In the 1960s, the Los Angeles music industry operated on a simple and largely unspoken arrangement: the names on the album were the artists, and the musicians in the studio were labor. You hired a plumber to fix the pipes and you hired a session player to play the bass. The plumber's name does not appear on your house. The bassist's name did not appear on the record.
The System
The AFM (American Federation of Musicians) operated a union scale. Session musicians were paid by the three-hour block. A typical date might produce two or three marketable tracks. The musician collected their scale fee — typically around $50 to $75 per session in the early 1960s — and went to the next booking. A busy session player could do three or four sessions a day across different studios, different labels, different artists.
The group that would later be called the Wrecking Crew was not an organized unit. It was an overlapping network of roughly fifty players — guitarists, bassists, drummers, keyboard players, horn players — who circulated through Western Recorders, Gold Star Studios, and Capitol Studios in the early hours after midnight and the long afternoons when the union rules were most relaxed. They were called in by the contractors, not the artists.
The Records
The roster of albums that contain Wrecking Crew performances is not a list of obscure records. It is a list of the defining texts of American popular music.
- 1965The Byrds, Mr. Tambourine Man — the band recorded the vocals. The Wrecking Crew played every instrument.
- 1966The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds — Brian Wilson wrote, arranged, and directed. The band toured. The Crew recorded the album.
- 1966Nancy Sinatra, These Boots Are Made for Walkin' — bass by Carol Kaye.
- 1966The Monkees' entire recorded catalogue. The group was assembled by a TV casting call. They did not play on their own debut album.
- 1968Simon & Garfunkel, Mrs. Robinson — drums, bass, and guitar: Wrecking Crew.
Carol Kaye
The most productive bassist in the history of recorded popular music began as a jazz guitarist. Carol Kaye came up in the Los Angeles club scene and crossed into session work in 1957. By the mid-1960s she was doing ten sessions a week and had developed a style of electric bass playing that fused jazz's harmonic vocabulary with the rhythmic precision that pop production demanded.
She played bass on an estimated ten thousand recordings. The bass line on the theme from Mission: Impossible. The bass line on Wichita Lineman. Midnight Confessions. The Righteous Brothers' You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'. The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations. She was not on the album covers. She was not in the liner notes. She received scale.
"We made the records. We just didn't get to keep them."
The End of the System
The arrangement began to fracture in the early 1970s when rock acts started insisting on recording themselves, partly for artistic control and partly because the Beatles had made self-sufficiency aspirational. Home recording technology and the emergence of the artist-producer made the contractor model commercially obsolete.
Glen Campbell — who had played guitar on hundreds of Wrecking Crew sessions, including the original Strangers in the Night — crossed from session work to performing artist and became a star on the strength of his name alone, a name that had appeared on no record during his most productive decade.
The players received no royalties and no ongoing credit from any of it. The music industry was not organized to return money to labor. It was organized to retain money for capital. That the records exist is a function of their talent. That they died largely uncelebrated is a function of the system that hired them.