Battle of the LA Session Musos: the Wrecking Crew vs. the LA Mafia

Ha, iTunes just shot me a Zevon album on shuffle!

Yeah, Don and Glenn and sometimes Joe all over those albums, but mostly as guests, not forming the core (session) band of the usual suspects.

Steve Lukather and Larry Carlton ... they were top session cats but not Mellow Mafia, no?

struggling to think of anything the Mellow Mafia (much better name there, yes duh - and actually coined by Kortchmar it appears?) did that is as iconic as Be My Baby or God Only Knows but surely there's something

I wanna say "Running On Empty," maybe?

but mostly as guests,

Yeah, that's what I mean. They're obviously "guest stars!"

Yeah, I thought you meant as session guys, a la backing Ronstadt.

xpost Hmm. Waddy co-wrote both "Edge of Seventeen" and "Werewolves of London" ...

one of the differences - which maybe makes this more difficult than I anticipated - seems to be that the LA Mafia guys didn't play as often as a full unit. Instead, they were often brought in as ringers or on certain tracks to augment/back up bands/artists that already functioned as instrumentalists. So instead of a situation with the Wrecking Crew where they literally played everything on a given track, except for the vocals, with the LA Mafia they might get used more piecemeal (I suppose there are exceptions to this like Linda Ronstadt and idk Carly Simon or something)

when i think of wrecking crew i think of a lot of early 60s dance songs and pop shite which isnt that good. when i think of la mafia i think of am gold which is more my speed but also became terrible. i pick the latter bcuz of lee sklar's beard.

It annoyed me a little that the Wrecking Crew documentary kind of made it sound like the decline of the Wrecking Crew was the end of the studio musician era, failing to mention that anyone else came along after them.

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Thursday, September 17, 2015 12:52 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I forget who it was, it might've been Blaine, but one of the Wrecking Crew musicians did say something in the doc like, "Well, we replaced the older guys, and then we got replaced by younger guys."

that doc was shitty as fuck

yeah I couldn't finish it, I knew most of that shit already anyway

yeah, i watched half of it the other day and thought it was awful as well. but in general i'm not a fan of feel-good documentaries.

Rubble Kings was p feelgood, you guys should watch that

I would have liked a doc on Carol Kaye alone, because she is a character.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q15LqTowvhA

carol is apparently very against the doc and its makers. she basically says the "wrecking crew" didn't really exist and they all hated each other. but she seems like a kook too, so who knows.

She's made so many nutball claims over the years it's hard to keep them straight -- the most famous one being that she, and not James Jamerson, played on all the classic Motown hits.

yeah like steve gadd saying he played on the beatles early stuff ... maybe you do so many sessions you end up just thinking you played on all of them.

carol is against EVERYTHING. she even lashed out against the woman that played her in love & mercy lol. i suggest following her on fb she lets out some amazing insane rants. here's her thoughts on the doc:

https://facebook.com/permalink.php?id=168440386566810&story_fbid=281253788618802

or this https://m.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=168440386566810&story_fbid=281253788618802

that doc was shitty as fuck

― chaki (kurt schwitterz), Thursday, September 17, 2015 12:29 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah I couldn't finish it, I knew most of that shit already anyway

― Οὖτις, Thursday, September 17, 2015 12:40 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, i watched half of it the other day and thought it was awful as well. but in general i'm not a fan of feel-good documentaries.

― 1996 ball boy (Karl Malone), Thursday, September 17, 2015 12:44 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, I was pretty let down by it. It was so hodgepodge and thoughtless, and I generally hate that common style of music docs now where it's just a bunch of fast-cut hyperbolic quotes with little structure.

yeah like steve gadd saying he played on the beatles early stuff

Ha, yeah, that was Bernard Purdie. He actually did overdub some tracks onto Hamburg-era recordings for a quickie Tony Sheridan/Beatles release on Atlantic, which he seems to have conflated with playing on all the early singles.

Their resumes are already so amazing that padding them with made-up stuff is kind of baffling.

whoah @ carol rants

Steve Gadd thinks he played on all of the Purdie stuff.

Hal Blaine's self-promotion with his stupid "wrecking crew" monicker

Invite her to ilxor, imo.

my eyebrows did go up at the scene w Blaine, Kaye and some of the others where they were talking about how she was just "one of the guys" in the same breath as saying "if there were sexual harrassment suits back then she would be millionaire"

xxp lol haha, yeah got those mixed up. but yr right, it's crazy to be the actual drummer who played on like a million clssics and still be like: "fuck you, i'm the drummer for the beatles!"

"Ringo doesn't even know what a fucking aeolian cadence even is!"

my eyebrows did go up at the scene w Blaine, Kaye and some of the others where they were talking about how she was just "one of the guys" in the same breath as saying "if there were sexual harrassment suits back then she would be millionaire"

― Οὖτις, Thursday, September 17, 2015 1:11 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Similarly the weird tension btw Plas Johnson and I think Tedesco on getting credit for the work, that was almost a storyline that could have gone somewhere

He has completely slandered me, changing his story why I "don't like his film" with all his showings, and lying about a supposedly funny but demeaning incident in the film about me, which NEVER took place, as well as using US to raise money and saying it takes "millions" to license recordings (not true - where is the money going while he burns it in expensive-taste spendings on limousines, and parties etc.? the non-profit status doesn't mean Denny is not getting the money at all) and soon the other musicians found out like I did, and are angry also - they all know now it's a scam too, that we were ALL USED as a backdrop for Tommy and Hal Blaine....imo, this is a continuation of the lowlife and limited jealousy viewpoints of Tommy Tedesco and also of Hal Blaine who Denny calls his "dad" (he said he never really knew his dad Tommy) -- this is the Hal Blaine-Tommy Tedesco story not about us at all and is totally skewered.

those carol kaye rants are insane! did she watch the same movie i did? she was all over it! and it wasn't slanderous toward her at all. and i didn't notice any leaning toward hal blaine. i guess i only watched about 3/5th of it, maybe the last section was all about blaine or something? wtf

Carol's Amazon review of a Wrecking Crew book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RG9T6V6WQF98O/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1250030463#RG9T6V6WQF98O

summary : avoid the revisionism and just enjoy the grooves.

Yeah, I didn't initially notice that the review resulted in 17 pages of discussion.

a little bit of david lindley and waddy wachtel sprinkled in there.

― tylerw, Thursday, September 17, 2015 12:14 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wish there was a solo album called A Soupçon of Watchell so I could post it in the i got my own album to do thread

lol seems like he should have a solo album just called WAD. think of the cover art potential.

i like carol's solo album fwiw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pk2qea3ReY

Waddy Watchell - Shootin' My Wad (cover is him holding a Strat like a rifle)

James Taylor's discography seems really dominated by these guys

Waddy Watchell - Shootin' My Wad (cover is him holding a Strat like a rifle)
it is a crime that this album doesn't exist

I could watch this all day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOWdp1sOxvA

Given his past legal issues, it might be ill-advised.

xp

If we're going by discographies, Wrecking Crew gets the nod easy - a session band is only as good as the music it's given, or the producer/arranger that directs it. Still, I'd certainly choose the mellow mafia's a-team if I were making my own record - the latter actually honed their chops on rock and funk and soul. Most of the Wrecking Crew guys honed their chops on big-band jazz, and the difference in feel is pretty stark - you can hear why so many of them were confined to Carpenters records and TV show themes after James Brown transformed the sound of the rhythm section forever.

Interesting that Glen Campbell is the only hotshot among them that made it out of the studio and as a solo acti.

Nilsson?

dunno if he counts really

leon russelll for sure

yeah that was gonna be my other one but I wasn't sure how huge of a star he really was (not glenn campbell level I would think?)

Dr. John is sometimes mentioned as a member of the Wrecking Crew, too, but I'm not sure what sessions he actually played on. He doesn't play on any Beach Boys stuff that I'm aware of, for instance.

are you thinking of Leon Russell?

i get those two hoodoo voodoo beardo weirdos confused sometimes

Dr. John def did LA session work with the Wrecking Crew

he talks about it in "Under a Hoodoo Moon" although iirc details were scant on particular songs/sessions - primarily R&B stuff I would imagine

nutso even

yeah! makes sense, but it's gotta be one of the weirdest records to ever be recorded there.

It's worth noting that, just like Dr. John, the most prominent players on that record were New Orleans natives who'd relocated to L.A. for studio work.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

me in high school / early 20s would have voted Wrecking Crew easy but somewhere in my mid-twenties I really developed a taste for that slick LA sound...something about how these dudes sound like they really wanna showboat but always (usually) rein it in just enough

which crew will win?????

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

xp I think that's the mark of a quality session pro; the ability to find that balance. I said before that the sound of the wrecking crew was hard to identify.. Thinking about it, I don't think I could necessarily distinguish the mafia from their 70s sessioneer peers (although I suspect they wrote the book w/r/t that sound).

I had another totally brilliant thing to say but I lost it

don't think I'd ever seen this before - in-studio footage of Lee Hazlewood recording with the Wrecking Crew including James Burton and Hal Blaine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDW2K4zxkXw

mellow mafia was basically just Danny Kortchmar, Craig Doerge, Leland Sklar, and Russ Kunkel, right? that's what wiki tells me, with a little bit of david lindley and waddy wachtel sprinkled in there.

Not sure about the others, but Russ Kunkel played on “(Listen To The) Flower People” and was the drummer in that scene.

Where do Graydon, hey, and dacosta fit in ?

Not sure about the others, but Russ Kunkel played on “(Listen To The) Flower People” and was the drummer in that scene.

There's a great scene in the Hired Gun doc where Graydon and one of the Toto guys breaks down Graydon's guitar solo for Steely Dan's "Peg". My big takeaway was that one of the guys (the Toto guy, I think) copped to being so anally repressive that they couldn't take a shit without first removing all their clothes.

That was Graydon, iirc, with Lukather. And I think the story was about them whipping up a hit for ... George Benson? Which is super funny, having Lukather, one of the most talented guitarists, playing piano for Graydon, one of the most talented guitarists, writing a song for Benson, one of the most talented guitarists.

Kortchmar & Co. AKA The Section:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/the-section-knights-of-soft-rock-233728/
Fave thing I remember from this: Carole King's junkie caveman hubbie (def post-Goffin) punching out DK,
who had just come off stage and gotten too much applause or sump'n.

Also-- much more recently, they had their own record & tour:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/immediate-family-session-veterans-cruel-twist-1012555/

Oh yeah, and they got back with Carole and James---I wrote this preview when they played Columbus OH, in 2010:
Carole King & James Taylor
Carole King & James Taylor performed at L.A.'s formidably hip
Troubadour club in 1969, when veteran songwriter King as was new to
the spotlight as Taylor. They returned in 2007 with the Section, the
backing band that helped define 70s soft rock. This warmly adept
concert, documented on Live At The Troubadour, inspired Tayor & King's
current tour with the Section and Cleveland's Arnold McCuller, whose
voice has accompanied Taylor's for thirty years.
05/30 @ The Schottenstein Center, 555 Arena Dr.
7:30 p.m.

Trying to remember the name of the unreleased project some of these guys did with Billy Cowsill.

Bridey Murphy. All the performing Cowsill brothers were involved, apparently, but only Billy ate the tape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh2KTuHuAxo

walls with sound

looololol

s

also RIP Shakey (jks jks jk ;)

come back to ilm imo

Feeling the urge to spam the board with another story about Steve Lukather’s guitar teacher Jimmy Wyble, especially since I ran into another one of student’s this weekend. Will just link this website I don’t think I’ve linked before: https://rjacobson.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/irec-and-miss-jimmy-wyble/

I’ve heard more than one story about some ambitious guitarist in their early years calling up some famous guitar name like Barney Kessel for lessons and the response being: “I don’t teach. Call Jimmy!” *click* *dialtone*

Update! The xpost Section, who've got their own albums to do as The Immediate Family, are ba-a-ack---and so are Carole and James! (good timing for her, after "Natural Women" so striking in Respect : now I enjoy it even more than the Aretha biopic's title song):
THE IMMEDIATE FAMILY MEMBERS
DANNY KORCHMAR, RUSS KUNKEL, LELAND SKLAR
TO BE FEATURED IN THE UPCOMING DOCUMENTARY
“CAROLE KING & JAMES TAYLOR: JUST CALL OUT MY NAME”
TO PREMIERE ON CNN AND HBO MAX IN LATE 2021

THE BAND MEMBERS WILL ALSO BE PERFORMING WITH CAROLE KING AT THE ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME INDUCTION CEREMONY

THE IMMEDIATE FAMILY’S 2021 TOUR KICKS OFF ON NOVEMBER 3 IN SUPPORT OF THEIR NEW SELF-TITLED ALBUM



October 26, 2021 -- Supergroup The Immediate Family have a full schedule this Fall/Winter with bandmates Danny Kortchmar, Russ Kunkel and Leland Sklar’s participation in the documentary Carole King & James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name, premiering on CNN and HBO Max and also performing with Carole King at her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony on October 30. The band then heads out on their national tour in support of their new album The Immediate Family released on Quarto Valley Records.

Prior to forming The Immediate Family, Kortchmar, Kunkel and Sklar have worked together since the early '70s as the legendary ensemble “The Section” backing up James Taylor and Carole King on The Troubadour Reunion Tour as well as appearing on Taylor and King’s various albums.

The Immediate Family which also includes Waddy Wachtel and Steve Postell, will be embarking on their national tour on November 3. Some of the stops include San Juan Capistrano, CA (The Coach House), Agoura Hills, CA (The Canyon Club), and New York City (The Society of Ethical Culture). The band has just released their latest album, The Immediate Family, which debuted at #6 on Billboard’s Blues chart and features the single “Fair Warning.” Complete list of tour dates below. For more information on The Immediate Family and to explore their new merch store, visit: www.immediatefamilyband.

2021/2022 Tour
November 3 - San Juan Capistrano, CA @ The Coach House
November 6 - Santa Barbara, CA @ Lobero Theatre
November 7 - Agoura Hills, CA @ Canyon Club
November 14 - South Windsor, CT @ Clinic & Concert
November 16 - Norwalk, CT @ Wall Street Theatre
November 17 - Yarmouth, MA @ The Music Room
November 18 - Derry, NH @ Tupelo Music Hall
November 20 - New York, NY @ Concert Hall at NY Society for Ethical Culture
November 21 - Ardmore, PA @ Ardmore Music Hall
February 14-18 - The Rock Legends Cruise IX
February 19 - Boca Raton, FL @ The Funky Biscuit
February 20 - Hallandale Beach, FL @ Sport of Kings Theatre at Gulfstream Park & Casino
Be there or be---not square? No, I wanna go the Society For Ethical Culture, and know I need it.

This interview with Danny Kortchmar I watched earlier this summer I thought was interesting and had alot of background on many classic records. If you have seen that one session musician documentary and the Billy Joel guys barking on getting fired, there is a bit later on in that with on how that gone down from a different angle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ngEhoa9fJU

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=267362992039629

Concerning the mystery of who played drums on “These Boots.”