A Bouquet For The Crew- The Wreaking Crew- A Documentary

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The Wreaking Crew, starring first-rate sessions and studio musicians from the classic age of rock and roll (2008) 

Everybody, everybody from the generation of ’68 who came of musical age in the 1950s with the fresh breeze of rock and roll and its iconic figures like Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Bo, Buddy, Wanda, Carl, Bill and later in the classic age the Beach Boys, Association, Sonny and Cher, and a ton of girl groups like the Ronettes, the Shirelles and Martha and the Vandella to not even come close to exhausting the list knows that those guys got us jumping, got girls going crazy throwing  every kind of object their way, including some unmentionables, and guys, guys like me, went crazy trying to look like Elvis with longer sideburns, swiveling hips (mind are still not right to this day trying to make that move he had that sent the girls into spasms), and snarl that every girl knew she could wipe off his face if she just had a minute with him, like Bill with his curlicue curl of hair and knowing smile, like Buddy hair’s too, tried to emulate Chuck’s duck walk and get nothing but a sore back for the efforts just so those girls who were throwing themselves with abandon to those faraway heroes would throw something our way.      

That’s the easy part, the upfront part of the saga of music of the baby-boomer now AARP-worthy crowd. What we have with the documentary under review, Dennis Tedesco’s The Wreaking Crew, dedicated to his late father who was one of the members is the back story of how rock and roll records, 45 RPM at first then albums, a lot of them got the great sounds that came out of that work. Now there are disputes, internal to the group and otherwise as we find out in the film, about the real name tagged onto the group of seasoned session and studio musicians who made the difference in the sound of rock and roll, especially that rock and roll sound after the likes of Sun Records were eclipsed by the bigger companies out on the West Coast. What is not in dispute is that this relatively small cohort of men and one woman (Carol Kaye) played in back of some of the greatest hits of the era. Made a difference in the sound with their expertise and ability to play and improvise everything before them from pop classics to commercials (hey they had to make a living too besides create great rock sounds since they were in back not the front).       

This documentary, as with all such efforts, is consciously designed to feature the “talking heads” of whoever in the early 2000s was still around to tell the tale of how West Coast musicians came to the rescue of many a record producer who were looking for help. It is also a story about how each featured musician came to the group and in some cases what happened after the music died. Well, not so much that the music died but that later on guys like Bob Dylan and groups like the Stones and Beatles were their own singer-songwriters and had enough professional competence to do the studio sessions themselves. Or thought they did.  For a look at a piece of rock history, real rock history since most of the crew  were individually or collectively induced into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame check this one out.