The Wrecking Crew

I'm into just about none of this music, but this was a joy to watch regardless, there's just such a fantastic wealth of information and anecdotes about this exciting, yet struggling time for these talented, yet neglected and often uncredited sessions musicians.

These were the music makers, and these were the dreamers of dreams. Responsible, and arguably sometimes more important, for many of the songs that they didn't get top billing on.

This isn't one of those documentaries that leave you feeling wrecked at the end with your emotions, but it was a highly interesting look at the music industry in Los Angeles during the 60's. There was this group called the Wrecking Crew of about 20 or so session musicians that would play the instrumentals of some of the most famous singers of the time like Elvis, Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys...

Excellent documentary about the super-talented session musicians appearing on a multitude of hit songs from the 1960s and early 1970s.

Even-handed, informative, and unsentimental. It doesn't try to tug our heart strings because it doesn't need to. Effusive emotion isn't the story. The story is these people and the work they did and its place in the evolution of popular music in America.

Important spotlight on overlooked genius musicians who wrote the soundtracks of our lives and got no credit. Only knock on it, is that it is mostly just a random mish-mash of interviews instead of charting the history of session musicians in popular music.

Directed by Tommy Tedesco's non-director son, so unsurprisingly somewhat sloppily and sentimentally slanted toward Sr., but the home-cobbled hang-out feel adds a certain complementary something to the stories. And hey, he kept in his dad's "If there were sexual harassment suits, [Carol Kaye] would be seven millionaires with what we put her through." (She grins and bears it as well as one assumes she did then.) Love Leon Russell looking like a Dixie Mafia godfather. And Kent Hartman's book.

This came out in 2008, not 2015.