How The Wrecking Crew Secretly Recorded Some of the Biggest Hits of the 1960s & 70s

in Music | April 7th, 2021

The top flight crew of L.A. stu­dio musi­cians known as The Wreck­ing Crew acquired their name, leg­end has it, because they “were wreck­ing the busi­ness for every­one else,” writes Janet Maslin at The New York Times­, mean­ing old­er ses­sion play­ers who couldn’t keep up. Drum­mers like Hal Blaine (“who jus­ti­fi­ably calls him­self ’10 of Your Favorite Drum­mers’ on his Web site”) and gui­tarists like Tom­my Tedesco and Car­ol Kaye could play any­thing put in front of them per­fect­ly, in one take, with the style and per­fect tim­ing that char­ac­ter­ize the absolute best rock, folk, pop, and soul of the 1960s.

With some excep­tions, this group kept a low pro­file and have only become known in sub­se­quent ret­ro­spec­tives that reveal just how much they con­tributed to the music of the era. The answer is: more than any­one sure­ly sus­pect­ed at the time. But “the Wreck­ing Crew was not sup­posed to attract atten­tion. Groups like the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Mon­kees and many oth­ers didn’t care to point out why they sound­ed so much bet­ter on records than on the road.”

Not only did mem­bers of the Crew “work mir­a­cles,” play­ing a “first-take, no-glitch ver­sion of ‘The Lit­tle Old Lady From Pasade­na,’” for exam­ple, but in many cas­es, they com­posed icon­ic parts with­out which songs like “The Beat Goes On” or “These Boots Were Made For Walk­ing” would prob­a­bly not have become hits.

“Nine times out of ten the pro­duc­er or arranger would tell us to use the charts as a guide, that’s all,” Blaine remem­bered. “We were encour­aged to go for it, to go beyond what had been writ­ten. We had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate, to be a team of arrangers.”

Though most­ly unknown to lis­ten­ers, the cou­ple dozen or so musi­cians in this group of excep­tion­al per­form­ers did pro­duce two major stars, Leon Rus­sell and Glen Camp­bell, who toured with the Beach Boys in the mid-60s until he became a major super­star with the Jim­my Webb-penned songs “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and “Wichi­ta Line­man,” both record­ed, of course, with mem­bers of the Crew. They played on jazz records and record­ed icon­ic TV theme songs like The Twi­light Zone, Green Acres, Bonan­za, M*A*S*H*, Bat­man, Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble, and Hawaii Five‑O.

The only female mem­ber of the Crew, Car­ol Kaye, was described as “the great­est bass play­er I’ve ever met,” by no less than Bri­an Wil­son. Report­ed to have played on some­thing like 10,000 ses­sions, she wrote basslines for songs from “Cal­i­for­nia Girls” to the “Theme from Shaft.”

You can learn much more about the once-hid­den work of some of the best stu­dio musi­cians in the coun­try, rivals of the best play­ers in Motown, Mem­phis, and Mus­cle Shoals, in the doc­u­men­tary above direct­ed by Dan­ny Tedesco, son of Wreck­ing Crew gui­tarist Tony Tedesco. Or Kent Hart­man’s book, The Wreck­ing Crew: The Inside Sto­ry of Rock and Rol­l’s Best-Kept Secret.

Lis­ten to a YouTube playlist of clas­sic Wreck­ing Crew tracks here. And see why when you thought you were lis­ten­ing to The Byrds, Beach Boys, Mamas and Papas, Mon­kees and even Simon & Gar­funkel, you were real­ly often lis­ten­ing to the Wreck­ing Crew.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Car­ol Kaye Became the Most Pro­lif­ic Ses­sion Musi­cian in His­to­ry

Meet Car­ol Kaye, the Unsung Bassist Behind Your Favorite 60s Hits

Visu­al­iz­ing the Bass Play­ing Style of Motown’s Icon­ic Bassist James Jamer­son: “Ain’t No Moun­tain High Enough,” “For Once in My Life” & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A Long-Lost Soviet Adaptation of The Lord of the Rings Resurfaces on YouTube–and Tolkien Fans Rejoice (1991)

in Literature, Television | April 7th, 2021

When Peter Jack­son’s The Fel­low­ship of the Ring came out in 2001, it her­ald­ed a cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy that would, at long last, pos­sess scale, pro­duc­tion val­ue, and sheer ambi­tion enough to do jus­tice to the orig­i­nal nov­els. This set it some­what apart from the ver­sion of The Fel­low­ship of the Ring that had aired just ten years before on Leningrad Tele­vi­sion — and has­n’t been seen since, at least until its recent upload (in two parts) to Youtube. An unof­fi­cial adap­ta­tion, Khran­iteli tells a sto­ry every sin­gle Tolkien read­er around the world will rec­og­nize, even if they don’t under­stand unsub­ti­tled Russ­ian. The pro­duc­tion’s appeal lies in any case not in its dia­logue, but what we’ll call its look and feel.

“Fea­tur­ing a score by Andrei Romanov of the rock band Akvar­i­um and some incred­i­bly cheap pro­duc­tion design, no one is going to con­fuse this Lord of the Rings with Jackson’s films,” writes /Film’s Chris Evan­ge­lista. “The sets look like, well, sets, and the spe­cial effects — if you can call them that — are delight­ful­ly hokey. This appears to have had almost no bud­get, and that only lends to the charm.”

Despite its cheap­ness, Khran­iteli dis­plays exu­ber­ance on mul­ti­ple lev­els, includ­ing its often-the­atri­cal per­for­mances as well as visu­al effects, exe­cut­ed with the still-new video tech­nol­o­gy of the time, that oscil­late between the hok­i­ly tra­di­tion­al and the near­ly avant-garde. Some scenes, in fact, look not entire­ly dis­sim­i­lar to those of Pros­per­o’s Books, Peter Green­away’s high-tech vision of Shake­speare that also pre­miered in 1991.

That year was the Sovi­et Union’s last, and the pro­longed polit­i­cal shake­up that ensued could par­tial­ly explain why Khran­iteli went unseen for so long. Until now, obscu­ri­ty-hunters have had to make do with The Fairy­tale Jour­ney of Mr. Bil­bo Bag­gins, The Hob­bit (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), Leningrad Tele­vi­sion’s ear­li­er adap­ta­tion of Tolkien’s pre-Lord of the Rings chil­dren’s nov­el. It was the now long-gone Leningrad Tele­vi­sion’s suc­ces­sor enti­ty 5TV that just put the Sovi­et Fel­low­ship of the Ring online — and in seem­ing­ly pris­tine con­di­tion at that — to the delight of glob­al Tolkien enthu­si­asts who’d known only rumors of its exis­tence. And as many of them have already found, for all the short­com­ings, Khran­iteli still has Tom Bom­badil, for whose omis­sion from his sprawl­ing block­busters Jack­son will sure­ly nev­er hear the end.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 1985 Sovi­et TV Adap­ta­tion of The Hob­bit: Cheap and Yet Strange­ly Charm­ing

Illus­tra­tions of The Lord of the Rings in Russ­ian Iconog­ra­phy Style (1993)

Sovi­et-Era Illus­tra­tions Of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hob­bit (1976)

The Lord of the Rings Mythol­o­gy Explained in 10 Min­utes, in Two Illus­trat­ed Videos

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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AI Software Creates “New” Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix, Doors & Amy Winehouse Songs: Hear Tracks from the “Lost Tapes of the 27 Club”

in Computer Science, Music | April 7th, 2021

What would pop music sound like now if the musi­cians of the 27 club had lived into matu­ri­ty? Can we know where Amy Wine­house would have gone, musi­cal­ly, if she had tak­en anoth­er path? What if Hendrix’s influ­ence over gui­tar hero­ics (and less obvi­ous styles) came not only from his six­ties play­ing but from an unimag­in­able late-career cos­mic blues? Whether ques­tions like these can ever be giv­en real flesh and blood, so to speak, by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence may still be very much unde­cid­ed.

Of course, it may not be for us to decide. “The charts of 2046,” Mark Beau­mont pre­dicts at NME, “will  be full of 12G code-pop songs, baf­fling to the human brain, writ­ten by banks of com­poser­bots pure­ly for the Spo­ti­fy algo­rithm to rec­om­mend to its colonies of ÆPhone lis­ten­ing farms.” Seems as like­ly as any oth­er future music sce­nario at this point. In the mean­time, we still get to judge the suc­cess­es, such as they are, of AI song­writ­ers on human mer­its.

The Bea­t­les-esque “Daddy’s Car,” the most notable com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed trib­ute song to date, was “com­posed by AI… capa­ble of learn­ing to mim­ic a band’s style from its entire data­base of songs.” The pro­gram pro­duced a com­pe­tent pas­tiche that nonethe­less sounds like “cold com­put­er psy­che­delia — eerie stuff.” What do we, as humans, make of Lost Tapes of the 27 Club, a com­pi­la­tion of songs com­posed in the style of musi­cians who infa­mous­ly per­ished by sui­cide or over­dose at the ten­der age of 27?

The “tapes” include four tracks designed to sound like lost songs from Hen­drix, Wine­house, Nir­vana, and the Doors. High­light­ing a hand­ful of artists who left us too soon in order to address “music’s men­tal health cri­sis,” the project used Magen­ta, the same Google AI as “Daddy’s Car,” to ana­lyze the artists’ reper­toires, as Rolling Stone explains:

For the Lost Tapes project, Magen­ta ana­lyzed the artists’ songs as MIDI files, which works sim­i­lar­ly to a play­er-piano scroll by trans­lat­ing pitch and rhythm into a dig­i­tal code that can be fed through a syn­the­siz­er to recre­ate a song. After exam­in­ing each artist’s note choic­es, rhyth­mic quirks, and pref­er­ences for har­mo­ny in the MIDI file, the com­put­er cre­ates new music that the staff could pore over to pick the best moments.

There is sig­nif­i­cant human input, such as the cura­tion of 20 or 30 songs fed to the com­put­er, bro­ken down sep­a­rate­ly into dif­fer­ent parts of the arrange­ment. Things did not always go smooth­ly. Kurt Cobain’s “loose and aggres­sive gui­tar play­ing gave Magen­ta some trou­ble,” writes Endgad­get, “with the AI most­ly out­putting a wall of dis­tor­tion instead of some­thing akin to his sig­na­ture melodies.”

Judge the end results for your­self in “Drowned by the Sun,” above. The music for all four songs is syn­the­sized with MIDI files. “An arti­fi­cial neur­al net­work was then used to gen­er­ate the lyrics,” Eddie Fu writes at Con­se­quence of Sound, “while the vocals were record­ed by Eric Hogan, front­man of an Atlanta Nir­vana trib­ute band.” Oth­er songs fea­ture dif­fer­ent sound-alike vocal­ists (more or less). In no ways does the project claim that MIDI-gen­er­at­ed com­put­er files can replace actu­al musi­cians.

They’re affec­tion­ate trib­utes, made by play­ers with­out hearts, but they don’t real­ly tell us any­thing about what, say, Jim Mor­ri­son would have done if he hadn’t died at 27. Yet the cause is a noble one: a rejec­tion of the roman­tic idea at the heart of the “27 Club” nar­ra­tive — that men­tal ill­ness, sub­stance abuse, etc. should be glam­or­ized in any way. “Lost Tapes of the 27 Club is the work of Over the Bridge,” notes Fu, “a Toron­to orga­ni­za­tion that helps mem­bers of the music indus­try strug­gling with men­tal ill­ness.” Learn more about the project here and about Over the Bridge’s pro­grams here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Writes a Piece in the Style of Bach: Can You Tell the Dif­fer­ence Between JS Bach and AI Bach?

Nick Cave Answers the Hot­ly Debat­ed Ques­tion: Will Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

Experts Pre­dict When Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Take Our Jobs: From Writ­ing Essays, Books & Songs, to Per­form­ing Surgery and Dri­ving Trucks

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Pro­gram Tries to Write a Bea­t­les Song: Lis­ten to “Daddy’s Car”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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