'Wrecking Crew' is a tribute to legacy of unknown musical giants

When he was a kid, Denny Tedesco knew that his father was a professional musician.

He didn't understand until later what that really meant.

Tedesco's dad was Tommy Tedesco, one of the Wrecking Crew -- a group of session musicians in the right place at the right time, namely Los Angeles in the 1960s during an explosion of mass-produced rock 'n' roll. Many came from jazz or big-band backgrounds. They were young. They were willing to experiment and jam. And they were willing to work around the clock.

On days off from school, Tedesco occasionally went to work with his dad. It wasn't exactly like seeing history unfold.

"The earliest moments I remember of any sessions was (the theme to) Green Acres. I remember sitting in the booth, watching the conductor swinging his arms up and down," he said. "It's boring to watch music being made. Don't forget -- they're not hits at that point. You didn't know that he did anything different. Growing up, it was just like, Dad was a musician."

As an adult Denny Tedesco got the appeal of his father and the rest of the Wrecking Crew's story -- the largely unknown, under-credited and sometimes un-credited master music machine that backed the soundtrack of a generation, plus.

When his father was found to have terminal lung cancer in 1995, Tedesco knew it was time to get that story down.

The result is The Wrecking Crew, a labor of love and an ode to these session musicians' careers.

Much of the film has footage of four Wrecking Crew musicians sitting around a table, reminiscing over the heydays. The foursome includes Tommy Tedesco, drummer Hal Blaine, saxophonist Plas Johnson and Carol Kaye, the rare female member of the Wrecking Crew, a feisty, then horn-rimmed glasses-wearing bass player who played the thick, rubbery line in the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations."

It took Denny Tedesco more than 10 years to finish the film (it premiered at the 2008 South by Southwest Music Festival). He worked on a shoestring budget and negotiated complicated music rights to get permission to use 131 music cues -- the film is littered with hit after hit touched by Wrecking Crew -- "Up, Up and Away," "These Boots Were Made For Walkin,'" "Good Vibrations," "The Beat Goes On," "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Windy," "California Dreamin'."

"Here, you have to show that it was a factory," Tedesco said. "That's the point, good or bad. Some of it was crap, and some of it was wonderful, but it was quantity."

Because his dad was basically a freelancer, the hunger for work never really went away. When the family went on vacation, Tedesco's answering service -- which helped book his gigs -- would tell studios that he "wasn't available." One job meant everything.

Denny Tedesco filmed the scene before his father died in 1997. His inspiration was Woody Allen's 1984 movie, Broadway Danny Rose, a story told in flashback through the conversation of a group of comedians eating lunch. "I call it the quartet without instruments," Tedesco said. "It's not an interview. It's more like I'm looking in on them."

But he did land interviews with a who's who of musical minds of the 1960s on the West Coast, many of whom owe the sound of their albums to the Wrecking Crew -- Micky Dolenz of the Monkees, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, Cher and Nancy Sinatra.

The Wrecking Crew did movie soundtracks, television themes and jingles, too, in addition to albums, thousands in all. Sometimes they recorded music, and studios would put together a band of photogenic kids to go on the road posing as the musicians, like the Marketts. And the Wrecking Crew was well paid. But credits were harder to come by.

"We just didn't think about credits," Hal Blaine said in a recent interview. "I would go just down to the union each week and pick up my checks. The thing about musicians is that they love to play music. They don't think about the business end of music."

"They would walk into a pop sound and play it," Dick Clark says in the film. "They could do rhythm and blues. They could do soul music. I guess they could have done classics if they had to. But they had the magic touch."

Maybe one of the reasons they left the names off was that the same musicians played on so many people's records, it would have been an embarrassment if anybody had ever listed it."

No one even seems certain even about where the name "Wrecking Crew" came from. Blaine says that the name came from the older, established session musicians, who said they were going "to wreck the business."

They might not have wrecked the business, but they had ideas. Blaine, now 80, played the congas on Simon and Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson." For "The Boxer," he said he came up with the idea of throwing snow chains on a concrete floor.

Some works -- the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, for instance -- were collaborations. Others weren't. Tommy Tedesco played on all of the Fifth Dimension's albums and never met them, Tedesco said.

"That was their job, so it was like they never knew that they should have been given credit, or thought about it. They had such respect from their peers. He said years later … he wished he did get credit, if only for the reason to show his kids and his grandkids."