Interview with Denny Tedesco, Director of “The Wrecking Crews” documentary on the session musicians who brought the world rock and roll.
Patrick O’Heffernan
(Los Angeles) The film The Wrecking Crew, is the story of guitarist Tommy Tedesco and the session musicians who played on hundreds, if not thousands of the hit records of the 60’s and 70’s. Eighteen years in the making, The Wrecking Crew features interviews with the group members, stars like Cher and Nancy Sinatra and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, plus the music of the times.
Few fans realized that the people playing on the 45’s they bought were often not the bands shown on the cover, but a fluid group of session musicians, some of whom did not originally like rock and roll but made a good living playing it in the studio. When Tedesco was diagnosed with cancer in 1996, his son Denny, a TV producer, started taping interviews to record that era and the people who made it happen. With the help of family, friends and Kickstarter, he was able to bring together archival footage, personal interviews with bands and producers done over 18 years into a remarkable film that chronicles an era, the music industry o what is today the music capital of the USA and the music form that eventually took over the world.
The film opens March 13 and I was able to talk with Denny a few days before the first screening in Los Angeles.
Patrick. Denny, let me thank you for this film – it is literally a soundtrack of the music of our lives. I bought some of the albums your dad played on, and I never knew.
Denny. It is amazing – it is a musical journey for so many people. A certain song can mean something to you and something else to me, but it is a bookmark in our lives. When you hear that song , you remember where you were, who you were dating, what you were doing – it is really cool that rock and roll meant so much to people at that time.
Patrick. What convinced you to do a full length film after the short film you did of your father?
Denny. When I was at Loyola-Marymount University in 1983 I did a project on my dad. It was OK as a student film, but we got some great footage. Cut to 1996, he has had a stroke and he got a diagnosis of terminal cancer and I was like ..ohhh – it was so shocking. My wife Suzie and I talked about trying to bring us back to that time and we put together a crew and decided to see where we could go with it. We put my dad, Hal Blaine (drummer), Plas Johnson (saxophone) and Carole Kaye (bass) around a table and I just let them talk. I never saw my dad in the studio, but I saw him and the musicians talk, and that is what they did. I call it the quartet without instruments. That was the first day of shooting. We didn’t know what would happen – we just kept going. He never saw any of it, which is a shame.
Patrick. Was it a good thing that the film took so long?
Denny. Absolutely. Not great financially, but if you screened the same film years ago, I don’t think it would have an audience. Other films have come before us like Twenty Feet from Stardom and Muscle Shoals. I was able to build an audience over the years by screening the film and doing festivals and fund raisers since 2008. Every time I would go to a town, we would have a screening, raise some money, pay off a label, and most, important, build an audience.
Patrick. Did the licensing cost a fortune and turn your hair grey.
Denny. Turn my hair grey, yes, but luckily I still have hair. I never thought music would be a problem, I thought sensibility would come across. But there is no good sense when it comes to music and documentary films. When Suzie and I started doing this we would have lunch with labels and let them know what was coming and let them see a teaser. But it wasn’t until 2008 that we had to license and quickly. The labels and publishers all knew about the project, so we went back to them. One publisher gave me a price of $10,000 a song! I am not going to pay $10,000 for 4 seconds of “Danke Schoen”. So we paid just for the film’s festival use – which was still expensive. But music is not supposed to be free. That is how my dad made his living. When we got to the final point, the publishers and labels helped me and I said everyone was going to get the same for music. So we renegotiated with them.
Patrick. You also had to get interviews with stars. How did that work, especially with Cher?
Denny. I got Cher because years ago I was working on a rock video with Cher and I remember standing next to her – she is very businesslike and I was intimidated by her – I was a grip. But I said to her, my dad worked with you on your first songs. And she said, who was your dad and I said “Tommy Tedesco” and she all of a sudden she transformed into that girl of 16 and melted. So I knew there was a chance. We asked her agent to ask her and the agent came back and told us she said “Yes!” I had only 11 min with her, but she filled the roll of film with great stuff.
Patrick. How did you raise the money for this? There are many producers listed in the credits.
Denny. The original money came from my wife and family and friends. The Executive producers – the big donors – came late, but they came when we really needed them. We started with Kickstarter to raise the money we needed for licensing the music for the film’s distribution outside of festivals. Cliff Bernstein was the first guy that donated $50,000. He saw the film in New York in a club and he called me and said he would give us $50,000 – I had never even met him!. He was the manager of the Red Hot Jimmy Peppers and many others…amazing guy. Same day I get a call from Jerry Moss of A&M and says he will give us $50,000. Then there was Dennis Joyce, who fell in love with the film and it went on and on, people donating. Finally, as we were getting close, Herb Albert said if we raise the $200,000 we needed for licenses he would give us the rest. And he did.
Patrick. Let me ask you about the only woman in the Wrecking Crew, Carole Kaye. She pointed out – and you emphasized it in the film with images – that prior to the 50’s, there were many women in bands. Did you ever talk with her about how she came to be in the group and why there was only one woman in the Wrecking Crew?
Denny. She was nobody’s girlfriend. No one ever looked at her as the girl in the room. I am sure they gave her lots of crap but never treated her like a token. They respected her – she was the bass player. You can’t have that as a weak link. In those days you only had one track (all the musicians recorded together on one track). If you blow it, you blow the whole band. They followed her. She was a huge creative force on her own. She is an amazing bass player and innovator. Glen Campbell said it best – “I play with Michael Jordan all day long and everyone in that room is Michael Jordan”. They were there to do a job and come up with ideas. And she did. Today that does not happen because you are not all in the same room, so the band is not pushing one another like they did then – like she did.
Patrick. Now that you have lived with this film for 18 years, do you think that rock and roll would have become the global force it is today if the Wrecking Crew had not been there?
Denny. Rock and roll was always going to be there. In the beginning the record labels didn’t trust rock – they weren’t sure they could make money with it, and it is all about the money. You still had Nashville and New York and London making music, but what LA had then was a lot of studios, a lot of young musicians, and a lot of older session players who did not want to do rock and roll because they thought it was beneath them – they didn’t want those jobs. So my dad and the Wrecking Crew could take those jobs with this new music. Without them it would have been different. They didn’t know they would a huge force. Pink’s drummer said to me that you could hate everything they did, but the difference is that the people we learned from copied what they did. But my dad and Hal Blaine and Earl Palmer and Carol Kaye had no one to teach them – they taught themselves and then others learned from them.
Patrick. Congratulations on the film and thank you.
Patrick O’Heffernan, Host, Music FridayLive. Full interview at http://bit.ly/1Fjn81H
THE WRECKING CREW
Directed by Denny Tedesco, produced by Denny Tedesco, Suzie Greene Tedesco
Running Time: 102 minutes. Rating: PG For language thematic elements and smoking images.
Distributed by Magnolia Pictures
http://www.wreckingcrewfilm.com/
Los Angeles release date: March 13, 2015 at The Nuart Theatre in West L.A., and the South Coast Village 3 in Santa Ana. Showings throughout the month.
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