Wrecking director makes it personal

Director, Denny Tedesco
Director, Denny Tedesco

As part of my standard procedure for conducting interviews, I let subjects know they're being recorded. When I told director Denny Tedesco know that, unlike the National Security, I let people know when the microphone is on, he half-jokingly replied, "I only wish somebody would listen to me."

I caught him at Tivoli Cinemas in Kansas City, Mo. two weeks ago as he toured to support something that's taken up most of his adult life. After spending 19 years assembling, cutting and obtaining support for his finally released documentary The Wrecking Crew, Tedesco has gained some hard-fought attention. His film, which opens in Arkansas today, has a 92 percent approval rating on RottenTomatoes.com.

Tedesco adds, with a sense of mock resignation, "We were number one on iTunes, and then Antarctica beat us out. You get penguins every day."

The subjects of Tedesco's movie are a loose collective of studio musicians who accompanied a wide variety of singers and instrumental soloists like trumpeter Herb Alpert, but who rarely got credit for their work.

Effortlessly switching styles and genres the way you or I would change clothing, "The Wrecking Crew" played thousands of sessions in Los Angeles and provided instrument expertise that many of the groups they secretly played for either didn't have or couldn't reproduce in the studio on short notice, or without wasting expensive studio time.

"Even if [Beach Boys] Al Jardine and Dennis Wilson and Carl Wilson and Mike Love could have done that stuff on the spot," Tedesco explains, "Brian Wilson would not have done that out of respect because they're family. He's not going to ask them to stay another five hours. These guys [The Wrecking Crew] aren't going to say that. 'You're paying us.'"

Both uber-producer Phil Spector ("Be My Baby" and "You've Lost That Loving Feeling") and Brian Wilson relied on The Wrecking Crew to get the best sound on their recordings. You might not get Elvis or Sinatra in the same room, but both sang with the Crew for "Viva Las Vegas" and "Strangers in the Night," respectively.

Some Wrecking Crew members, like Leon Russell and Arkansas native Glen Campbell, gained fame once they did their own singing. Others like Rock and Roll Hall of Fame drummer Hal Blaine, New Orleans-born saxophonist Plas Johnson and bassist Carol Kaye gained cult followings from serious pop music aficionados.

That said, the exact makeup of The Wrecking Crew isn't clear. They never played concerts or released albums under that name (Russell even disputes the use of the moniker "The Wrecking Crew"), and no surviving members can even give an accurate member count. "That's why at the beginning, I make a joke about it," Tedesco says. Each Crew member offers a different total.

Tedesco has a particular perspective on The Wrecking Crew that made his movie possible. His father, Tommy Tedesco, played the themes to Bonanza, Batman and Green Acres but also can be heard on The King and The Chairman of the Board's Los Angeles-recorded songs, as well as The Ronettes' "Be My Baby."

The younger Tedesco had only an inkling of what his father did when he wasn't home. "I knew my dad went to work as a guitar player, but that was all I knew," he recalls. "The kid across the street, his father was an accountant. It didn't really mean much to me until I did these interviews. He spent 30 years of his life with these people."

Tedesco adds that he began to start work on the film that would consume so much of his life when he learned that his father, who died in 1997, only had possibly a year to live.

"I was thinking, 'What if they didn't say terminal?' Would I have gone for it, because I've had cancer twice? Nothing's ever been called terminal. But terminal's terminal. They don't give you that too often, and then they give you time. They gave him maybe a year. That was it, and I had to do it," he says.

Tedesco, who has made his living producing commercials and workout videos, says he made a mistake when he tried to present his film as a neutral account instead of a personal one.

"I didn't want it to be about my father and me. The reason was my ego. My ego was, 'I want to be the director,' which is weird because it sounds like I'm egotistical. But to put myself in it was just the opposite. I wanted to be the director where I got the job on my own, but I realized it was a better story if I don't do that, and it was. People related to it because everybody has a father," he says.

Thanks to expensive music rights (there are 100 songs sampled in the film), Tedesco has had to scramble to get all those permission forms signed and fees paid. He got help from Facebook fans and Kickstarter users. That said, the wait has enabled him to insert lots of previously unseen footage of Brian Wilson supervising sessions, and recording dates with the Mamas and the Papas and Sonny and Cher.

Blaine also helped Tedesco find footage in an unlikely location.

"Hal said, 'I brought an 8mm and directed the guys to do silly things. And then I went home and cut it between a porno,'" Tedesco says. "He sends it to me, and I can't put it on my projector because it's too brittle. You can't take it to a mom and pop place. I took it to my lab, and they did it late at night when there's no clients. But that helped."

The film also helps clear up which members played which sessions. Because of the sheer volume of sessions they played, Wrecking Crew members can't honestly recall when they played. The film's website (wreckingcrewfilm.com) includes labor forms that list which musicians played on which songs.

Tedesco says, "We know [my father] played on 'Be My Baby' because on the back side was 'Tedesco and Pittman.' That was because Phil Spector didn't want any B-side to ever be played. He's just put a jam session on it.

"He got a nice charm from [composer] Jimmy Webb for 'Up, Up and Away' [recorded by The 5th Dimension] because it won a Grammy. He didn't even know he was on it. He was doing three, four sessions a day. Sometimes there wasn't even a vocalist there."

MovieStyle on 04/24/2015

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