
In the mid-’90s, when Tommy Tedesco was diagnosed with terminal cancer, his son, Denny Tedesco – a veteran filmmaker who has worked on doc projects all over the world – started work on a music documentary about the crew. Tommy died in 1997, but his kid kept shooting … and shooting … and shooting. The movie, also called The Wrecking Crew, has become the Great White Whale of music films – 12 years in the filming and editing, and five more in music-licensing limbo as Denny raised funds and negotiated discounts with labels and publishers to clear some 120 songs.
Since a long 2008 festival run that drew strong reviews and several awards, The Wrecking Crew has been under wraps, save for the occasional benefit screening. Now, with his million-dollar licensing mountain whittled down to a $250,000 hill, Tedesco is running a Kickstarter campaign to raise the final tranche of dollars to secure a theatrical, DVD, and on-demand release. With a December 21 deadline approaching, he talked to MFW about growing up the son of a session ace and – with surprising good humor for a guy talking about something that’s taken 17 years – finally finishing his labor of love.
MFW: Did you grow up knowing the folks in the Wrecking Crew? Were these the people who came to your backyard barbecues?
Denny Tedesco: I knew all the names. Occasionally people would have parties at the house or something. But Dad kept it pretty separate. The ones I remember were Snuff Garrett and Hal Blaine. Snuff because my dad had a real gambling fetish, he loved gambling. If there was gambling involved the guys were there. But other than that – he went to work 12, 14 hours a day. I didn’t see my dad play guitar at home until 1975, maybe. I was born in 1961. He didn’t play for himself until the mid-’70s.
He thought of it strictly as work?
Kind of. He kept his life separate. I always remembered him saying, “I have my musical friends, I have my gambling friends, I have my Italian friends” – meaning the guys from growing up. He played 14 hours a day. You’re playing all day long, everybody’s throwing music at you. The last thing he wanted to do [at home] was pick up a guitar. He just wanted to watch TV or go golfing – anything but [music].
Tommy Tedesco
Were you aware that he and his peers were playing on so many of the hit records of the time?
Not at all. I think the first time I saw my dad’s name on the credits was the Partridge Family, at 10, 11. Dad just went to work like any other dad. If you’re growing up with it, you don’t realize it’s different. Instead of a hammer or a saw or whatever in the trunk, he had a six-string acoustic and a Telecaster and an amp, a mandolin and a banjo. Those were the tools of his trade.
Did it bother your father or the other people in the group, the lack of recognition they had at the time?
No. Most of them grew up poor. The fact that they’re playing an instrument and getting paid for it – that’s just ridiculous. And not just getting paid for it – making a hell of a living. When you’re an Italian kid from Niagara Falls, New York, and you call home and say, “I’m playing with Frank this week” – all you have to say is “Frank,” you don’t have to say “Sinatra” – that’s pretty cool.
Do you know how many records he played on?
No. Thousands. Like my dad said – you asked if he ever got upset about stuff – he said, “I got paid really well. I made hundreds of hits, but I made thousands of bombs. I never gave the guy back the 25 dollars.”
Did he have a favorite?
I think he was proud of the work he did, but if he wanted to be remembered for something in terms of his playing and his capability, I think it would’ve been his movie work. When someone like [five-time Oscar-winning composer] John Williams is telling you, “Hey, in September I got two weeks on this film, it’s gonna be all guitar” – that’s when you know you’ve made it, when they’re telling you a month ahead of time about another film. He knows he’s in that position because it’s him. When he’s doing, say, [the] Batman [theme], or many of those rock ‘n’ roll things in the ’60s, there’s a number of people that could do that just as well.
You spent 12 years making the film proper. Do you think it was beneficial in any way that you ended up spending that much time on it?
Absolutely. It was very difficult to keep moving, but I kept moving. I just kept interviewing and interviewing people. Ten years after we started the project, my wife was concerned that we’d just made the most expensive home movie ever. We had nothing to show for it, except hundreds of thousands of hours of raw footage. It’s like having your dream home, but it’s not built yet. You got the property, you got the appliances, you got the fixtures, you got the wood, and you don’t have anything to show for it. Until you build it, you have no idea. So that’s what we ended up doing – hired an editor, got it done, got it into the festivals. I had pre-negotiated with all the labels and publishers, paid them for festival use, and kind of pre-told them what I was going to pay them on the back end. Well, no one was biting, even with the reviews and all the awards we had. Really amazing reviews, and amazing quotes from guys like Elvis Costello and Peter Frampton, who went on their own to see it. Everybody’s flipping out but no [distributor is] jumping on it because the music was so expensive.
So over the course of the film you made a decision to put that aspect off until you get the film out there, and once it’s out there people will want to come on board and deal with the licensing?
Yes. Some of it was being naive, but some of it was, I had no choice. I had one editor at one time who said what you really should do is license the music before you start cutting. With other films that would be smart, but with 100 songs you can’t do that. You don’t even have the labels talking to you. It wasn’t until the success in the festivals and literally taking the film to the labels or publishers in New York or LA, saying, “Let me show you what I’m doing” – that’s when they got excited. That’s when they said, “OK, we’ll help you out here.”
It seems like if you had tried to deal with all that stuff while you were filming it would have affected the finished product. You would have been going, “I can’t shoot this scene because I can’t get that song.”
Yeah. The other thing [with] the time it took – if this film, let’s say, was released 10 years ago it would not have been the film it became. One, a lot of interviews came after I thought I was done. I just got Leon Russell, who’s not in the film yet, but he will be. That happened this year. Leon didn’t want do the film; finally someone convinced him and I got a great interview with him. He’s a major part of that era, as a session player. There’s a lot of other things. In 2009 there was a whole article on music documentaries in one of the trade papers. Music docs had a very difficult time finding homes. They talked about Scorsese with the Stones film, struggling with it, and about Demme with his Neil Young film, struggling with it. And then they talked about another struggling director, Denny Tedesco, with the Wrecking Crew film. I went, “Oh my God, I’m on the same page! This is awesome!” [Laughs]
Carol Kaye and Bill Pitman. Photo courtesy of GAB Archive/Redferns.
Well, talk about silver linings – you’re emerging in a period when audiences seem much more receptive, not just to music docs, but to docs about unknown musicians.
Ex-actly. Sugar Man comes out last year, wins the Academy Award. 20 Feet from Stardom, Muscle Shoals – all these docs. The one before us, [about the] Funk Brothers, Standing in the Shadows [of Motown] – that came out halfway through my production. It was like, oh no! A friend said to me – we did all these documentaries in Africa – “How many lion films do we do? Don’t worry about it. There’s always another storyline to it.” So I didn’t worry about it. Like you said, maybe it’s the perfect timing. And the viral thing – right now I’m doing Kickstarter. The only reason I’m doing Kickstarter is I still have to raise the last $200,000 for the musicians themselves, for the union. I’ve got to pay that and then I’m free to go. If a distributor jumps in, great. If not, then I’ll do it on my own.
Why did you wait until now to go the Kickstarter route? It’s been around a few years now.
One, because if you don’t raise all the money on Kickstarter – I went for $250,000, and a year ago it was maybe $350,000 I needed – if you don’t raise all of it, you give it back.
You had to get the figure down to something you thought you could make.
Yeah. The other reason was, I didn’t know exactly what the musicians union was going to ask for. And that was one bill I always wanted to pay – it’s money in the musicians’ pockets. That’s what I wanted. If I paid the labels and not the musicians – that would have been horrible. I was always hoping I’d lose 30 pounds, that was the other reason [laughs]. I was hoping I’d lose 30 pounds to look good on camera.
Did you manage?
No. I got the number down to 250 instead of 350 but I kept the 30 pounds on.
Do you have any sense of how much it would cost to license all the music if you hadn’t gotten deals with the labels?
Oh, hundreds of thousands, maybe a million dollars. At one point, when I got to one of the labels in the early days, it was – I sent in my request, and they try to basically blow you off. It would have been like $10,000 a song. One of the songs I was asking for at that point was “Danke Schoen,” for four seconds. I thought, I ain’t paying $10,000 for “Danke Schoen.” No danke there. But the woman who gave me that full-grade price – later, when I went to New York to show that label the film, she pulled me in the office and apologized.
Denny Tedesco with some of his dad's axes.
What have you ended up paying for the music?
Probably a couple hundred thousand, in the end. It’s not that bad.
Did you ever think about just having fewer songs?
People would come up with ideas. Why don’t you do 20 songs instead of 100 songs? And maybe that would make an impact. The problem was, if I play, let’s say, the Supremes and the Temptations and Stevie Wonder and Smoky Robinson, you know instantly it’s Motown. But when you have Sinatra, the Beach Boys, 5th Dimension, the Byrds, and the Chipmunks, what’s the connection? That was the thing I was trying to show. Not only quality – it had to be quantity.
Would you consider your experience an example of perseverance for a music doc maker, or more of a cautionary tale?
You know, it’s very sweet that people write it as, my God, he stuck with it. I didn’t have a choice. Another filmmaker, a friend of mine, Ali Selim, he’s made some wonderful films, he said John Sayles said to him, “There’s a point when you cross the line where you went too far, and you’ve got to go for it.” I crossed that line in 2006. If I stop now – if I had bad reviews it’d be different. I’d be barking up a tree. But I never had bad reviews. I watched audiences around the world – and I’m not saying this because of the film, it’s this music – I’ve watched this music play in different cultures around the world, and everybody knows it, and it brings a smile to their face. It’s a bookmark in everybody’s life. That’s what the movie brings back, a lot of memories for people.
