Glen Campbell and the Wrecking Crew

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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Glen Campbell didn’t play on “8 Miles High,” but the suggestion isn’t so ridiculous. Campbell was, after all, a steady member of the Wrecking Crew, for several years.

The Wrecking Crew was a loose association of veteran L.A. session musicians that typically included Hal Blaine on drums, Carol Kaye on bass, Leon Russell on keyboards and Campbell (among others) on guitar. And while none of them played on “8 Miles High,” several members of the Wrecking Crew DID play on other Byrds tracks (Blaine, for instance, played drums on “Mr. Tambourine Man”).

Mind you, I’m NOT trying to suggest that the Byrds weren’t genuine musicians! Some bands get very huffy at the revelation that session men appeared on their records, as if they’re being accused of fraud. To be sure, there were pre-fab bands in the 1960’s and 1970’s who didn’t really play their own instruments (the Monkees and Partridge Family, e.g.). But even when we’re talking about truly talented bands of serious musicians, the fact remains, it was VERY common in the 1960’s for record companies to replace actual band members with session men during recording sessions.

Imagine the year is 1965. Capitol Records has just discovered and signed a new band called Sheldon and the Schmendricks, who’ve gotten a lot of attention in their home town with a song called “Bar Mitzvah Blues.” Execs think it could be a #1 single with a little luck.

They bring the band into the studio to make the record, and one thing becomes clear: while all 5 boys in the band are real musicians, none has any experience working in a studio, and their technique is pretty sloppy. Fact is, what sounds just fine in bars or night clubs or concert halls can sound all wrong on a recording, where, very often, “less is more.”

Now, what Capitol Records REALLY wants is to get the single recorded FAST, and get the band out on tour to promote it. So, they can either let Sheldon and the Schmendricks putter around in the studio for a few weeks until they’ve mastered studio technique… OR, they can hire Hal Blaine, Carol Kaye, Leon Russell and Glen Campbell to come in and play the instruments. In the end, in all likelihood, Sheldon provides the vocals, and the rest of his bandmates sit around looking disappointed, while hired professionals do the recording.* The Wrecking Crew would get the track recorded in 2 takes, and the single could be pressed immediately. Then Sheldon and the boys would hit the concert tour circuit, promoting “Bar Mitzvah Blues.”

That kind of thing happened all the time- and while Glen Campbell did NOT play on “8 Miles High,” people might be very surprised at some of the tracks he and the Wrecking Crew DID play on! Heck, Carol Kaye played for everyone from Phil Spector’s girl groups to Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention!

  • Hal Blaine says he sometimes felt sorry for the kids he replaced in the studio, but would console them by saying “Look at it this way- I’m making $50 an hour playing this song in the studio. You’re going to make $50 thousand a week playing it live.”
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OMG I LOVE THE SCHMENDRICKS!!!

Sorry - somebody had to do it, so it might as well be me :slight_smile:

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Link to the article: Did Glen Campbell play lead guitar on “Eight Miles High”?

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The problem is that the Byrds were indeed one of the groups that got very huffy when people reminded them that “Mr. Tambourine Man” was made mostly with session musicians, and compounded that with the hypocrisy of putting out “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star.”

The Monkees, of course, played all their own instruments from their third album on, and Mike Nesmith was playing on his own compositions from the beginning, IIRC.

The use of session musicians wasn’t confined just to America, either. Ringo was lucky that it was his take rather than a session drummer’s on one of the first Beatles singles. And Jimmy Page once said that he had played on 50% of all the hit singles on the British charts in the mid-1960s.

And let’s not forget Motown’s Funk Brothers or the excellent documentary on their contributions that was released in 2002.

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I loved the Funk Brothers documentary! But there’s a BIT of a difference between the Funk Brothers and the Wrecking Crew. Motown’s acts were almost always VOCAL groups, after all. It doesn’t hurt the reputation of the Supremes, the Marvelettes, the Miracles or the Temptations to reveal that hired session men played the instruments on their records, because those groups never pretended to be musicians, only singers. But when guys who are supposed to be drummers, bassists or guitarists are replaced by session men, it’s a blow to their pride, and it’s embarrassing.

Thing is, though, when a rock musician was replaced, it usually wasn’t because he was a BAD musician- it’s just that he’d cut his teeth in bars and night clubs, where subtlety was neither necessary nor desirable. In a night club, it’s fine for a drummer to settle into a loud, steady “boom-BAM-boom-boom-BAM.” But if he tries to do the same thing in a studio, his drumming is liable to overwhelm the song. That’s why a guy like Hal Blaine got so much work- unlike many very capable rock drummers, he understood the value of restraint in the studio.

I’ve heard bassist Tony Levin (who’s been both a much sought-after session man AND a steady member of bands like King Crimson) talk about this very topic. He says that, early in his career, if he spent more than a few months doing studio work, his live playing became flat, and that if he spent more than a few months touring and playing live, his studio playing suffered, and he couldn’t figure out why. Today, of course, he DOES understand why, and tries very hard to maintain a workable balance of concert and studio work, so that his skills in BOTH areas stay sharp.

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Wasn’t Glen Campbell (together with Seals and Crofts) part of the group “The Champs” who played the song “Tequila?”

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In a way. They all joined later, after “Tequilla.” None of them were on the record.

http://www.vh1.com/artists/az/champs/bio.jhtml

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Nothing to add here; just wanted to say that I’m finding this bit of rock n’ roll lore quite fascinating! Thanks, astorian and Exapno, for the education into how the music I grew up on 40 years back was actually made.

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“I loved the Funk Brothers documentary! But there’s a BIT of a difference between the Funk Brothers and the Wrecking Crew. Motown’s acts were almost always VOCAL groups, after all. It doesn’t hurt the reputation of the Supremes, the Marvelettes, the Miracles or the Temptations to reveal that hired session men played the instruments on their records, because those groups never pretended to be musicians, only singers. But when guys who are supposed to be drummers, bassists or guitarists are replaced by session men, it’s a blow to their pride, and it’s embarrassing.”

It’s worth pointing out that the idea that a music group included people like bassists and drummers was still pretty new in the mid-60s.

Back in the 50s the vast, vast majority of groups were vocal groups. When people bought a record by the Coasters or the Drifters or the Cadillacs, nobody imagined that the people playing bass or drums on the disc were part of the group. (Some vocal groups did have guitarists as part of their official lineup, though, like the Moonglows and the 5 Royales.)

Most of the early rockers were billed as singles. (Early Crickets records were an exception, but that’s because Buddy Holly was using the name as a ruse to avoid obligations to another label.) Rock groups as such didn’t really come into the fore until the surf music craze of the early 60s. Since these were mostly instrumental groups, people did begin to make a connection between the musicians and the group. If the Ventures weren’t the instrumentalists who played on the record, who were they?

Then along came the Beatles, who mostly wrote their own songs and mostly played on their own albums. Their staggering popularity combined with the emerging do-it-yourself ethos from the folk movement laid down a new blueprint for rock bands. Now a real rock band had to write their own songs and play their own instruments. This is the ideology that would dog the Monkees when they hit the airwaves.

But only six or seven years previous no one would have cared that the Monkees didn’t write songs or play on their records. What people would have complained about in 1960 is the fact is that they couldn’t sing worth a damn.

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Well, yes and no.

The reason that rock music has been so successful is that it is an amalgamation of every type of music that came before it.

Doo wop, teen idols, chick singers, white boys playing black music, girl groups, vocalists, and gospel-descended singing teams certainly represent one strain of what would become rock.

Just as important, however, were the roots that came from country & western, rhythm & blues, and folk music. In all these segments of the industry the notion of a group as a complete music making ensemble was strong and pervasive.

You can take anyone from Bill Haley and the Comets to D.J. Fontana, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black backing Elvis on almost all his breakthrough hits to Ike Turner’s pre-Tina band the Kings of Rhythm to the Carter Family to the Weavers to find early examples. There were also a million instrumental groups recording rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s before the Ventures got started. (Technically they recorded as The Marksmen in 1959 but we’ll ignore that.)

Session musicians can be found back as far as you want to go in virtually every genre of popular music (heck, you can even find them in jazz at a certain point) but “the idea that a music group included people like bassists and drummers was still pretty new in the mid-60s” is just wrong in all sorts of ways.

While there is a grain of truth in that groups were not the norm until the mid-60s, that still ignores the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons, both of which started in 1962, the whole surf music genre that preceded the Beach Boys, Cliff Richards and the Shadows in the UK, and the proverbial more.

So, a little bit of yes, but a whole lot of no.

P.S. Need I say that I love The Monkees? Them’s fightin’ words.