The Wrecking Crew (4 page)

By 1959, new indie label releases recorded in Los Angeles like “Donna” by Ritchie Valens, “Teen Beat” by Sandy Nelson, and “It Was I” by Skip & Flip were routinely selling over a million copies each. Record companies, hungry to cash in on the phenomenon, clamored for ever more product, cutting songs in the studios sometimes twenty-four hours a day. Songwriters, producers, arrangers, engineers, singers, and musicians were booked solid. The musical floodgates were open.

Word soon spread among young, aspiring guitar players, drummers, pianists, bassists, horn players, and anyone else who could strum, bang, pluck, or blow: get to LA as fast as possible. Producers were pumping out new records literally by the stack and there were jobs to be had. Good jobs. Particularly so since a lot of the older, established musicians in town—the blue-blazer-and-necktie, by-the-book, time-clock-punching men who had cut their teeth during the Thirties and Forties playing on movie soundtracks, Big Band records, and early TV shows—simply loathed everything about rock and roll. To them this new music was appallingly primitive, an effrontery on every level. Most refused to play it. In their minds, their careers had been built on decorum and sophistication, not on wearing T-shirts and blue jeans to work while bashing out simplistic three-chord rhythm patterns over and over. That kind of thing was surely going to wreck the business. Because of this, skilled new session aces were increasingly needed to take their places, especially those who could lay down some seriously inspired grooves.

Like the clarion call of a medieval trumpet, the money to be made in the record business at the dawn of the Sixties in Los Angeles would prove to be an irresistible draw to every kind of hopeful. Essentially music's version of the California Gold Rush, the varied and rapidly growing number of opportunities to make some cash and a name in rock and roll began to attract talent, ambition, greed, and egotism, all in seemingly equal measure. And from this diverse migratory mix—aside from the scores of singers, songwriters, and others who made the journey—there evolved a core clique of instrument-playing sidemen who gradually began to stand out from the rest. These particular musicians not only had the willingness and ability to play rock and roll (two qualities that set them uniquely apart from other session musicians in town, both old and new); they also instinctively knew
how
to improvise in just the right doses to make a given recording better. To make it a hit. Which naturally put their services in the highest of demand: producers wanted hits. It also, over time, provided them with a nickname that mirrored their emergence as the new, dominant group of determined young session players who were taking over the growing rock-and-roll side of things: the Wrecking Crew.

Membership in the Wrecking Crew required no club dues. It required no ID card. There were no chapter meetings or other formalities, either. In fact, it couldn't have been more informal. Boiled to its essence, it came down to the simple exercise of show up, play instrument, collect check. But at the same time, it was so much more—an exclusive collaboration created strictly by private invitation. Exemplary skills and some well-placed word of mouth around town might get you a look, a foot in the door. Getting along well with others and, especially, learning how to help turn a song into a million-seller would keep you coming back.

Just like in any industry, those in charge—in this case the producers and arrangers—all liked to hire their favorites time after time. No need to reinvent the wheel on every song. It might be only three pieces, perhaps just guitar, bass, and drums. Or it might be three or four of every conceivable instrument. But they all pulled from the same finite pool of talent, where a hard-won sterling reputation came to mean everything in terms of consistent employment. Though the total number of musicians in the Wrecking Crew fluctuated, a small number of mainstays always seemed to play in some combination on all the most prominent rock-and-roll recordings. People like Glen Campbell, Carol Smith, and Hal Belsky, along with a couple dozen other similarly gifted and ambitious freelancers. And each of them, to be sure, had their own undeniably unique experiences in finally making it to the “show”—
and
in staying there.

*   *   *

A couple of months after Glen Campbell and his uncle Boo made their exhilarating getaway in search of musical fame and fortune across the far reaches of the Continental Divide, the realities of life on the road all came crashing down. Hard.

Finding themselves stranded with little money and no prospects—after a short, dispiriting attempt at performing on a “pass the hat” basis in a string of smoky bars and honky-tonks across Wyoming—the weary duo were forced to weigh their limited options. Uncle Boo had quite clearly miscalculated their potential for earning a livable wage on the road.

Despite the shame of failure, they decided the best move would be to return to Arkansas as soon as possible. Family, friends, and a warm bed surely waited for them there, not to mention a hot meal. Wyoming was rugged, desolate, and bitterly cold, not the kind of place for a pair of gentle-natured, corn-fed country boys.

But in order to cobble together even the small amount of money needed for a couple of bus tickets back home, the two traveling troubadours ended up doing the unthinkable: they pawned their guitars, the indispensable tools of their trade. According to Uncle Boo, it was the only way.

“We'll buy 'em back soon enough; you'll see,” he said, trying to reassure his skeptical nephew.

One of the benefits of a large extended family is that there often exists a network of people willing to help a relative in crisis. And this would hold true in Glen's largely rural American branch of Clan Campbell, whose proudly held roots dated back over seven hundred years to County Argyll in the Scottish Highlands. Though his uncle Boo hadn't remotely provided the path to success that Campbell had expected, another uncle—a fellow named Dick Bills—stepped forward with an offer of his own. He invited Glen to come live with his wife and him in Albuquerque, where Bills was an established bandleader and radio personality. Word had gotten to him through the Campbell family grapevine that Glen was a virtual prodigy on guitar and that, more than just taking in a nephew, Bills would be gaining an important addition to his band.

If the Uncle Boo excursion proved to be a fiasco, the Uncle Dick experience proved to be everything Campbell could have hoped for. From the minute he arrived in New Mexico, young Glen found himself strumming his now-out-of-hock guitar for his uncle virtually every day of the week: during the noon radio show, during the nightly dances, and even on Bills's Saturday morning children's show on local television. And for a now-sixteen-year-old young man who would never darken the door of a schoolhouse again, the on-the-job training was just what he needed. For in Glen Campbell's mind, nothing—
nothing
—was going to stop him from his dream of becoming the world's best guitar player.

*   *   *

Sitting in a small booth inside a bustling twenty-four-hour diner on the Sunset Strip late one summer night, Billy Strange knew it was time to think about getting sober.

With a thirty-minute drive back to his home in the Northridge section of the San Fernando Valley staring him in the face, Strange had stopped in with a pal to gulp down as much black coffee as they could reasonably hold before attempting the journey. Having a few drinks and a little fun after a full day of recording sessions had become a tradition of sorts for the lanky guitar player, but one that also routinely required gaining intimate knowledge as to whether Maxwell House, per their latest ad campaign, really
was
good to the last drop.

Born in 1930 in Long Beach, California, Billy Strange grew up in a different world from most of his friends. His parents carved out a living as a minor-league, cowboy-style singing duo on local radio and by performing concerts whenever and wherever they could. With little money to provide extravagances for their only son, they passed along the one thing they did have in abundance: a passion for music.

By the age of five, little Billy evidenced enough natural talent to sing along with his mom and dad on the radio and to win a nearby yodeling contest. Music quickly became all he thought about. By the time a family friend gave Strange a beautiful Gibson L-7 archtop acoustic guitar when he turned fourteen, there could be no turning back. He had the chops. He had the drive. He would become a musician, just like his folks.

After dropping out of high school at sixteen to travel the Southwest with a bunch of hell-raising musicians several years his senior (he drove a beat-up converted school bus often hundreds of miles between shows while they slept off their daily hangovers in the back), Strange finally ended up in Los Angeles, working his guitar magic—both acoustic and electric—on a variety of live country music TV shows for stars like the Sons of the Pioneers, Roy Rogers, Cliffie Stone, and others. Sometimes Strange even sang with them, too, being the proud owner of a particularly resonant baritone voice.

During this time, the savvy Strange also made the most of his growing list of local studio connections, which paid off handsomely as rock and roll became a boom industry by the late Fifties. He was a known entity to important LA-based producers and arrangers alike, his estimable skills easily transferable and in high demand from the start.

So perhaps Strange could be excused if upon occasion he imbibed a little more than he should after an especially long day. That's why they made coffee anyhow.

Stubbing out the latest in a chain of unfiltered cigarette butts into a tabletop ashtray, Billy casually exhaled a final lungful of smoke high in the air and then dropped a couple of crumpled dollar bills next to his cup. Time to hit the road.

As the two friends climbed into the car and began heading east toward Cahuenga Boulevard in order to take the Hollywood Freeway over the hill, Strange flipped around on the radio dial, trying to find something, anything, that would help keep him awake. Landing on one of the local country stations, Strange could not seem to get over a record they were playing called “We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus (and a Lot Less Rock and Roll).”

“Man, I can write a song better than that in five minutes,” he said, sounding at least halfway serious.

Before Strange could give the subject any further comment, however, his traveling companion suddenly whipped out his wallet and slapped a hundred-dollar bill on the front seat between them.

“Okay, Billy, you're on!”

Never one to back away from a challenge, particularly when it related to music or money, Strange immediately reached into the backseat and grabbed one of his blank score pads, the kind he used in the studio to sketch out arrangements. A hundred dollars was a whole lot of cash in 1961; it took almost six hours of studio time at union scale for a guy like Strange to earn that much.

Humming to himself while jotting down a series of musical notes as he drove, Strange quickly came up with a basic song he decided to call “Monotonous Melody.” As he sang it back to his friend well within the allotted five minutes, they both burst out in laughter. Monotonous or not, Billy's little ditty really
was
better than that crap they had just heard on the radio.

Tossing the pad over his shoulder, a vindicated Strange slid the cash into his pocket and promptly forgot about the whole thing. Just another night on the town in Hollywood for a hardworking, hard-drinking, Stetson-wearing guitar slinger.

*   *   *

Several weeks after coming up with his spur-of-the-moment “five-minute tune,” Billy Strange found himself hired to play guitar one afternoon on a TV soundtrack session over at United's Studio B in Hollywood for
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
. The show's music composer and arranger, Basil “Buzz” Adlam, had just created a new music-publishing company on the side and wanted to put out the word that day among the gathered musicians that he was looking to stock it with some fresh songs.

“Anybody have any good material they want me to hear?”

Strange immediately flashed on the forgotten little composition he had so blithely thrown into his backseat.

“Buzz, you know, I might have one,” he said. “How about if you give me an hour with the guys so that I can cut you a demo?”

Agreeing to the proposition, the British-born Adlam made himself scarce with his customary cup of tea while Strange and the other players set about laying down the instrumental tracks. Messing around with various tempos and styles, they decided on a basic rhythm section of guitar, bass, and drums employing a calypso feel as the song's foundation. Then, for lack of any real lyrics, they all began singing the words “what a monotonous melody” over and over in unison, eventually sending themselves into a fit of hysterics.

“That's just about the dumbest thing I've ever heard,” Strange said, guffawing along with the rest.

When Adlam returned, Billy Strange dutifully handed him the master tape of the recording. Adlam gave it a quick listen, politely said, “Thank you,” and left Strange feeling certain that nothing more would come of it. Oh well, he thought, at least we all got a good laugh out of it. Once again, Strange put the song right out of his mind.

But “Monotonous Melody” proved to be anything but.

About a month later, Strange received a phone call at home from Dave Burgess, a guitarist and producer who was the leader of a band called the Champs. It seems that Burgess had not only heard Strange's demo through Buzz Adlam's new publishing company but, in fact, had
already
recorded it with his guys. Thinking that it might have the makings of a decent hit for the Champs—who had been on a dry streak for several years since their breakout chart-topping smash, “Tequila,” in 1958—Burgess got right to the point.

“Billy, I want to put out ‘Monotonous Melody' as our next single. I think it's got a real shot. But I want to change the title. Would you mind?”